Target audience: caseworkers
Please contact your Regional Learning Coordinator if you are already certified and wish to enroll in this course.
Category: New Caseworker Academy 2022-2023
Search results: 48
Self enrollment
Self enrollment
Target Audience: caseworkers; case aides; supervisors; state staff; foster, kinship, and adoptive families
Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are traumatic events occurring before age 18 and include all types of abuse and neglect, as well as parental mental illness, substance use, divorce, incarceration, and domestic violence. The repeated stress of these experiences has proven effects on the development of the brain, with the impact occurring over a lifetime. People who experienced high levels of trauma as children are at a much higher risk for health issues, such as heart disease and lung cancer.
The long-term impact of adverse childhood experiences gained wider acceptance through the landmark CDC-Kaiser Permanente ACE Study. In this interactive Web-based training, you’ll explore the study and lessons learned. You’ll also gain an understanding of how toxic stress can impact brain development and, in turn, long-term health and well-being outcomes. Furthermore, you will begin to explore prevention and intervention strategies to help mitigate the impact of ACEs.
Target audience: caseworkers
This interactive learning experience provides child welfare professionals with the tools to help families understand how to access quality and consistent health care for children and youth.
Target audience: caseworkers; supervisors; foster, kinship, and adoptive parents
This interactive, self-guided online course is designed to help child welfare professionals and foster, kinship, and adoptive parents understand the impact of trauma on the development of adolescents who have experienced child abuse and neglect.
Category: New Foster Parent Academy 2022-2023
Target audience: caseworkers; supervisors; foster, kinship, and adoptive parents
This interactive, self-guided online course is designed to help child welfare professionals and foster, kinship, and adoptive parents understand the impact of trauma on the development of infants and toddlers who have experienced child abuse and neglect.
Category: New Foster Parent Academy 2022-2023
Target audience: caseworkers; supervisors; foster, kinship, and adoptive parents
Category: New Foster Parent Academy 2022-2023
Target audience: caseworkers; supervisors; foster, kinship, and adoptive parents
This interactive, self-guided online course is designed to help child welfare professionals and foster, kinship, and adoptive parents understand the impact of trauma on the development of children and youth who have experienced child abuse and neglect.Category: New Foster Parent Academy 2022-2023
Self enrollment
Target Audience: caseworkers and supervisors
Entering complete and accurate data into Trails is critical. In this brief course, you’ll engage in three short interactive activities—including a demonstration of what, where, and how to enter data—that will assist caseworkers and supervisors alike in avoiding common errors when documenting contact in Trails.
Learners who have already completed this WBT can access the training at any time to review it.
Self enrollment
Target Audience: all audiences
How familiar are you with Family First? The Family First Prevention Services Act of 2018, dubbed Family First, overhauled federal child welfare funding—but it reaches far beyond funding. With an emphasis on evidence-based and trauma-informed services and preventing out-of-home and out-of-family placements, Family First has implications beyond child welfare and into the juvenile justice system, courts, service providers, and community partners. In this introductory Web-based training, you will review the purpose of Family First, how it impacts service provision and placements, and much more.
Self enrollment
Target Audience: caseworkers; supervisors; case aides; foster, kinship, and adoptive parents
Fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) affect nearly 30 percent of children and youth in the foster care and adoption system and 15 to 25 percent of those in the juvenile justice system. Do you know how to support children, youth, and families who are impacted by them? This Web-based training, with customized content for both caseworkers and caregivers, explores the research around the impacts of fetal alcohol exposure and how FASD affects behavior and functioning. You’ll examine what FASD looks like to adults and think about what it feels like to an affected child or youth. Using case scenarios, you’ll explore practical strategies and interventions for supporting these children and youth at home, in school, and in the community.
Self enrollment
Target audience: caseworkers and supervisors
This web-based training highlights key elements of four key federal laws: the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), the Multiethnic Placement Act (MEPA), and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
Self enrollment
BEFORE ENROLLING, click HERE to see if there are open seats in an upcoming session!
