(Updated) THE 2020 LOYOLA SUMMER INSTITUTE & HOW YOU CAN JOIN OUR SSW PLC THIS YEAR: How We’re “Making It Happen”
Hello SSWN readers: as most of you know by now, my name is Dr. Michael Kelly and I am Professor at Loyola Chicago School of Social Work, and along with teaching at Loyola, I am also the Director of the online School Mental Health Advanced Practice Program (SMHAPP) as well as the Family and School Partnership Program (FSPP). To date, the FSPP has provided advanced training CEUs to over 1,500 school mental health professionals. including our 15th Annual Summer Institute this July 16th & 17th. Join us in beautiful downtown Chicago at our Water Tower Campus this July!
Telling Our Story and Sharing What Works: A 2-Day Collaborative Workshop to Build Your School Mental Health Practice
Dates: Thursday, July 16 – Friday, July 17, 2020
Times: 8:30 a.m.- 4:30 p.m.
Presenters: Michael Kelly, PhD, Jonathan Singer, PhD, & Current Loyola SMHAPP students
Location: Loyola University Water Tower Campus: Schreiber Center, Room 908
Map of Loyola’s Water Tower Campus.
6.5 CEUs/CPDUs per day
Description:
Join professors Michael Kelly (co-editor SSW.net) and Jonathan Singer (The Social Work Podcast) and School Mental Health Advanced Practice Program (SMHAPP) students for 2 invigorating and exciting days that will help you move your school mental health practice to the next level. Through interactive sessions, you’ll share your favorite effective interventions and learn what others are doing that works in their schools, and create tools to take back to your schools next fall in the form of infographics, podcasts, and videos. Everyone will leave with tools and strategies and a plan for implementation. Come to this dynamic and interactive 2 days, where as always our conference will become a community to help you extend your learning beyond the summer and into next year!
Fees :
General Admission: $120/2 days
Loyola and CAPS Alumni: $90/2 days
Field Instructors, Adjunct Faculty, and Students: $65. Register here
Even if you can’t join us in Chicago this July, there’s lots of great ways for you to get involved with our growing professional learning community through our SMHAPP Certificate, and I share below some information about the SMHAPP below, concluding with a pdf of last year’s Summer Institute, which contains great examples of Loyola SMHAPP students in action from all K-12 grade levels and 8 states. Hope to see you this Summer in Chicago.
How the Loyola SMHAPP Got Started, What It’s All About, & How You Can Join Us For Fall 2020
While we’ll always gladly offer CEU events like this one to school clinicians, we have also found that some of our school clinicians wanted more. Over the past decade, we heard loud and clear from some of our trainees that they wanted more than CEUs, that they wanted to go more in-depth on learning how to be more systemic, data-driven and evidence-informed in their work as SEL leaders, so we created the SMHAPP certificate to provide the kind of learning environment that will help more school mental health professionals to become more active and effective in delivering interventions across all 3 tiers of the MTSS/PBIS framework. We just published several articles this year (Brake & Kelly, 2019; Thompson, Frey, & Kelly, 2019) underlining the need for more professional learning communities (PLCs) to help school mental health professionals grow. We hope that you consider becoming part of the next SMHAPP cohort and join our growing PLC. The 15-credit SMHAPP is delivered almost completely online to allow you to continue your important school mental health work while learning the most up-to-date techniques, strategies, and interventions from the school mental health research and practice world. Courses focus on small group cohort problem-based learning via online seminars, as well as online courses on evidence-based practice (EBP), strength-based school mental health interventions, and data-driven school mental health practice.
Each one of the incredible SMHAPP students that our FSPP attendees will meet in July has been tasked with developing and delivering an intervention that change their school at a systemic level. We call it the “School-Change Project,” and each SMHAPP student has just finished year 1 of the 2-year project, and will share their work in progress with you this week. Each of them have developed their project using the following steps:
- Identifying a key problem in their school (including collecting some initial needs assessment data and EBP searches to find “what works”)
- Building key alliances with school stakeholders (admin., teachers, parents) that understand what needs to happen to address the problem
- Conducting more detailed needs assessments using relevant data, and developing a logic model about the proposed intervention or program
- Delivering the intervention and measuring its outcomes.
Based on our careful study of implementation science and how it relates to school mental health implementation, we know that all of the SMHAPP students’ “School-Change Projects” won’t happen overnight. Indeed, each of our presenting students are in year 1 of what will likely be a multi-year initiative for each of them, so they will be speaking mostly to the first 2 steps (how they identified a problem and an intervention, and how the mobilized school stakeholder buy-in), and then inviting participants to work with them to figure out what systemic school problems they might lack to tackle during the 2020-21 school year.
I reached a point early on in my SSW practice career (1992-2006) where I realized that everything I had learned in grad school was necessary but not sufficient if I was going to be the visible valuable, and vital SSW I wanted to be. I sought out professional consultation, community, and resources where I could find them, but it was always a challenge to find sustainable spaces and networks to help me manage my complicated school contexts and everything that was coming at me. Now, 14 years into a research career focused on studying what school clinicians say they do and what they need, I’m even more convinced that we need ongoing and meaningful professional learning communities (PLCs) to “make it happen.” Join us however you can: follow us on Twitter at @SchoolSocWork & join us our 100% free, no spam e-mail social network at schoolsocialworkers.mn.co/ and finally go here if you want to start an application for our Fall 2020 SMHAPP cohort–all applications are due on or before August 1st.
Here’s the FSPP 2019 Program Booklet with all the details, including bios of all the awesome 2018-20 SMHAPP students who presented:
FSPP2019FinalProgramBooklet
