Advanced Practitioners' Lectures
for Educators & Child Mental Health Professionals

February - April 2010

Ann Martin Center sponsors lectures on contemporary research, theory, and technique relevant to educators and child mental health professionals.  Speakers reflect diverse expertise in the assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of learning, emotional, behavioral, developmental, and school-related problems.  The series is offered as a free service to the professional community and all presenters have graciously donated their time.

Location: Ann Martin Center, 1250 Grand Ave. (between Wildwood and Fairview Avenue)

Registration: To reserve a space, within a two week period before lecture, call (510) 655-3999, ext. 333, leaving a message with (only): Your name, phone number, and date of presentation you wish to attend.  Your place is confirmed unless we call to tell you the lecture is full.

Web Updates: Visit us at www.annmartin.org for lecture updates and information about our services.

The Art of Interviewing Children
Kristy Brodeur, MS
When: February 5, 2010 (Friday) Time: 12:30 - 2 p.m.

This presentation will provide information on Alameda County’s multi-disciplinary process of investigating and interviewing suspected child abuse victims. We will be discussing the benefits and procedures of CALICO Center’s services and protocol, as well as, child interviewing techniques and helpful hints.

Kristy Brodeur has been interviewing suspected child abuse victims for over 15 years. Currently she is the Senior Forensic Interviewer at CALICO Center in Alameda Co. She is also the Training Coordinator and conducts trainings throughout the county on the Multi-disciplinary process and child interviewing skills and techniques.

Emotional Regulation
Presenter: Leah Kuypers, MA, Ed., OTR/L
When: February 26, 2010 (Friday) Time: 12:30 - 2 p.m.

The Zones of Regulation (ZoR) is an evidence-based strategy that helps students become more aware of (and independent in) controlling their emotions and impulses, managing their sensory needs, and improving their ability to problem solve conflicts. Practical ideas are provided that can easily be incorporated at home. ZoR teaches clients how to: 1) identify their level of arousal and sensory needs; 2) determine calming strategies work for them; 3) assess the benefit of calming strategies; and 4) develop other problem-solving solutions

Leah Kuypers is an occupational therapist and autism specialist who specializes in working with children with self-regulation challenges. She developed the Zones of Regulation curriculum to help clients learn strategies to self-regulate their sensory needs and emotions. At Communication Works (CW), Leah provides traditional occupational therapy, as well as offers individual and group therapy to address self-regulation that incorporates fundamentals in sensory integration, emotional regulation and executive functioning. CW is known for its social learning groups run in their Oakland Clinic. Along with clinic based groups, CW maintains certification as a Non-Public Agency (NPA) and contracts with over 10 local school districts, private programs and centers to deliver specialized speech and language services as well as provides in-home early intervention services through the Regional Center of the East Bay (RCEB). Clinic services are also vendorized through RCEB.

Comprehensive Assessment of ADHD: Diagnosis, Treatment Planning and Outcomes
Presenter: Alan Siegel, PhD
When: March 5, 2010 (Friday) Time: 12:30 - 2 p.m.

With an incidence estimated between 5 and 10 percent of the population, ADHD can be challenging to diagnose because many children and adolescents also have learning disabilities or other psychological difficulties and a number of disorders can be confused with ADHD. Individuals with less severe symptoms and those with intellectual gifts or other strengths may be able to partially compensate especially in elementary school. We will look at a comprehensive approach to assessing Inattentive and Hyperactive ADHD, using a flexible battery of tests, interviews, consultations and observations. The focus will be on clarifying diagnostic dilemmas in more complex cases where a thorough and definitive evaluation may dramatically affect a child’s future psychological and academic adjustment. The challenges of presenting results to parents, implementing a detailed but flexible treatment plan, long-range planning and outcomes, empowering parent advocacy, and strategies for obtaining accommodations from public and private schools and test and license boards will also be covered.

Alan Siegel, PhD has conducted psychoeducational, neuropsychological, psychological, and forensic evaluations of children and adults for 27 years and has evaluated children from over 100 different public and private schools and from 15 school districts in Northern California and with young adults from dozens of colleges in the United States and Canada. As part of the evaluation process, he has successfully helped students obtain academic and test accommodations from elementary through high school, college and graduate school and for professional examinations in law, medicine, and business. He is Assistant Clinical Professor, UC Berkeley, Psychology Department, and Adjunct Faculty at Alliant University/CSPP. He was the supervising psychologist at the Child Development Center at California Pacific Medical Center. He practices in Berkeley and San Francisco.

