Dancing to Mindfulness in the time of COVID

Earn 2 New York State LCAT, LCSW, LMHC or LMSW Continuing Education Credit

From the Comfort of Your Own Home on Your Own Schedule!

Course Description:

As practitioners working with “at-risk” families, how do you hold a child’s attention through video conferencing sessions? During this extended period of time when parents are asked to continue to maintain “stay-at-home” orders, what activities can they do to engage their children and support them to express the array of diverse feelings they have? Mindfulness activities are helpful, but how do you get children to slow down, breathe and focus when they have been confined indoors and are quite literally “bouncing off the walls”? 

Course Objectives

1. Gain understanding about how young children's body actions and behaviors are nonverbal cues that can be transformed into meaningful movement and dance-based self – expressive activities during telehealth sessions/lessons.

2. Learn how to create individualized movement and dance- based activities to reduce stress in young children and engage them with their therapist/teacher during telehealth sessions.

3. Explore and learn how to use movement and dance activities to transform dysregulated behaviors into more regulated actions that focus a young child’s attention to obtain a mindful state of awareness that the child can use during and after telehealth sessions/lessons.

4. Learn activities you can teach caregivers to do with their young children to support stress reduction and a more mindful state of awareness.

Course Curriculum

1. Welcome to Dancing Dialogue LCAT LMHC PLLC's Continuing Education Program

   — Welcome to the Dancing Dialogue Continuing Education Program
   — Getting your Continuing Education Credit

2. Movement and dance-based activities to support families through telehealth

   — Six considerations when using Telehealth with young children
   — Adding dance and movement to Telehealth sessions
   — Structuring dance/movement therapy sessions over Telehealth

3. Course examination and closing

   — Resources and closing

   — Course Examination

   — Course Evaluation

Course Instructor:

Suzi Tortora, Ed.D. BC-DMT LCAT LMHC CMA is a New York State Licensed Creative Arts Therapist (LCAT), Licensed Mental Health Counselor (LCAT) and Board Certified Dance/Movement Therapist (BC-DMT) with her doctorate from Teacher’s College, Columbia University. She serves as consultant to the “Mothers, Infants and Young Children of September 11, 2001: A Primary Prevention Project” in the Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University under Dr. Beatrice Beebe. She has a full-time private practice in Cold Spring, NY and NYC for over 30 years, specializing in parent- infant/child and family therapy; trauma; pediatric medical illness; and adult chronic pain. Dr Tortora is a pioneer in the field of dance/movement therapy bridging the fields of infant mental health, dance/movement therapy and nonverbal movement analysis. Dr. Tortora is the International Medical Creative Arts Spokesperson for the Andréa Rizzo Foundation, having created and continuing to be the senior dance/movement therapist at Integrative Medicine Service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, NYC, dance/movement therapy program for pediatric patients, since its inception in 2003. She received the 2010 Marian Chace Distinguished Dance Therapist award from the American Dance Therapy Association. She teaches in Europe, South America, New Zealand, the Middle East and Asia and holds faculty positions in the USA, The Netherlands, Chech Republic, Argentina and China. She also offers international webinar-based Ways of Seeing training programs for dance/movement therapists and allied professionals. She has published numerous papers about her work and her book, The Dancing Dialogue: Using the communicative power of movement with young children is used extensively in dance/movement therapy training programs around the world.