Continuing Education

The School of Social Work offers post-graduation certification in advanced psychodynamic psychotherapy in partnership with the Institute for Advanced Psychotherapy. This program is a year-long commitment, designed for full-time, working professionals that provides licensed clinicians the training needed to expand and update clinical skills, enrich care provided to clients, and enhance one’s overall practice. The framework incorporates multiple theoretical disciplines and offers a method of case conceptualization that includes various listening and intervention techniques from a variety of treatment approaches.

Comprising three learning formats (on-site residency, virtual small-group consultation, and webinars) the program enables participants to continue their daily professional practices while earning this Advanced Psychotherapy Certificate. Time commitment is approximately 2.5 hours per week for the year. The certificate program offers 72 hours of Continuing Education credits for psychologists and 72 hours through IDFPR. New cohorts begin in late October/early November of each year.

More information on IAP can be found on their website.

Learning Objectives:

• Attendees will learn strategies for engaging with diverse communities in a culturally responsive manner.
• Attendees will explore culturally responsive practices that support clients and communities navigating trauma.
• Attendees will develop self-care skills and practice practical techniques to manage compassion fatigue and promote well-being.

Attendees will earn 2 CEUs for Cultural Competence for social work relicensure.

Fees:
General Admission: $60
Alumni/Internship Supervisors: $45
Students: $25

REGISTER HERE

The online world can be a positive space for learning and exploring for school aged children. However, the online world also has bad actors, troubling content, and the possibility of harming kids in different ways. This presentation will look at the darker side of the online world, what kind of risks exist for school aged children, and how kids can be manipulated and coerced into harmful activities. The presentation will share strategies that caregivers, teachers, and social workers can incorporate to help mitigate risks and respond to kids who are developing troubling behaviors and beliefs based on their online activity.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand the current on-line landscape and threats posed to school aged children.
• Identify risk and protective factors that can impact the risks posed to school aged children.
• Identify best practices for intervention strategies.
• Discuss how intervention strategies can be incorporated into your current work.

Fees:
General Admission: $80
Alumni/Internship Instructors: $65
Students: $15

REGISTER HERE

Please join us November 6 for "Ethical Decision Making Across the Continuum of Care" presented by Sarah Buino, LCSW and Livia Burdys, LCSW. 

In partnership with BridgeLine Consulting, this clinical gathering invites therapists into a deeper conversation about one of the most ethically complex moments in outpatient work: recognizing when a client may require a higher level of care.

Centered around the 3-hour training, When Outpatient Care Isn't Enough: Ethical Decision-Making Across the Continuum of Care, this experience is designed not only to increase clinical competence, but to create a relational and professional bridge between outpatient providers and the broader continuum of care.

Many clinicians quietly carry the weight of these decisions alone—navigating questions of safety, containment, acuity, attachment, and ethical responsibility without enough support, consultation, or clarity. This training offers a grounded framework for understanding when outpatient treatment may no longer be sufficient, while helping clinicians strengthen their confidence in making thoughtful, ethically sound level-of-care recommendations.

This experience is designed to help clinicians feel less alone at the edge of difficult clinical decisions. Drawing from years of work across outpatient and higher levels of care, they offer not only education, but thoughtful companionship in navigating the thresholds where ethical responsibility, clinical intuition, and compassionate action meet.

This program will provide 3 CEU's towards the Ethics requirement for social work relicensure.

REGISTER HERE

Play functions as a primary mode of learning and regulation across the lifespan but is vital for children. Play is physical, mental, emotional, and often social and provides opportunities for children to explore and make meaning of their inner and outer worlds and experiences. It allows for communication through “acting out” and can be more accessible than “talking through” for children. 

Play should be heavily used in school social work practice in both intervention and assessment. It is aligned with the leading SEL frameworks from CASEL and the Foundations of Young Adult Success, providing natural and child-led opportunities to develop SEL competencies and skills. It allows clinicians to evaluate SEL skills and develop therapeutic goals in highly motivating and safe ways. 

Play is connection. It is concrete and immediate. Not only is this regulating for children, but allows School Social Workers opportunities to regulate and increases opportunities for joy, attunement, co-regulation, and positive attachment in the demanding and stress ridden practices of school social workers. 

