Description
LIVE STREAM: May 27 – 29, 2026 from 8:30am – 4:00pm (Winnipeg, MB) Please adjust your start time according to your specific time zone.
ON-DEMAND: Recorded footage & course content (certificate, videos, quiz) will be available until July 5, 2026. Please allow 3 – 10 business days for footage to be processed. Extensions cannot be granted under any circumstances.
May 27, 2026 | Day One
Optimizing Self-Regulation and Managing Big Emotions with Children & Adolescents
Presented by Caroline Buzanko, Ph.D., R. Psych
In today’s world, our children and youth face an unprecedented level of stress and pressure, making it hard to effectively self-regulate and manage day-to-day stressors. As parents, educators, and mental health professionals, it’s essential that we equip ourselves with effective strategies to help children and teens develop the skills they need to navigate life’s challenges. When they don’t know how to manage those emotions, problem behaviours often result and can negatively affect their physical, psychological, academic, and social well-being. For many, they struggle to meet even the most basic expectations. It is essential they receive the right support.
Join us for a transformative workshop designed for mental health professionals, educators, parents, and caregivers to build self-regulation and emotional management skills in children and teens. During this workshop, you’ll learn evidence-based interventions and practical tools to promote healthy self-regulation and emotional management skills in children and youth. This workshop will provide you with the knowledge and skills you need to make a meaningful difference in the lives of the children and teens you work with. Join us in this engaging and practical workshop, where you will leave with the skills and knowledge to empower children and youth to manage their emotions, overcome challenges, and build resilience.
May 28, 2026 | Day Two
20+ Proven Executive Function & Cognitive Skill Coaching Activities PreK-12th Grade
Presented by Lynne Kenney, Psy.D.
In this workshop, Lynne Kenney, Psy,D., pediatric psychologist, author, and international educator, will show you how to integrate the newest research in neuroscience, kinesiology, cognitive science, and neuroeducation for students to learn more efficiently. You will experience over 20 cognitive skill coaching and cognitive- motor activities with developmentally progressive cognitive-exercises, worksheets, and activities to enliven your classroom, office, and clinic. Learn the science of how to improve cognition, enhance learning, and empower children to be better thinkers with motor movement, sequencing, attending, self-regulation, and memory activities.
Executive function encompasses the cognitive processes that enable goal-directed behavior, emotional regulation, attentional control, and adaptability – capacities that are critical to academic achievement, social competence, behavioral regulation, and overall well-being. Recent neuroscience research has shifted our understanding of executive function, revealing that it includes teachable skills such as self-regulation, organization, planning, attention, memory, and cognitive flexibility. Executive function is no longer seen as a set of unmalleable fixed traits. A growing body of evidence demonstrates that specific interventions can improve learning and behavior by strengthening both the structural connectivity and functional activation patterns within the neural networks that support executive functioning.
The application of this research is of particular interest to educators, clinicians, and allied professionals who directly influence students’ learning, social, and cognitive development. By receiving specialized training, professionals can implement brief, evidence-based activities that strengthen executive function skills, improving learning, self-regulation, and prosocial behavior. Integrating such practices into educational and therapeutic settings can significantly impact students’ trajectories and lifetime outcomes.
Dress comfortably, as we will be moving to think and calm to learn with balls, bean bags, desk percussion, rhythm activities, and music.
May 29, 2026 | Day Three
Working with Stuck Kids: An Attachment Based Relational Perspective
Presented by Eva de Gosztonyi, M.A.
With over 40 years of experience working in schools, it ads become clear that there are no easy answers for teaching and working with students who have challenging behaviours. The construct of psychological immaturity (not everyone grows up as they get older) has been with us as an intuitive concept for ages, but only recently has developmental science advanced to a state where it can now yield effective strategies and interventions to address learning and behavioural challenges.
Rather than asking, “What can we do to fix this student?” we must, instead develop an understanding of why children get stuck, creating a situation which results in many kinds of challenging behaviours. This understanding comes to us through the neuroscience of development and the research on the effect of adverse childhood experiences (complex trauma) on development, learning and behaviour. It is anchored the attachment-based developmental paradigm developed by Gordon Neufeld, PhD, which considers the keys to human development: maturation, vulnerability and attachment and the role of emotions. This presentation will start with theory and then move on to present a variety of attachment-base and developmentally friendly interventions that have been implemented with success in schools across Quebec. Using this knowledge, it also becomes apparent that some of our “tried and true” interventions are not only ineffective, but they can, at times, make things worse for our students. An Intervention Continuum will be presented that proposes a number of in-class and in-school interventions that are preventative in nature, require minimal additional resources and are applicable at both the Elementary and Secondary levels.
