Barbara Kaiser is giving presentations about challenging behavior all over the world. You can invite her to your conference, school, or center.

Participants rave about Barbara's presentations!

"You truly were an inspiration to all who were in attendance."

"We were thrilled with the day! Barbara challenged teachers to rethink their classroom management practices and apply new ideas."

"Barbara did a fantastic job and seemed a natural at the virtual presentation. She was able to include the audience and be responsive. Very impressive presentation and content."

"Barbara's webinar was THE MOST informative. Practical information that is REALISTIC."

"This was the best training/webinar I have done during the COVID-19 situation on how it is affecting staff, children, and our field as a whole, both now and moving forward."

"Wonderful training! I appreciate that while my head is spinning trying to navigate all of the new requirements, she brought the focus to the children. I really needed that! Thank you."

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTIONS (1-1/2 to 3 hours)

FULL-DAY WORKSHOP DESCRIPTIONS

WEBINARS (1-1/2 to 3 hours)

A SERIES OF 3 WEBINARS, EACH LASTING 2 HOURS

BARBARA'S SPEAKING SCHEDULE

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTIONS (1-1/2 to 3 hours)

Any workshop can be presented as a keynote or a webinar.

Where Is the Fairy Dust?
If you're like most of us, you feel frustrated and defeated when confronted with a child with challenging behaviors. The daily struggles sap your energy and joy in teaching. You worry that you're failing not only that child and his family but the rest of the children in your group as well. Early intervention is key when it comes to children with challenging behavior. The adults who spend many hours a day with them can make a difference in their lives. Designed to help parents, teachers, and caregivers who are working directly with children with challenging behavior, this workshop uses an anecdotal approach to identify research-based practical and effective ideas and strategies to prevent and address this behavior.

Opening the Culture Door: Understanding the Impact of Culture on Your Teaching Style and Expectations of Children's Behavior
Everyone has a culture and our culture is the framework for our lives. Children naturally develop the characteristics that their own culture values. They begin to construct their identity—to understand who they are—from understanding their own culture and by responding to how others see and relate to them. Sometimes a cultural conflict, visible or invisible, causes or contributes to challenging behavior. Maybe behavior that is inappropriate in the child-care setting or school is acceptable—or even desirable—at home. This workshop explores how understanding cultural influences on both the educator and the child can improve a teacher's ability to prevent and respond to challenging behavior.

Building Positive Connections
Your connection with a child is the most powerful tool you have as a teacher. In a safe, caring relationship with an adult, a child finds a secure base for exploring the world. He learns to value himself and believe in his own personal power. He discovers that he can influence the people around him and that they will help him fulfill his needs. With a sensitive, responsive adult as a guide and model, he can learn to understand and regulate his own feelings and behavior, and he can learn to care about other people, see things from their perspective, and understand their feelings, too.

This session explores what happens when problem behavior enters the picture and this crucial relationship falters, blocking your view of the child and making it a challenge to establish a positive connection. How you relate to the child depends on what you see when you look at the child—and what you see depends on who you are. Whether you're aware of it or not, everything about your teaching—how you approach and respond to the children, set up your room, choose and present activities, even your knowledge of child development and theory—filters through the prism of your own emotions, family background, education, temperament, beliefs, values, and culture.

"That's Not Fair!"
Helping teachers to create an environment that supports all children sometimes means making things work for that one child you wish could be absent just once in a while. This workshop examines how teachers' attitudes, biases, and assumptions often impact their effectiveness and influence their response when working with children with challenging behavior. When a teacher creates an environment that enables all children—especially a child with challenging behavior—to succeed, everyone benefits.

Beyond Survival: Building Your Resilience
We may not be able to control everything that is happening in the classroom, but we can control how we respond. When challenging behavior occurs, teachers need to be powerfully present, emotionally responsive, and role models of healthy social and emotional behavior.

Personal resilience is the capacity to prevent, tolerate, overcome, and be enhanced by adverse events and experiences. When we lose control of ourselves, our response to a child's inappropriate behavior can make things worse. Strengthening resilience allows us to moderate our feelings, thoughts, and behaviors, enables us to respond effectively to challenges, and encourages us to develop new skills. Fostering resilience can be more productive than focusing on managing stress.

"I Didn't Mean to Ruin Your Day"
When you recognize that a child's challenging behavior is rooted in biological and environmental factors and not a desire to ruin your day, it becomes possible for you to figure out what the child needs to learn in order to succeed. Using evidence-based prevention strategies, this workshop will help you understand why a child behaves in a particular way and make it much easier to meet those needs and effectively manage inappropriate behavior.

