Week 02 - Theoretical and Philosophical Foundations to Groups part I

SOWK 487 Spring 2021 Planning: Class 02

Time: Wednesday’s from 5:30-8:15
Date: 01/20/21 Content: Theoretical and Philosophical Foundations to Groups part I Reading Assignment: Garvin et al. (2017) Chapters 1-3 Due Dates:

• A-01: Synchronous Class Engagement Attend class
• A-02: Asynchronous Class Engagement Description of characteristic of a population due Friday 01/22/21 at 11:55 PM and two replies due Sunday 01/24/21 at 11:55 PM via My Heritage Class Forums
• Read Garvin et al. (2017) Chapters 1-3

Attendence and if you could describe your day today as an animal

Often when starting groups, if you just ask how people are doing, they will not answer or it will be “ok” if pressed. In class, I tend to ask you to give a simple rating scale (thumbs up to thumbs down). Another way to make it concrete and solit more convesation is to make it abstract.

[Whole Class Activity] As I go through and do attendance, please share how you would describe your day if it was an animal. You can also pass if you need to

• Spend time talking about other options for this type of simple activity.

Fight Club Movie Introduction

What are groups used for in social work practice? We are going to watch a clip from a movie, Fight Club. There is some strong language and themes. We are only going to watch about 5 - 10 minutes. You can feel free to step out if you might be easily offended. [Activity] Watch scene from Fight Club (5:41-12:26) Discuss some scenes from support groups in movies

https://tubitv.com/movies/565391/fight-club

Agenda

• Overview of working with groups
• Group dynamics and roles
• Tools and strategies in groups

Working with Groups

Group work can be some of the most challenging and rewarding work that we can do as social workers. But what does it mean to do work with groups?

• Definition
  • A group is a collection of people with shared interests who come together to pursue a goal.
  • Can be individual, group, organization, and/or community goals.
• Examples
  • Groups can help a lot of different people with different needs such as people with CD issues, weight loss groups, family support groups, and advocacy groups.
  • Social workers use groups to gather information about clients and to help plan interventions through staffing clients, or case conferences.

Benefits of Groups

Nothing truly valuable can be achieved except by the unselfish cooperation of many individuals. — Albert Einstein We were all born into a group (family) and eventually become members of multiple groups such as work, church, and other venues. Humans are social animals and need to belong, to be accepted by others.

• Mutual Assistance the opportunity a group offers to be able to give and to receive help from others. The help given could include companionship, material assistance, emotional, or spiritual support, access to resources, and others.
• Connecting with others helps reduce individual isolation and allows sharing of thoughts feelings, and beliefs. Groups give us the chance to put our problems into perspective and identify with others who share our feelings, and interests.
• Testing new behaviors, groups allow us to test out new behaviors in a safer environment than might ordinarily be available.
• Goal achievement due to the fact that a group of individuals generate ideas, solutions, and responses in greater numbers than a single person which increases the likelihood that a problem can be solved.
• Decision making in a group is the capacity to bring the wisdom of many to the decision making process. Buy in by members is especially important when they will be expected to carry out decisions made in the group.

Types of Groups

There are two main types of groups, task groups, and treatment groups. [Discussion] What types of groups have you been involved with or seen [Discussion] What is a local example of each group?

Treatment Groups

The type most of us think about is treatment groups. These are any groups where the primary focus is on member’s emotional and social needs.

• Growth Group: Designed to encourage and support the growth of the individual group member.
  • They focus on helping individuals achieve their potential and building their strengths. i.e. women in a DV shelter.
• Therapy Groups: Help clients who have an identified goal of changing some aspects of their behavior or thinking. The objective is recovering from problematic life experiences. i.e.; victims of abuse.
• Educational Groups: The purpose is to educate or teach the group members about some issue or topic. i.e.; parenting group
• Socialization Group: Assist participants in acquiring skills necessary to become socialized into the community. The presumption is that the group members have a deficit of some sort of social skills. i.e.; teenagers with delinquent behavior.
• Support Groups: People sharing certain characteristics who get together to provide one another with emotional sustenance, encourage new coping mechanisms, and allow a strengths-based sharing of issues, concerns, and problems.

Task Groups

The second type of group is a task group, which is are where members focus primarily on a specific objective or task.

Task groups could be characterized in three ways based on who it is intending to meet the needs of:

• Needs of the client
• Needs of the organization
• Needs of the community

Task Groups Continued

These groups often take some of these general forms.