Are you looking to deepen your knowledge and understanding of issues related to substance use? Join this interactive learning opportunity to connect with experts in the field and your peers for a deep dive into substance use and child welfare practice.
In this virtual series of six 60-minute case-based learning experiences, you’ll explore the following:
- Indications of substance use and how to identify substances, paraphernalia, and a person under the influence
- What drug tests really reveal—and the complications associated with interpreting test results
- Treatment evaluations and the importance of supporting families in accessing the right level of treatment at the right time
- Facts and myths about medication-assisted treatment
- Approaches for supporting families in recovery and working to prevent relapse
- Various decision points in the life of a child welfare case and how to assess and ensure for parental capacity at each point
Not only will you hear from experts, but you’ll also discuss challenging cases and build solutions with your peers, creating a community of practice to share experiences and continue learning into the future!
The Web-based training The Substance Use Puzzle: Putting Together the Pieces has foundational information related to this ECHO series. We encourage you to complete the WBT prior to the first session so that you can make the most of your virtual sessions.
- Editing Trainer: Missy Berglund
- Editing Trainer: Jason Read
Self enrollment
Target Audience: caseworkers
This brief Web-based training provides an overview of individualized safety planning with families. You will finish the training with an understanding of the basic principles of safety planning, how to involve a family in the creation of the safety plan, and when and where to document the safety plan in Trails. If you are completing this training as part of the PIP requirements, follow-up activities to this training include a facilitated discussion within teams regarding safety planning and a tool for supervisors and caseworkers to use during supervision to ensure safety plans are supporting children and families effectively.
Self enrollment
Target Audience: child welfare professionals and resource parents
Informed supervision is the daily supervision of a juvenile who has committed a sexual offense. This short web-based training introduces the role of an informed supervisor, standards for informed supervision, and best practices. In this course you will learn the following:
- Basic terminology regarding sexual offenses
- Goals and phases of treatment for youth who have committed sexual offenses
- How multidisciplinary teams work with the informed supervisor and the youth
- Safety planning around high-risk behaviors and protective factors
Although this course does not certify you to be an informed supervisor, you will learn some basics on how to keep the youth and community safe, ways to hold the youth accountable, and ways to maximize the health of the youth and minimize deviant behaviors.
Target Audience: all child welfare staff
Becoming an adult can be challenging, especially for young people who have experienced foster care. Colorado’s child welfare system is familiar with serving older youth, but the Foster Youth in Transition Program is a new program. Legislative changes in 2021 recognized that foster youth need more during this transition, and the program was created in response to enhance the support these youth receive and the way we partner with them. In this Web-based training, you’ll be introduced to the Foster Youth in Transition Program. This module is a guide to eligibility, entry into the program, and the court process. You’ll explore casework tools such as the Voluntary Services Agreement, Roadmap to Success, Emancipation Transition Plans, and Supervised Independent Living Placement, which support youth in developing skills for adulthood. You will also understand the purpose of and how to prepare for a Transition Hearing and an Emancipation Discharge Hearing. You’ll leave this course with the confidence and know-how to partner with youth and set them up for a future of success.
Target audience: caseworkers; supervisors; child welfare professionals; foster, kin, and adoptive parents; community partners
The legalization of marijuana for both medical and recreational use in Colorado has brought with it many questions about its impact on children and families. In this interactive learning experience, learners will explore to what extent marijuana use or cultivation may affect child safety.Self enrollment
Target audience: individuals who are required by law to make reports of child abuse or neglect
This Web-based training is for individuals who are required by law to make reports of child abuse or neglect.Target Audience: resource caregivers
In this training, you'll learn how to become an advocate for children in your home
to ensure they receive the services and supports that they need.
Emphasis is placed on being a lifelong learner, recognizing the
importance of developing a support network (school, community supports,
friends, medical), and learning about the types of services and supports
that the child and/or the family that is fostering or adopting might
find beneficial.
