Building Bridges
Using Grief Education to Enhance School Collaborations
About this training
Grief doesn't stay contained to the therapy room — it shows up in the classroom, the front office, and the hallway conversations between a struggling student and the adults trying to help them. For clinicians working alongside schools, understanding grief isn't optional; it's foundational to effective collaboration.
Building Bridges is an interactive training designed for licensed mental health professionals who work with, consult for, or partner alongside school systems. Participants will explore the stages of grief through the lens of pandemic-era and ongoing collective loss, examine the often-overlooked overlap between grief, burnout, and vicarious trauma, and walk away with concrete strategies for recognizing prolonged grief before it escalates into more serious mental health concerns.
This training blends short lecture segments with live polling, guided self-reflection, and case-based discussion — built to work equally well in a conference room or on a video call.
What participants will get out of this training
- A clear, usable framework for understanding how the classic stages of grief show up differently in a pandemic and post-pandemic context
- Practical language and tools for talking with school staff, parents, and students about grief without minimizing it or over-pathologizing it
- A working understanding of how grief, burnout, and vicarious trauma feed into one another — and how to interrupt that cycle
- Skills to recognize when grief has moved beyond a normal course and may be prolonged grief requiring further clinical attention
- Self-care strategies grounded in grief knowledge, not generic wellness advice — designed for helping professionals in high-loss environments
- Interactive tools and reflection exercises they can adapt and bring directly into their own school consultation work
Learning objectives
By the end of this training, participants will be able to:
- 1.Identify the stages of grief and explain their unique presentation in the context of pandemic-era and ongoing collective loss.
- 2.Differentiate between grief, burnout, and vicarious trauma, and describe how the three interact in the experience of helping professionals.
- 3.Apply grief-informed self-care strategies that address the specific risks of working in high-loss, high-stress environments such as schools.
- 4.Distinguish the symptomology of prolonged grief from a typical grief course, and identify appropriate next steps when prolonged grief is suspected.
- 5.Demonstrate practical strategies for applying grief education in school-based consultation and collaboration to support students, staff, and families.