• Board of Directors: An administrative group charged with responsibility for setting the policy governing agency programs.
  • The board is a legal entity established by the bylaws, organizational charter, or articles of incorporation.
• Task Forces: A group established for a special purpose and usually disband after completion of their task.
• Committees and commissions: Committees are groups responsible for dealing with specific tasks or matters.
  • Members can be appointed or elected depending on the type of committee.
  • Two types of committees
    1. Standing committee that exists on a continuous basis
    2. Ad hoc committee is like a task force that is set up for one purpose and expected to cease operation after completion of the task.
• Legislative Bodies: include city councils, county boards of supervisors, state legislatures, and U.S Congress.
• Staff Meetings: Agency staff members who assemble periodically for some identified purpose.
• Multidisciplinary Teams: Groups of professionals from various disciplines that meet to discuss specific clients with whom team members are working.
• Case Conferences Staffing: Agency or organizational meetings in which all professionals involved in a particular case discuss such things as the clients identified problems, goals, and intervention plans.
• Social Action: Individuals that take social action to bring about solutions to social and economic problems.

Professional Roles in Groups

There are a number of roles that social workers take while facilitating groups.

• Brokers: Help group members obtain needed resources by connecting them with the community agencies. This process requires that the worker be familiar with community resources, have general knowledge about eligibility requirements, and be sensitive to the client’s needs.
• Mediators: Help group members resolve conflicts. In this role, the worker must believe that different sides to a disagreement are legitimate and help each side recognize that the other side’s views are valid. It helps parties identify their points of disagreement and of mutual interest.
• Educator: Provides group participation with new information, structures the presentation of the information, and uses modeling to help members learn new skills.
• Facilitator: Guides, eases, or expedites the way for others. This role is important whether working with individuals or with groups.
• Multiple Roles: Social workers will have to play various roles depending on the group’s needs and the problems confronted.

Conceptual Frameworks: Group Functions and Roles

During every group, there are two functions that have to be fulfilled consistently. These are task functions and maintenance functions. As a group leader, you will have to go back and forth between the two throughout the group process to have the group be successful.

• Task functions
  • Help to keep a group on task and work toward agreed-upon ends.
  • People playing task roles are interested in the group completing their agreed-upon tasks and try to help the process.
  • A group needs task function to work towards goal completion.
• Maintenance functions
  • Ensure that the needs of group members receive attention.
  • Group maintenance roles are concerned with improving, enhancing, or increasing group functioning.
  • Maintenance to encourage members to continue to attend.
• Potentially positive roles
  • As with anything in social work, there is a wide range of roles that might be necessary for any group.
  • Every role is not necessary every time, and even roles that can be positive can sometimes not be what is needed at a specific time.
  • Some potentially positive roles are as follows:
  • information seeker, opinion seeker, elaborator, instructor, evaluator, energizer, recorder, procedural technician, harmonizer, compromiser, encourager, follower, tension reliever, and listener.

Negative and Nonfunctional Roles

Group members also frequently take on roles…

Some roles can potentially be negative, such as aggressor, blocker, recognition seeker, dominator, help seeker, confessor. Some roles played by members meet only their own needs and do not help further the progress of the group.

• Aggressive members, recognition seekers, dominators, confessor, scapegoat, defensive members, deviant members, quiet members, and internal leader.

• Groups need guidance and help from the leader to recognize and confront nonfunctional roles.

Simple Group Example

When a group has a general, expected format (whether you are looking at a treatment group or a task group), it helps all of the members have an idea of what to expect and for it to be easier to create norms.

When I was at the Crisis Residential Center in Spokane, I frequently led groups for the youth staying there. I had a general format that I would always follow:

• Review the rules
• Check-in question
• Fun engaging activity
• Work on a specific topic or skill

[Activity] Have all students move desks into a circle. Go through the first three steps of the group. We are going to go through a part of a group exercise to see what it can look like. We will role-play as if this is a therapeutic group working on communication skills.

Determine Group Rules

If any of you have every part, sometimes it can be a little bit difficult… one way that we can make it a little bit easier is to set up some ground rules for while we are at the group. Does anybody have any suggestions about possible rules for our group sessions?

• Elicit ideas
• Write on the board
• Review them
• Thank the group

Check-in Question

If you could describe your day today as an animal, any animal… what would it be today and why?

• Ask check-in question (highs and lows today)
• Follow up on some of the group members and why they picked what they picked

Activity

Today, we are going to do a pretty fun activity. It is kind of like telephone, but… completely different…

Picture is worth a 1,000 words

• Description: Variation of telephone. Each group member is given a piece of paper. They are instructed to write a short phrase on their paper. The paper is passed to the next person. That person is instructed to draw a picture of the phrase. Before they pass their picture to the next person they fold and cover the written statement directly above. This process is repeated until papers get back to the original writer.
• Purpose: The phrase to drawing changes what the writer intended. This often happens when we communicate.