Target Audience: resource caregivers
In this training, caregivers who are fostering and adopting learn concepts and definitions related to enhancing the resilience of children who have experienced trauma, separation, or loss. Protective factors are described along with strategies on how to build upon these factors to support children develop their identity, self-esteem, and skills toward self-advocacy.
Target
Audience: resource caregivers
This training discusses the importance of self-care for caregivers who are fostering or adopting as well as practical ideas on how to incorporate it into their daily routines. It will help caregivers learn why maintaining their own mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being is so important when caring for children who have experienced trauma, separation, or loss.
Self enrollment
Target
Audience: resource caregivers
This training provides an overview of some of the common thoughts and feelings experienced by children and adolescents who have been adopted, such as believing that they were responsible for removal from their birth family, internalizing the message that they should be grateful or that they should feel lucky to have been adopted, feeling guilty regarding mixed loyalty issues, and experiencing a sense of loss. The training provides strategies that caregivers can use to support their children and to help them address and make sense of the thoughts and feelings they may be experiencing.
Self enrollment
Target
Audience: resource caregivers
This training will help caregivers who are fostering or adopting understand some of the educational challenges children who have experienced trauma, separation, or loss may encounter. This training highlights some of the services and supports that can be put in place for children, including Individualized Education Plans (IEP) and 504 plans, as well as strategies that can be used to partner and advocate with the school system to ensure their educational needs are being sufficiently addressed.
Self enrollment
Target
Audience: resource caregivers
In this training, you'll learn the impact fostering or adopting can have on family dynamics, including the impact on marital relationships, biological children, foster or adoptive children already living in the home, and extended family members. This training helps caregivers who are fostering or adopting gain insight and increased understanding of how their family may need to adjust, as well as strategies that they can use to support healthy family dynamics.
Self enrollment
Target
Audience: resource caregivers
This training will help adoptive parents understand the purpose of pre-placement referral medical review consultations. It highlights some of the common medical conditions impacting children/youth who have experienced institutionalization, including malnutrition, exposure to environmental toxins, and exposure to maternal substance usage. The required US visa medical clinic assessment is reviewed as well as the importance of early and regular pediatric appointments with an adoption-competent medical professional.
Target
Audience: resource caregivers
This training will help adoptive parents understand the importance of having ongoing conversations with their children about their birth and adoption story. The modules show how empowering children/youth with the missing pieces of their story can help them build trust in family relationships, help with healthy identity formation, and can lead to stronger connections with birth family members. You'll learn how to have ongoing conversations with your children/youth about their life story that are done in an inclusive, open fashion.
Target
Audience: resource caregivers
In this training, caregivers get an overview of the impact that transitions, both planned and unplanned, have on children/youth who have experienced trauma, loss, or separation. It discusses strategies caregivers can use to make these transitions less traumatic and disruptive. Strategies for making children feel welcomed and connected before, during, and after transitions occur are shared.
Target
Audience: resource caregivers
In this training, you will receive an overview of the common skills that youth will need to effectively navigate as an adult and provide strategies on how families who are fostering or adopting can prepare youth to successfully transition into adulthood. The training highlights the variance that can exist between chronological and developmental age for children/youth who have experienced trauma, separation, and loss and how this can impact the transition to adulthood. Some of the challenges that youth may face during this transition are highlighted.
Target
Audience: resource caregivers
In this training you'll learn the importance of children/youth maintaining visits with their family and how to check in and address concerns, questions, and emotions children/youth may encounter before and after the visits. You'll learn strategies for helping children name and validate the range of feelings they may experience before, during, and after a visit and understand the role that parents who are fostering or adopting play in these visits.