Learning Objectives:

• Explore the foundational elements of play therapy and connecting those elements to the Social Emotional Learning frameworks (Foundations of Young Adult Success, CASEL)
• Discuss and practice play as emotional regulation, social skill development and relationship connection
• Play as a means of interrupting patterns of behavior and developing therapeutic goals in schools
• Play as clinician self-awareness and self-care

Fees:
General Admission: $80
Alumni/Internship Instructors: $65
Students: $25

REGISTER HERE

This interactive workshop is designed to equip practitioners with the tools and strategies to create and facilitate effective groups in private practice. Learn how to plan, design, and implement groups tailored to your clients’ needs. The session combines didactic information with case examples and shares practical knowledge about group structure, participant selection, marketing strategies, and best practices.

Learning Objectives:

• Develop strategies for creating, marketing, promoting and evaluating group offerings.
• Differentiate between psycho-educational, support, and process-oriented groups, and identify the facilitator’s role within various types of groups.
• Screen and select participants to ensure effective group composition and alignment.

REGISTER HERE

Drawing on the work of Sigmund Freud and Frantz Fanon, reinterpreted through a contemporary, evidence-informed lens, the decolonial psychoanalytic perspective offers a novel, guiding framework for theory, research, and clinical practice in clinical psychology, social work, and other applied social sciences. This presentation provides an introduction to this paradigm in two parts.

Part One will outline the foundations of this perspective in the work of Freud and Fanon, working from the "inside-out" to the "outside-in," describing how Freud connected his thinking on psyche, sexuality, and relationships to mental health and societal inequality, and how Fanon worked from an understanding of inequality, sexuality, race and gender to how society "trickles down" into the intimacy of our lives. This first part concludes by reviewing current evidence in support of this perspective and its application in treatment.

In Part Two, this presentation explores the decolonial perspective in research and practice, drawing on the author's research program on colonial mentality among Puerto Rican populations, reporting on a secondary analysis of his data with a focus on gender, race, and inequality. From this research project, implications for clinical practice from a decolonial point of view will be drawn and illustrated through a clinical example.

Question and Answer periods will be held throughout the presentation, allowing attendees the opportunity to engage with the insights of this perspective, and explore their application for pedagogy, research, and clinical work today.

As a result of this presentation, attendees will:

• Describe the relationship between sexuality, mental health and social inequalities;
• Distinguish between how sexuality and social cognition are organized around a) attachment, relationships, and closeness, and b) status, group membership, and hierarchy;
• Describe the evidence for how attachment and status inform human behavior, and its implications for research and practice.

Fees:
CEU’s: $30
Not Seeking CEU’s: No Charge

REGISTER HERE

Pop quiz! What is the largest employer of social workers in the US? What sets apart sailors, Marines, soldiers, airmen, guardians and Coast Guardsmen?

Attend this 3 hour CEU course designed for civilian social workers to find these and more answers. This course gives foundational entry into military culture and unique needs of veterans and service members. With approximately 2.1 million active duty and reserve service members and 18 million living veterans, social workers are likely to engage with this population and their families across clinical and community settings.

In this course participants will learn about military branches, common stressors faced by service members and their families, and generational differences among veterans.

By the end of the 3 hour course participants will be able to:

• Identify the key distinctions between branches
• Understand the military organization of rank and structure
• Recognize the demographic differences of the service branches
• Describe major mental health and psychosocial stressors.

General Admission: $80
Alumni/Internship Instructor: $65
Student: $25

REGISTER HERE

Would you like to improve your group work practice with children, adolescents, young/older adults in settings such as schools, hospitals, addictions, and/or mental health agencies? This interactive session provides theoretical and practical strategies for planning and facilitating effective groups. It addresses purpose, time and duration, composition and diversity, engagement, contracting, facilitator role and expectations, stages of group development, member and agency needs, use of activities, and assessment and feedback.

Learning Objectives:

• Harness the power of group work principles to create meaningful connection and change.
• Understand how groups develop and change over time, including what to expect from members at each stage, and the role of the leader throughout the process.
• Plan more effective group interventions for a wide variety of practice settings and populations.

Email Caroline Gosselin (cgosselin@luc.edu) to register.