Skill

Today we are going to be talking about communication. What did we see when we did the activity? How could that relate to how we communicate?

Debrief

What did you see and not see?

• What did you see in my facilitation of the group
• What worked, what didn’t
• Is this something you could imagine doing in a group?

Adapted Online Circle

I really like the restorive justice model and the concept of circles. One component of these circles is that have set up and agreed upon norms is highly important. One exmaple of these norms comes from Clifford (n.d.) and the handbook developed for San Francisco Unified School District.

Group Norms:

1. Respect the talking piece: everyone listens, everyone has a turn
2. Speak from the heart: your truth, your perspectives, your experiences
3. Listen from the heart: Let go of stories that make it hard to hear each other
4. Trust that you know what to say: no need to rehearse
5. Say just enough: without feeling rushed, be concise and considerate of the time of others

Reference

Clifford, A. (n.d.) Teaching restorative practices with classroom circles. Retrieved from https://www.healthiersf.org/RestorativePractices/Resources/documents/RP%20Curriculum%20and%20Scripts%20and%20PowePoints/Classroom%20Curriculum/Teaching%20Restorative%20Practices%20in%20the%20Classroom%207%20lesson%20Curriculum.pdf#page20

Circle Up - Studying and College Life

Following a Restorative Justice Model

• What have been some difficult aspects of college so far and how have you managed?
• How do you study, and what do you do when you study?
• If you could have given yourself a piece of advice your first year of college, what would it have been?

Assessing Individuals' Patterned Behaviors

When looking at patterns of behavior, two areas that we frequently evaluate are those of content and process.

• Content refers to verbal statements and related topics that members discuss
• Process involves the ways members relate or behave as they interact in the group and discuss content.
• Seeing these processes happen that we can start to see Thematic Behaviors.
  • Patterned cognitions and behavior are inextricably related and reciprocally reinforce each other

Group Dynamics and Composition

All groups have an identifiable culture that is made of the traditions, customs, and values and beliefs shared by group members.

• Norms are unwritten expectations about how individuals will act in certain situations.
• Value differences among group members may contribute to difficulties within the group.
• When a climate of trust exists, members are more likely to accept individual differences and allow fellow members to express their individuality.
• Power issues always exist within groups (i.e. facilitator and member).

Group size and composition of a group changes its dynamics and is frequently is determined by the worker.

• Group size does have an impact on what occurs in the group.
• Age also may play a factor, for example, different levels of development.
• Gender is also an important consideration.
• Homogeneity
  • Selecting individuals who share similar problems but have different personalities, you would want a mix of talkers and listeners.
  • Having diverse group members can bring unique qualities and multiple perspectives on problem-solving processes to the group
• Determining the duration of a group requires that the worker decide how many sessions will be held and how long it will last.

Decision Making Patterns

Groups make decisions in different ways. These include:

• Consensus Decision Making is a time-consuming approach to making decisions. Consensus is a process used by groups to reach a general agreement about what they want and how they will get it. In the end all members accept and support the decision. It requires an atmosphere of openness where all members have the opportunity to be heard.
• Compromise is when the group attempts to reach a solution that most, if not all members, can support.
• Decision making by majority is when a decision-makers support or vote for an idea. Decisions made in this fashion typically are accepted by the winning side and disliked by the losing side.
• Rule by individual is when groups make decisions by default and allow one individual to make choices that affect the entire group.
• Persuasion by a recognized expert is when a group comes to a make a decision and they go by the recommendations from the person in the group they consider the expert.
• Averaging of opinions of individual group members is when groups opinions can really be rated in a numerical rating.
• Persuasion by a minority of the group occurs when one or more members of a group feel strongly about a particular decision and a subgroup has intense attitudes and the rest of the group is less invested in the matter at stake.
• Nominal group technique this helps group members arrive at a consensus with respect to a pending decision. The group members generate ideas and help build commitment to a decision.
• Brain storming is a group technique used to encourage members to produce a variety of ideas about a specific topic.
• Parliamentary procedure was devised over 100 years ago and remains the most common set of guidelines in use today. Examples of I move to purchase three gallons of paint for the child care center. If anyone else supports this motion some would say I second the motion and then it would be open for discussion. Primary motions bring business to the group for consideration.