Target
Audience: resource caregivers
This training helps caregivers understand some of the difficulties that children/youth who have experienced trauma, separation, or loss can have in regulating themselves. This training reviews the different phases of crisis and provides caregivers who are fostering or adopting with strategies to proactively prevent a crisis from occurring. You'll learn ways to keep children/youth safe when they are having a crisis and strategies that can help to de-escalate the situation.
Target
Audience: resource caregivers
In this training, learners explore how early childhood trauma and neglect may impact a child’s/youth's ability to interact successfully with their outside world—sensory integration. This training provides those who are fostering or adopting with the ability to identify behaviors related to sensory integration difficulties and strategies to aid a child/youth with sensory integration challenges in the home, school, and community.
Target
Audience: resource caregivers
This training provides an overview of healthy sexual development and how to talk to children/youth about healthy sexual development and relationships. The training addresses some of the needs that children/youth who have experienced trauma, loss, or separation may have in developing a positive, healthy identity relative to their sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression (SOGIE), and sexuality. The training also highlights strategies that caregivers who are fostering or adopting can use in supporting the child’s/youth's sexual development.
Self enrollment
Target
Audience: resource caregivers
This training provides an overview of some of the emotional needs of children/youth who have been sexually abused. The training highlights some of the unique challenges in parenting children/youth who have experienced this type of abuse and the safety measures to put in place to ensure all children/youth in the home are safe. The training also provides information on seeking effective therapy for children/youth who have been sexually abused to minimize risk of revictimization, minimize risk of children/youth reenacting abuse on other children/youth, and maximize healthy sexual development.
Self enrollment
Target Audience: child welfare professionals
Module 1 provides an overview of the National Adoption Competency Mental Health Training for Child Welfare Professionals and makes the case for the need for adoption competency. Lessons in this module orient participants to the training and training objectives, highlight the guiding principles that provide the foundation for work with children and families from an adoption or guardianship lens, provide context for the changes in adoption and guardianship options and practice today, and emphasize the urgent need for permanency for children and youth and the negative consequences of impermanence.
Self enrollment
Target audience: supervisors
Module 1 for supervisors provides an overview of the National Adoption Competency Mental Health Training for Child Welfare Professionals and makes the case for the need for adoption competency. Lessons in this module orient participants to the training and training objectives, highlight the guiding principles that provide the foundation for work with children and families from an adoption or guardianship lens, provide context for the changes in adoption and guardianship options and practice today, and emphasize the urgent need for permanency for children and youth and the negative consequences of impermanence.
Self enrollment
Target Audience: hotline workers, hotline supervisors, child welfare caseworkers and supervisors, medical providers, treatment providers, mental health providers
The birth of a new baby is a joyous occasion—but it is also a critical time for infants who are affected by prenatal substance exposure and for their caregivers. Plans of Safe Care is an interactive learning experience for hospital mandatory reporters and screeners who are vital to the creation of plans of safe care with these families.
Self enrollment
Target audience: caseworkers, case aides, supervisors
This self-guided, interactive course will enhance your understanding of psychological assessments as they are used within child welfare.Target Audience: caseworkers, supervisors, case aides, CDHS staff, multidisciplinary professionals
Human trafficking is on the rise in the United States, and you—the child welfare workforce—are uniquely positioned to recognize and respond to children and youth who might be experiencing trafficking. This self-guided Web-based training will increase your awareness of indicators of labor and sex trafficking, highlight risk factors that statistically make a child or youth more vulnerable to traffickers, support you in screening for trafficking, and empower you to respond with sensitivity to disclosures.
Self enrollment
Target Audience: New caseworkers
Welcome to the New Caseworker Academy!
Start here to register for a cohort of the Fundamentals of Colorado Child Welfare Casework Practice.
