Advanced Group Dynamics

I am assuming these are the questions from Chapter 5 (please answer any 4 of the questions posed in the Exercise section)

1. What do you most want to occur in your group? State your purposes simply and concretely.

2. What is the main emphasis of your group?

3. What kind of screening methods would you use in forming your group?

4. What characteristics would people need to have to be included? What is the rationale?

5. What importance would you place on the preparation and orientation of the members of the group? What would you most want to convey in this orientation process?

6. What procedures and techniques would you use in your group? Are your procedures practical? Are they related to the goals and the population of the group?

7. What evaluation methods might you use to determine the effectiveness of your approaches? Are your evaluation procedures appropriate to the purposes of your group?

OTHER STUDENT’S DISCUSSION POSTED

Pamela posted

For this hypothetical group I am using the scenario of conducting a counseling group for elementary school students from divorced families during the school day.

What I would most want to occur within this group is for students to be able to work through the feelings they are experiencing while going through their parent’s divorce, for students to be able to support each other and make friendships, and for students to learn positive coping skills for coping with the negative feelings they may be experiencing.
The main emphasis of this group is to help student’s whose parents are going through a divorce to learn to cope with this change in their lives, to have a safe place to share their feelings, to teach them healthy coping skills, and have support from other group members.
The screening methods I would use to form this group would be to have students fill out questionnaires about questions that apply to requirements for being in the group and also ask teacher’s to answer questions about students (Corey et al., 2018). I would use both of these forms of feedback together and then obtain parental consent for students being in the group. I would also interview students one on one and explain the group process to them and see if they seem like they would be a good fit and if they are interested in joining.
The characteristics that people would need to have to be included would be to be an elementary school student from a divorced family who is interested in joining a group with other students from the same situation in order to have support and learn to positively work through the feelings they are experiencing. They must be committed to regularly attending and completing the group, and interested in learning new skills and techniques that may help them and wanting to implement these skills in daily life.

Source

Corey, C., Corey, G., & Corey, M. (2018). Groups: process and practice. 10th Ed. Cengage.

Linda’s posted

What was it like for you to be in this group? Being around my husband and the AA group members, I felt out of place, but I learned a lot being in the therapy group, how some of them got addicted to drugs and alcohol. Some said because they were around alcohol and drugs thought it was the norm. Some said drinking helped them coop with the outside world. With my son, he says smoking marijuana keeps him calm. My Husband says drinking is a stress reliever for him.

What would each of you be willing to do outside of the group this weekend to practice some of these new skills you are acquiring? I would be willing to go to the Freedom House and sit in on a group session and observe the clients and see if what I have learned compare to what they are doing now.

Before we close tonight, I’d like to share with you some of my reactions and observations of this session. Some of the reactions I got out of this session was witnessing the group members get up in each other’s faces to express their struggles of how they found themselves addicted to drugs and alcohol. There was this 77-year-old man that was up in my husband’s face saying how he found himself in a crack house waiting for them to pass him the pipe. He said he could not believe he was there. This was after he got into the group.

What affected you the most, and what did you learn? The effect this group had on me was that everybody does not come out of the group with all their questions answered, and choose to not come back to the group. I noticed that a lot of the people in the group I was in with my husband wasn’t really getting any help from the person in leadership, but from each other. I didn’t understand his purpose of being there (L Watson, personal communication, September 5, 2023).

Answer preview for Advanced Group Dynamics

APA

300 Words