Prevention Is the Best Intervention
Challenging behavior can be prevented when teachers understand its causes and create a responsive learning environment, program, and social climate. This workshop applies research to practice, investigates biological and environmental risk factors and the role of the brain, and helps teachers to redefine the concept of fairness.

The Importance of Social Emotional Learning
Social and emotional skills provide a foundation for safe and positive learning and enhance children's ability to succeed in school, careers, and life. There is no doubt children learn social and emotional skills simply by being in a group, but they learn much more when you teach these skills intentionally and proactively. The preschool years are the optimal time to begin. Experts have found that in addition to helping children make friends and get along with others, social and emotional skills enable them to improve achievement.

Greater social and emotional competence can increase the likelihood of high school graduation, readiness for postsecondary education, career success, positive family and work relationships, better mental health, reduced criminal behavior, and engaged citizenship. We can give children a jump start if we begin focusing on their social emotional competence when they are young. Social emotional skills are the foundation for creating a safe and caring environment and become the foundation for children to make better decisions, form friendships, and feel good about themselves.

Understanding, Preventing, and Responding Effectively to a Child's Challenging Behavior (3 hours)
This workshop is designed to help people who are working with children with challenging behaviors by bridging the gap between research and practice. Teachers often feel unable to help children with challenging behaviors to develop the skills they need to succeed, and as a result they may not be able to provide a safe setting for the other children in their classroom. This workshop brings together information and skills drawn from neuroscience, psychology, psychiatry, special education and social skills programs. It presents the basic facts about challenging behavior and describes strategies for preventing it, addressing it effectively, and teaching alternative appropriate behaviors.

Addressing Challenging Behavior in Young Children: The Leader's Role (can also be a full day)
Dealing with difficult behavior is often the number-one concern of teachers of children of all ages. As the head of a team, leaders play a crucial role in making it possible for children with challenging behavior to remain in child care and school, develop positive relationships with their peers and adults, learn appropriate ways to express their needs, and be ready to learn. However, these goals can only be met when leaders believe in them and have the skills to develop and lead a team that supports them. Possessing good leadership skills is just the beginning. This workshop helps leaders to understand and respect everyone's needs and challenges and enables them to act as advocates for children, staff, and families even though they're pulled in all directions at once.

Time-Out for Time-Out!!!!
This workshop explores alternatives to time-out and the effects of punishment. It examines the use of natural and logical consequences, and provides an overview of Functional Assessment and Positive Behavior Support—tools that enable early childhood educators to help children with challenging behavior learn appropriate ways to express their needs.

Bullying Behavior: What You Need to Know and What You Can Do about It
What is bullying? Why do kids bully? Who are the children who engage in bullying behavior? Who are the targets of bullying behavior? What is the role of the bystanders? Bullying happens everywhere, whether the school or the classroom is large or small, urban or rural. This session highlights research and best practices in defining, preventing, and intervening when bullying behavior occurs. It will help educators understand the importance of creating a safe and caring environment, explore the difference between bullying and other forms of challenging behavior, and help them to develop the skills to intervene effectively when bullying occurs.

Parents as Partners
Talking to parents about their child's challenging behavior can be one of a teacher's most difficult jobs. This workshop provides lots of tips for connecting with parents and creating a team approach to challenging behavior.

WEVAS: Working Effectively with Violent and Aggressive States (3-hour workshop)
This workshop presents an overview of the WEVAS strategy that enables teachers to identify their role in a child's challenging behavior and learn ways to help a child to de-escalate that behavior and successfully rejoin the group. See description in the full-day workshop section.

Can't Help Loving Them, but... Why Is My Child Behaving This Way? A Parent Workshop (a workshop/keynote for parents of children with challenging behavior)
One of the most difficult jobs parents face is disciplining their children, especially when they exhibit challenging behavior. Challenging behaviors can occur at home, in child care, in school, or all three. They usually occur regularly rather than once in a while and can make any parent feel inadequate and alone. There are always reasons for a child's challenging behavior, but it may be difficult to figure them out. They are rarely the result of bad parenting and never because a child is just "bad." This workshop will help parents to understand their child and themselves and teach ways to prevent and respond to their child's challenging behaviors more effectively.

