For this webinar series, participants will automatically be enrolled in all 5 sessions.

Speaker

Joanna Bridger, LICSW, Safety, Hope, & Healing Counseling & Consulting

Description

This webinar series is intended for school-based professionals in K-12 schools to help provide foundations in understanding how stress and regulation affect students’ ability to be present in the classroom and take in new information. Case examples will illustrate models for understanding the impact of trauma/toxic stress, regulation, and neuroscience as they apply to learning. Participants will share, learn, and practice strategies for working with students in a variety of situations as well as strategies for managing their own levels of stress and regulation in doing this work.

To receive PDPs and CEUs, participants must attend all 5 sessions and successfully pass a quiz following Session 5. Within 24 hours of the live webinar, registrants will be emailed a link to view the recorded webinar. The recording will be made available for 7 days after each session.

 In many schools, when someone says that a student is not “available for learning” that is the end of the conversation. This interactive, case based, workshop views this as the beginning of a conversation about what does it mean when a student is “Not available for learning”? What kinds of things might cause a student to be not available for learning? What kinds of things help people (adults and children) to better be able to take in new information? What types of strategies might be used in different situations and with different developmental levels? And how does a sense of safety relate to availability for learning? The concept of state dependent functioning is explored to help school staff understand what types of strategies might be helpful to reengage the student.

Safety is the foundation for learning and recovery.  Humans need to feel safe enough to let down their defenses to be present to learn and try new ways of being in the world. But safety is not just about the absence of overt physical threats. This interactive workshop uses a trauma lens to help attendees think about how their students’ experiences of stress and trauma might relate to their current struggles and how to minimize the potential for retraumatization in their work both for the clients and for themselves.  This workshop covers the basic physiology of the stress response and how it relates to trauma.  It introduces the “SAPhE” framework for understanding different types of safety and ways of helping ourselves and others to feel safe (Social Safety, Authentic Safety, Physical Safety, Emotional Safety).  Using case studies, attendees will explore strategies to help foster environments that enhance feelings of safety for the people they work with for themselves.

Executive functioning is often compared to air-traffic control in the brain. In order to help students learn, educators need to be aware of the factors that might lead to cognitive overload for students as well as strategies to help “land the planes” so that the air-traffic control can most effectively focus on the information that the educators are presenting. This workshop introduces cognitive load theory (Sweller) and multiple strategies for reducing extraneous cognitive load and increasing students’ (and educators’) capacities to be fully present and maximize their capacity to absorb new information.

To be effective and fully present to support and educate students, school staff need to understand taking care of themselves and their community as an ethical imperative and job requirement. Rising stressors are leading to significant burnout and compassion fatigue for many school staff while student behavioral health concerns continue to rise. Increasing school staff’s capacity to understand, acknowledge, and mitigate the impacts of toxic stress on themselves and their community allows the work to be sustainable and for school staff to create environments where students are able to be present to learn. Advances in the concepts of trauma stewardship and toxic stress will be described. The ARC framework of Awareness, Regulation, and Connection will be introduced, and examples of safe and healthy coping strategies will be provided. Participants will be asked to reflect on their own understanding, history, and methods for coping, and to consider ways to address the barriers to engaging in self-care on personal, systemic, and societal levels, as well as ways that they can help foster a culture of community care so that the work is sustainable and so that they may remain able to provide optimum levels of support for students.

This session will focus on compiling and integrating the concepts from the previous four sessions. Participants will have opportunities to discuss specific cases that they have been experiencing. There will be skills practice and hands-on-activities to think about how to more fully bring these concepts into their work.

About the Speaker

Joanna Bridger, LICSW (she/her) is the Founder and Director of Safety, Hope, & Healing Counseling & Consulting where she provides counseling, critical incident response, clinical consultation, organizational consultation, and training for families, schools, and organizations throughout Massachusetts and beyond.  She is the clinical consultant for the Support After Death by Overdose (SADOD) program and the co-chair of the Greater Boston Suicide Prevention Coalition.  Joanna provides regular consultation and training with schools and has previously provided school-based counseling and facilitated district mental health teams.

Joanna has worked with youth, families, adults, and communities that have experienced trauma and loss in the U.S. and abroad for more than 25 years. For ten years she was the Clinical Director for Riverside Trauma Center. Prior to that she worked for ten years with people experiencing homelessness in a variety of settings including homeless and domestic violence shelters as well as organizations focused on helping people to find and maintain housing . Joanna has an MSW from the University of Michigan with a concentration in Health, and a Certificate in Traumatic Stress Studies from the Trauma Center at JRI (now the Trauma Research Foundation) and is trained in a wide range of trauma and loss focused therapeutic modalities.  

Membership Information

Most MPY webinars are available ONLY to current staff from member districts and organizations. Public school memberships include police and fire personnel. Former and retired employees and members of committees, including but not limited to, PTO/PTA, PAC, School Improvement Councils, Health Councils, Drug/Alcohol Councils, and school volunteers, are not considered MPY members.

PDPs and CEUs

MPY is an approved Professional Development Provider through the Massachusetts Department of Elementary & Secondary Education (Provider No. F20180079). Professional Development Points (PDPs) are offered for most MPY professional development webinars. PDPs are issued in 10 hour increments, per DESE requirements.

Continuing Education Units (CEUs) are available for clinical staff through the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) and the Massachusetts Mental Health Counselors Association, Inc. (MaMHCA). The NASW and the MaMHCA approve each event individually. CEUs may be given in hourly increments.

To receive PDPs and CEUs, participants must past the quiz.

Event Cancellation Policy

If you are unable to attend a MPY webinar you must cancel, through Bonnie Mullen at bonnie@mpyinc.org, one business day before the webinar.

For MPY hybrid conferences, the date in-person registration closes will be posted on MPY’s website. Virtual conference registration will close one business day before the hybrid conference. You cannot cancel or switch your registration from in-person to virtual after in-person registration closes. Please email Bonnie Mullen at bonnie@mpyinc.org with any questions regarding registration.

 

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All sessions are 12:00 – 2:00 pm.

  • Session 1: October 15, 2025, Available for Learning
  • Session 2: November 12, 2025, To Feel SAPhE: Fostering Trauma-Sensitive, Safe, and Supportive Learning Environments
    Session 3: December 10, 2025, Land the Planes: Increasing Executive Functioning and Reducing Cognitive Load
  • Session 4: January 21, 2026, The ARC of Self and Community Care
  • Session 5: February 11, 2026, Putting it Into Practice