Family Literacy from the Top Down: How a Parent’s Literacy Problems Impact the Child’s Educational Issues
Presenter: Ann Daniels
When: March 19, 2010 (Friday) Time: 12:30 - 2 p.m.

It is well known that the children of adults who have difficulty reading and writing are themselves significantly more likely to have difficulties by the time they start school. In the Bay Area, as in many places in this country, a significant percentage of the population is functionally illiterate – unable to fill out a job application or read simple directions. Yet many of these adults have developed coping mechanisms so that they are able to hide their literacy difficulties for years or even decades, even from those closest to them. Thus, when children present with literacy difficulties, it is crucial but often difficult for the professional to ascertain whether and to what extent one or more adults in the family may have problems reading or writing. We will discuss how adult literacy problems can be identified and how the childhood learning specialist can help a parent in need of literacy assistance. We will also discuss some ways in which families can help their children overcome the disadvantage of having parents who are unable to read or write fluently.

Ann Daniels is the Family Literacy Coordinator for Second Start Adult Literacy, a program of the Oakland Public Library. She has worked in the field of adult and family literacy since 2002.

Brain-based Psychotherapy
Presenter: Lloyd Linford, PhD
When: April 2, 2010 (Friday) Time: 12:30 - 2 p.m.

Psychotherapy needs a new model of the mind. Most of us still based our work on ideas that were familiar to Pavlov, William James and Freud, and are now more than 100 years old. A peculiar omission from this meta-psychology is information about the biological systems that produce the mind. With the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, the brain suddenly vanished from psychotherapy. For more than a century, therapists have largely concerned themselves with the mind only, leaving psychiatrists to deal with the biological underpinnings of mental life. With breakthroughs in neuroscience and the advent of a theory of developmental neurobiology, this era is rapid drawing to a close. In this presentation, we will look at the paradigm-changing discoveries of modern neuroscience, ranging from specialized cells that allow us to model the unspoken emotional states of others, to the discovery of the processes that underlie neuroplasticity. Combining this new view of the brain with findings from the attachment literature, we will look at a new metapsychology that is emerging in the field of child and adolescent mental health and what it will mean for the mental health professions.

A former Executive Director of the Ann Martin Center and Chief Psychologist in the Department of Psychiatry at Kaiser Oakland, Lloyd Linford, Ph.D., is currently Director of Psychiatry Best Practices in Kaiser’s Northern California Region, and Chair of Kaiser’s Annual Psychiatry Conference. Lloyd has been in private practice in Oakland for more than 30 years, working with adolescents and adults. He is the author, with John Arden, Ph.D., of Brain-Based Therapy for Children and Adolescents (Wiley, 2009) and a companion volume on adult treatment.

More than Numbers - Utilizing the Results from Psychoeducational Assessments for a Cognitive Profile
Presenter: Shawn Usha, MA
When: April 16, 2010 (Friday) Time: 12:30 - 2 p.m.

Psycho-educational assessments can provide a robust and complex cognitive functioning profile of a child but often that profile is obscured by the emphasis on diagnosis and /or determination of eligibility for services. This workshop will explain how to look at assessment results in detail, build a profile of that child, and begin to prioritize and strategize instructional activities and methods. We will begin by reviewing the structure of the WJ-III Cognitive and WISC-IV - history of development, structure of the indexes, the Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) theory of cognitive abilities, and a task review of the individual subtests. Cognitive test results with typical profiles for cognitive weaknesses (like memory, auditory or visual processing) will be used as practice in building a picture of the strengths and weaknesses of a child. The session will end with recommendations for instructional strategies tied to a specific profile.

Shawn Usha is a professional educational therapist working at Ann Martin Center and also has a private practice. At the Ann Martin Center Shawn has conducted psych-oeducational assessments for five years, and he has worked in community college settings completing learning disability eligibility assessments. Shawn taught for over fifteen years in the field of adult literacy along with a diverse background in instructional writing, technical support, and program development. Shawn has a Masters degree from San Francisco in education and completed the certificate program for Educational Therapy at UC Berkeley.

Lecture ideas? Email your requests or suggestions for speakers & topics: davidtheis@annmartin.org