- Welcome to Colorado Child Welfare WBT
- Hotline and RED Team: Where Assessment With Families Begins
- Safety Through Engagement
- Working Toward Closure: Decision Making and Documentation
- Legal Preparation for Caseworkers
- The Fundamentals Practice Simulation
- Choose Your Own Trail: Documentation and Practice
Category: New Caseworker Academy 2022-2023
Self enrollment
Target Audience: caseworkers, supervisors
What happens in a family when domestic violence, substance abuse, and mental health issues meet? These intersecting issues produce some of most challenging cases that we work with in child welfare. In this interactive learning experience, you’ll apply the Safe & Together model—an internationally recognized approach to responding to domestic violence when children are involved—to these complex situations.
Self enrollment
Target audience: caseworkers and supervisors
In this Web-based training, you’ll get an introduction to the internationally recognized Safe and Together™ Model. The model is a set of concepts, tools, and practices to improve how agencies, communities, and individuals respond to domestic violence when children are involved.
Self enrollment
Target audience: caseworkers and supervisors
Prerequisite: Safe and Together: Introduction to the Model
This course dives deeper into the internationally recognized Safe and Together™ Model. The model is a set of concepts, tools, and practices to improve how agencies, communities, and individuals respond to domestic violence when children are involved.
Self enrollment
Target Audience: caseworkers, supervisors
Partnering with adult survivors is a critical aspect of domestic violence–informed practice. It’s the key to developing a child-centered approach to families in which domestic violence occurs. In this Web-based training, you’ll learn six steps to facilitate effective partnering with survivors. Based on the internationally recognized Safe & Together model, these steps will help you enhance safety, promote healing, and support family functioning. You’ll become a stronger ally for adult survivors and a more effective advocate for the well-being of children and youth.
Target audience: caseworkers and supervisors
This course dives deeper into the internationally recognized Safe & Together™ Model. The model is a set of concepts, tools, and practices to improve how agencies, communities, and individuals respond to domestic violence when children are involved.
This interactive learning experience introduces a father-inclusive approach to working with children and families.Target audience: caseworkers, supervisors, and foster, kin, and adoptive parents
In this interactive Web-based training, you will learn about creating safe sleeping environments for infants. You’ll explore customs and myths related to infant sleep along with recommended approaches and interventions associated with reductions in the risk of sleep-related infant deathsSelf enrollment
Target audience: foster, kinship, and adoptive parents; caseworkers; supervisors; managers and directors; CDHS staff
On a daily basis, parents and caregivers are faced with decisions regarding their children’s safety, permanency, and well-being. These decisions require the use of judgment. The task is complicated for caregivers of children and youth in foster care given the number of laws, policies, guidelines, and rules that restrict activities and require potentially time-consuming approval processes.Category: New Foster Parent Academy 2022-2023
Target audience: caseworkers, supervisors, child welfare professionals
Issues of substance use and abuse within families can be a complex puzzle. Its various pieces—a family’s struggles, needs, strengths, and supports—cohere to form a unique picture of the impact of substance use on parental functioning and parenting capacity. Through this interactive Web-based training, learners will better understand all of the pieces of this puzzle and how they fit together.Self enrollment
Target Audience: caseworkers, supervisors, managers
This video presentation is designed to help caseworkers learn about the Toxicology Resource Guide. The Toxicology Resource Guide is an online resource developed to support Colorado child welfare professionals in understanding substances, possible effects, and the utility and application of toxicology testing to enhance practice.
Self enrollment
Target Audience: caseworkers, supervisors, and foster, kinship, and adoptive caregivers
Opioid use disorder (OUD) is at a crisis level in Colorado. Caregivers facing OUD may have diminished protective capacities that lead to child safety concerns, and their families are frequently at increased risk for harm to occur due to potentially compromised protective factors. In this interactive Web-based training, you’ll explore how to better serve families experiencing OUD with empathy and compassion as they navigate this devastating brain disease that impacts behavior and decision making. You’ll build concrete skills for avoiding stigma-inducing language while still identifying behaviorally specific child safety concerns associated with OUD. Through this learning experience, you’ll better understand how positively influencing a caregiver’s ongoing participation in treatment can significantly impact their ability to create lasting safety for children.