Helping Students Thrive: Meeting Basic Needs

College students have faced significant challenges in the last several years, including COVID-19, reductions in supportive grants for student services, stress-inducing executive orders from the White House, and increasing costs for housing and food. Many students struggle to balance their basic needs for food, housing, family, health, and work obligations while on the path to academic success. Even with training in counseling, social work, and other supportive approaches to helping, college staff would benefit from having access to detailed and easy-to-follow resource guides to assist students in moving forward in their academic journey.

• Classes will be recorded and made available for those who are unable to attend a session due to scheduling conflicts
• Group rates are available
• Email bethany@dprep.com with questions

YOUR INSTRUSTORS

Brian Van Brunt, EdD, is the Director of Behavior and Threat Management for D-Prep Safety and the President of the Workplace Violence Prevention Association. Author of over a dozen books, Brian has spent time as a child and family therapist, university professor, assistant deputy director of training at Secure Community Network, partner at TNG, and president of the National Association for Behavioral Intervention and Threat Assessment (NABITA). He is an internationally recognized expert in behavioral intervention, threat assessment, crisis preparedness, mental illness, and instructional design. Brian has provided consulting services to schools, colleges, and universities across the country and abroad on a wide variety of topics related to student mental health, counseling, campus violence, and behavioral intervention.

Allison Frost has over a decade of experience in behavioral intervention, threat/risk assessment, case management, and student support. Allison has extensive experience providing guidance and resources for individuals going through Title IX processes, university conduct processes, policy interpretation and creation, safety evaluation and threat or risk assessment, and strategic planning after a campus crisis or emergency. Allison is thrilled to continue teaching and collaborating with others in the field while also doing direct, student-facing work at a large public university.

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Course Description:

This virtual certification course is offered to college staff, counseling, BIT/CARE members, and faculty interested in assisting students in achieving success in their college goals. Brian and Allison will review core intervention, support, and advocacy skills drawn from the fields of social work, counseling, life coaching, academic success, disability accommodation, tutoring, and career services. They will address challenges and offer practical strategies to address housing and food insecurity, academic readiness, mental health, safety planning, study skills development, time management, mental wellness, social support, navigating community services, critical thinking and problem-solving, fiscal management, emotional regulation, and improving self-advocacy. There will be opportunities for case review and discussion, demonstrating how to apply these skills effectively. While Brian and Allison will provide the lead instruction and design for the course, a series of supplemental videos from DPrep Safety’s subject matter experts will offer insight into applying these techniques successfully with the student population.

The course will review of students' core areas of need. We will discuss the importance of assessing local, state, and federal resources and how basic needs staff, case managers, counselors, social workers, and other support staff can better educate students to access resources. We will offer a collection of twenty resource sheets describing the various approaches to helping with worksheets for students to use to put these skills into practice. We will also include several interactive breakout sessions to discuss case study examples showing how these topics are applied.

Supplemental Resources Provided:

• A summary packet for the course
• Access to a recording of the course instruction
• Twenty resource sheets that provide an overview of the intervention approach, what population and problem it would be useful to address, and a case example of the intervention approach in practice
• Twenty worksheets for students to put these concepts into practice
• An interactive, online decision-making rubric that staff can use to choose the appropriate intervention to address the student’s challenge
• A series of seven, short (10-15 minute) supplemental videos from DPrep Safety’s subject matter experts engaging in a deeper discussion related to neurodiversity, student stress related to immigration and deportation, understanding religious differences with a focused on Jewish and Muslim tensions, visual notetaking, and the importance of forming study skills
• Two bonus conversations with a student who struggled at college and now helps others, and with a student with dyslexia who moved successfully through the community college process to graduate with honors from a four-year institution

Summary of Skills Sheets:

1. Controlling Your Stress: Getting control of your stress is a critical skill needed to be successful in college, including understanding the differences between stress and burnout.
2. Reading the Room and Thriving By Increasing Emotional Intelligence: Emotional intelligence (EQ) refers to the ability to recognize our emotions and those of others. It affects group dynamics, individual and group performance, creativity, communication, and motivation.
3. Navigating Hard Conversations: Guidance for staff and faculty for when and how to address difficult topics, including the Israeli/Palestine conflict, reproductive rights, gun ownership, political divides, race relations, immigration, and LGBTQ+ rights.
4. Overcoming Being Overwhelmed: One of the things we can teach our students is how to gain control of their feelings of panic and dread and learn how to center themselves to focus on the tasks at hand.
5. Adopting an Optimistic Mindset Through Positive Psychology: The study of what goes right in life, from birth to death, and at all stops in between. It examines the strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive.
6. Developing a Better Plan with Reality Therapy: Creating plans and goals for a student in a manner that ensures success based on wants, direction and doing, evaluation, and planning (WDEP). Plans should be simple, attainable, measurable, immediate, controlled by the planner, consistently practiced, and committed to.
7. Support Critical Thinking Skills by Redefining Failure: Narrative therapy helps students see their stories from a different perspective. The story doesn’t change, but how they think about it shifts.
8. Safety Planning to Address Mental Illness and Suicide Risk: The collaborative process between the staff and students to increase warning sign awareness and build internal coping strategies to overcome challenges they may face related to self-harm, suicide, and general functioning.
9. College Should be Challenging; Not Overwhelming: Stress & Burnout Assessment: This assessment is useful for students to gain insight into their functioning at college. This checklist can be given to the student to complete and bring back to you for scoring and further direction.
10. Addressing Anxiety: The ABCs of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy: Assisting students to see their irrational thoughts is the first step to helping them find alternative ways to process the world around them.
11. Building Habits and Making Change through Transtheoretical Change Theory: This approach outlines how people move through various stages before becoming ready to make lasting changes in their lives.
12. Improving Academic Study Skills: Working Smarter, Not Harder: A successful college career starts with assessing what each of your professors and instructors requires of you to obtain a good grade in their class.
13. Addressing Food & Housing Insecurity: Access to food and housing is an essential barrier for college students to overcome so that they can focus on their academic progress.
14. Managing the Medication Discussion: Understanding the challenges to medication cost, access to providers, compliance, and consistency when taking medication.
15. Supporting Students of All Religions: Given the recent conflict in the Middle East and the increase in tensions between Jewish and Muslim students, it is helpful to better understand the conflict and how to address it.
16. Teaching Boundaries in Social Relationships: Whether from students with developmental disorders or other social challenges, knowing how to teach the importance of boundaries and positive social interactions is an area of need.
17. Managing Money: This material will help the many students who have not had financial literacy training and make poor financial decisions when receiving payments from grants, loans, and paychecks.
18. Self-Advocacy: An important skill for any college student is knowing when to ask for help and advocate for themselves in the classroom, with friends and family, at work, and with their healthcare needs.
19. Pronouns: Understanding why pronouns are important as they relate to gender identity, expression, and the separate issues of sexual orientation.
20. Navigating Conduct and Title IX: Students are often overwhelmed when they enter the student conduct and/or Title IX process. Staff should understand how to support and advocate for the students they are working with on campus.

Summary of Supplemental Videos:

1. Understanding Neurodiversity: From defining autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to discussing differences in person-first and identity-first language, learn how Jeanne Clifton helps students on the spectrum in her role as an academic support counselor.
2. Student Stress Related to Immigration and Deportation: Our subject matter experts will provide a lens through which to understand the stress impacting students related to immigration concerns under the new executive orders from Washington.
3. Understanding Religious Differences: Our subject matter experts will share important, foundational points needed when talking with students who have experienced Islamophobia or antisemitism on their campus.
4. Visual Note Taking with Silent James: Silent James, an artist and visual notetaking expert from the Bay Area, will share insights related to his work and how these techniques can revitalize how students approach notetaking.
5. Reflections on Study Skills: Dr. Poppy Fitch will offer some personal experience on her process for study and preparation, and how this has informed her work with students with learning disabilities and first-generation college students.
6. AI in the Classroom: Dr. Amy Murphy shares some of her perspectives about using AI in the classroom and how this can be both a benefit and a challenge for colleges.
7. Helping Students with Anxiety: Dr. Van Brunt shares some insights on helping students with anxiety overcome challenges in friendships, dating relationships, and navigating academic accommodations.

Bonus Conversations:

1. From the Front Lines: Dr. Van Brunt talked with an employee who personally experienced many challenges in their college life, who now works with students struggling to be successful in their academic progress.
2. A Story from Home: Dr. Van Brunt talks with his son, Noah Van Brunt, about his journey from part-time classes at Manchester Community College to earning a degree at New England College. As a homeschooled student with dyslexia, Noah will share what helped (and what didn’t) in his journey to graduation.