Critical Thinking and Groups

As heterogeneity (i.e. diversity) goes up, so does critical thinking.

• Groups can be effective decision-makers but they can fail to use critical thinking in their deliberations, sometimes with disastrous results.

• Group think is used to describe situations where groups have the illusion of agreement but have really failed to carefully consider their decisions. This usually happens when decisions are made too quickly or do not want to upset the camaraderie by expressing opposing opinions.

• A critical thinking group will weigh alternatives carefully, consider both advantages and disadvantages of each option, and value the insights of all group members.

Conceptual Frameworks: Group Dynamics

There are a number of ways to think about group dynamics and processes. Some of the seminal work on groups was Tuckman in 63 where we got the group dynamic concepts of forming, storming, norming, and performing stages. Hepworth lays out five stages:

• Stage 1. Preaffiliation: Approach and Avoidance Behavior
  • Group coming together
  • Forming stage
• Stage 2. Power and Control: A Time of Transition
  • Shift concerns to matters related to autonomy, power, and control
  • Storming stage
• Stage 3. Intimacy: Developing a Familial Frame of Reference
  • Develop close, deeper ties…
  • Norming stage
• Stage 4. Differentiation: Developing Group Identity and an Internal Frame of Reference
  • cohesion and harmony
  • Performing stage
• Stage 5. Separation: Breaking Away
  • Adjournment phase

Another model describes the following:

1. Stage I: Reliance on Leader
   • The first stage of development is where the groups show a strong reliance on the leader.
   • Limited participation
   • The expectation for strong direction
2. Stage II: Conflict
   • Stage two members begin to assert themselves more.
   • During this level some level of conflict is common
   • Members start to feel safer and express themselves more.
3. Stage III: Working
   • Stage three is the working phase of the group.
   • This is when members develop affection or liking for it and its members, and are more willing to share their ideas and reactions.
   • The role of the leader is likely to change in this stage from the director to consultant or advisor.
4. Stage IV: Separation
   • The fourth stage is separation where the group has reached its goals.
   • Members begin to separate emotionally from the group, and the group comes to an end.

Personally, I like the simplicity of groups having…

• Beginning
• Middle
• End

Conflict Resolution for Task and Treatment Groups

Conflict is a fact of life. It occurs routinely within relationships and can have positive or negative consequences depending upon how it is handled. There are four steps to the problem-solving framework of managing conflict.

1. Recognition
   • Recognizing conflict is easy when people do not talk to one another are openly hostile, not polite, or outright rude.
   • Ideas by one side may be routinely rejected by the other.
2. Asses
   • Conflict usually requires talking directly to the parties involved.
   • Why is there the conflict and what does it entail.
3. Choose
   • Choosing a strategy and intervening in identifying the source of conflict is an important step in resolving it.
   • Once identified, appropriate strategies can be considered or devised.
4. Resolve
   • One of the ways we can avoid becoming involved in conflicts is to recognize when a win-lose conflict situation is developing. This is when you feel yourself lining up on one side or the other you are probably becoming involved in a win-lose incident.
   • Strategies are often successful in resolving to avoid win-lose situations and seek to find a win-win solution.

Modeling and Coaching

There are two main methods that a group facilitator can evoke change among group member’s behaviors.

• Modeling
  • Social workers may find modeling helpful in a number of situations.
    • Teaching new skills
    • Showing clients alternative methods for resolving problems
    • Helping clients develop a number of responses to problematic situations.
  • Conditions that increase the likelihood that a modeled behavior will be copied.
    1. The observer’s attention level or awareness of the model.
    2. The observer’s retention of the modeled behavior.
    3. the observer’s ability to perform modeled behavior.
    4. The observer’s motivation to perform the behavior.
• Coaching
  • Coaching is a skill that includes giving the client-specific information as well as corrective feedback.
  • This can be done through role-playing.
  • Coaching also involves encouraging members to try new behavior.

Confrontation

• Confrontation within a group tends to be more discomforting than confronting individuals on a one-on-one basis.
• [co-leading] A worker that determines that a member has engaged in behavior warranting confrontation has a responsibility to follow through and confront that individual.
• This situation provides a good opportunity to model appropriate confrontation for other members by:
  • The worker engaging in nonblaming type of confrontation
  • Pointing out the discrepancy
  • How it affects the worker, for example, by using “I” statements.
• Another way is for a worker to involve the whole group and ask the entire group to take responsibility for problem-solving.
• As always, confrontation should be used judiciously and tactfully. One should have both empathy and respect for the sensitivities of the person being confronted.