Hello one and all and welcome to my end of week blog post.
This week I had the distinction pleasure of training the troops from Shropshire Council’s ‘Stepping Stones’ team, along with their colleagues from across the council. The Stepping Stones model is an innovative specialist project which provides wrap around, customised provision for children, young people and adults in need of support and specific forms of foster care. Stepping Stones supports young people with complex needs and challenging behaviour with their aim to provide fostering placements to young people as they leave residential care.
I was asked to create a two-day bespoke Motivational Interviewing training programme and as you can see from the collated feedback, they were mightily impressed with my hard work, research and the fact the course was relevant to them and their learning needs. I do like a satisfied group of learners.
Please peruses the comments at your leisure and do let me know if I can assist your learning and development needs.
“Steven was absolutely fantastic! Steven has a great way of engaging people and keeping people motivated throughout training. I would definitely look forward to more training sessions with him on a number of different topics. Despite the training being online, it was interactive, fun and really informative. I’ve taken so much out of the training that if I sat here and listed it all, I would be here all day. However, the main thing that I have taken and will take forward into my practice are the various ways of reflecting information back to an individual.”
Becky
“Thank you Steven, I have learnt some great tools to enhance my practice and most importantly this will help to make change with the families I support. I thought 2 days of training would be hard for me, I have been able to stay focussed throughout both days.”
Bethan
“What a wonderful course. It was great fun and there was the right amount of input from the course tutor and activity by the participants. I will be using some of the interviewing techniques with my young people to talk about their behaviours and life choices. The message I will take away is less tick boxing and more listening!!”
Caroline
“Helpful and informative, enjoyed the practical examples, videos, and opportunities to use and develop these skills.”
Dave
“This training exceeded my expectations and I expect to be using this immediately with my young people and in difficult conversations with family. Thank you.”
Elaine
“This was a great piece of training that I have gained really useful information and tools from that I will be able to use in my practice going forward. Steven was great and I really enjoyed his teaching style, it was fun and informative. I would definitely like to attend other training he provides.”
Emma
“Felt that the training was very insightful and helpful for my work with families. The training was enjoyable given that it is online which can become difficult with training over several days.”
Georgia
“Steven is a brilliant trainer; the content is taught then practised to embed the information and Steven keeps your mind active by participation throughout the course. Any course Steven runs should be offered to Shropshire council staff as he has so much valuable knowledge to share. If you don’t already you need to run a course around how to debate professionally as I really think this is healthy and not done enough in social work until you have to defend a decision which seems ironic. Thank you for two days of intense but wonderful training, I will now be able to use motivational interviewing more confidently and not ask too many questions. I wanted to say a personal thank you also for being so understanding with my anxiety, your thoughtfulness mean I could fully participate despite my anxiety. Not many people have your level of understanding nor would they make as much effort to think what might help me.”
Laura
“The training was presented in chunks of learning and then doing practical exercises to get to grips with the ideas and methods, this was useful as it was a lot to learn and I think it started us out of trying out the different techniques so that we feel more confident to start using them in practice. I think it’s the kind of method which we will get better at the more we use it. Steven was fun and I wasn’t bored or distracted. He was very engaging and I enjoyed the training. Mostly I learned a lot and feel motivated to use motivational interviewing techniques with the people I am working with.”
Susie
“Steven, thank you for the last two days, such an engaging and enjoyable two day event, you kept us all thoroughly engaged, which I believe is always hard via Teams/Zoom. This definitely has a place within Stepping Stones. Thanks again. A very informative training event, which sits very well within Stepping Stones, and how we work and engage with our families. The event was presented very well, the content was and is relevant to our service. The facilitator was extremely engaging, and despite the event being on Zoom, kept the audience engaged and motivated for the duration of the sessions.”
Ian