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FULL-DAY WORKSHOP DESCRIPTIONS

How Can I Understand, Prevent, and Respond Effectively to Children's Challenging Behavior?
Have you ever continued to respond in the same way to a child's challenging behavior even though you knew your approach wasn't working? Many of us keep doing something that doesn't feel right or have the desired outcome because we don't know what else to do. But you can respond effectively to a child's challenging behavior when you have the appropriate knowledge, strategies, and skills.

When you understand yourself, know which behaviors push your buttons, and recognize that a child's challenging behavior is rooted in biological and environmental factors and not a desire to ruin your day, you are in a much better position to respond effectively. By bridging the gap between research and practice and bringing together information drawn from neuroscience, psychology, and special education, this workshop will help you understand why children behave in a particular way, how to figure out what they need, and how to use evidence-based, proven-effective strategies to meet those needs and manage inappropriate behavior effectively.

Positive Behavior Support/Functional Assessment
Functional Assessment is an important tool for helping children with challenging behavior learn appropriate ways to express their needs. Its premise is that every challenging behavior can be thought of as a child's solution to a problem and a form of communication. This workshop will help educators learn to use Functional Assessment to understand where the behavior is coming from, why it is happening at a particular time in a particular place, the logic behind it, the function (or purpose) it serves for the child, how it can be prevented, and what replacement skills the child needs to learn in order to meet their needs appropriately. Even if the behavior is unacceptable, the function seldom is.

WEVAS: Working Effectively with Violent and Aggressive States (1- or 2-day workshop)
Even to the most experienced child care educator or teacher, it sometimes seems as if challenging behavior comes out of nowhere. But according to the WEVAS intervention, children usually present warning signs. If you can recognize them and intervene early enough, you can prevent challenging behavior and help children return to a competent state, where their minds, bodies, and emotions are functioning well and geared up for learning. No matter which state they're in, children need support and guidance to return to the competent state. The WEVAS strategy helps staff provide this support and guidance by recognizing exactly where children are at, seeing things from their perspective, understanding how their own reactions contribute to the children's behavior, and matching their response to the children's needs.

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WEBINARS (1-1/2 to 3 hours)

Opening Pre-Ks and Child Care Centers in the Time of the Coronavirus: Supporting Children, Staff, and Families Beyond

COVID-19: Helping Children, Families, and Staff Adapt to the New Normal Beyond

COVID-19: Supporting Migrant Families and Their Children

Beyond Survival: The Importance of Resilience

The Importance of Family Engagement in On-Line and In-Person Learning

Understanding the Impact of Trauma on Behavior

The Importance of Creating a Caring Culture: The Leadership Role

Celebrating Diversity: Creating a Diverse, Equitable and Inclusive Environment

The Power of Prevention: The Leader's Role

How Can I Understand, Prevent, and Respond Effectively to a Child's Challenging Behavior? (3 to 4 hours). See description in the Full-Day Workshop section.

Understanding Children's Behavior and Why It Is Challenging

Preventing Challenging Behavior in Young Children

Responding Effectively to Children's Challenging Behavior

Building Positive Connections. See description in the Workshop section.

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A SERIES OF 3 WEBINARS, EACH LASTING 2 HOURS

"I Didn't Mean to Ruin Your Day": Understanding Yourself and the Child
When you understand yourself, know which behaviors push your buttons, and recognize that a child's challenging behavior is rooted in biological and environmental factors and not a desire to ruin your day, you are in a much better position to respond effectively. By bridging the gap between research and practice and bringing together information drawn from neuroscience, psychology, and special education, this session will help you understand why a child behaves in a particular way and make it much easier to meet those needs and effectively.

"Nothing I Do Works!" Preventing a Child's Challenging Behavior
No strategy works in a vacuum. It is probably impossible to eliminate challenging behavior entirely, but a lot of it can be prevented. Prevention is the best form of intervention. When the environment meets their physical, cognitive, emotional, and social needs, children feel competent and capable of success, and their challenging behavior becomes less necessary. This means that every aspect of the environment—the social climate, the physical space, the curriculum, and your teaching strategies—must take each child's needs into account.

Where Is the Fairy Dust? Responding Effectively to Children's Challenging Behavior
Teachers often feel unable to help children with challenging behaviors to develop the skills they need to succeed, and as a result they may not be able to provide a safe setting for the other children in their classroom. Many of us keep doing something that doesn't feel right or have the desired outcome because we don't know what else to do. But you can respond effectively to a child's challenging behavior when you have the appropriate knowledge, strategies, and skills.

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Where is Barbara going?
Barbara's speaking schedule and webinars

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