Group Work in Education and Training

Michael Reynolds, Reynolds, Michael

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138421455
• eBook ISBN: 9781135351892
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Supplies the educational or vocational teacher with advice on the effective and successful running of a training group. The author uses a number of anecdotes from his own experience as a trainer to illustrate group work sessions and structured group activities of various kinds.

1

Why Groups?

Introduction

Groups of some kind have always been used for learning but there has been a considerable growth in interest in different forms of groupwork in education and training since the early 1960s. It is worth sketching out some of the earlier beginnings because it helps in understanding the different types of groupwork used at present and the underlying reasons for using them. Where did the group methods used in contemporary educational practice come from? Why has there been such a preoccupation with groups in both education and work?

The forms of groupwork used have developed from quite different origins, chiefly from group dynamics research, from psychotherapeutic and counselling group practice and, more broadly, from a belief in participative methods in education in support of democratic values.

In this chapter some of these origins are examined to provide a background to the theory and practice of groupwork which follows later. The first two sections are about the development of learning groups and the current preoccupation with group methods in education and at work. Following these sections are brief descriptions of various types of group methods, the ways in which they differ, and a summary of the different reasons for their use in education and training.

The development of experiential learning groups

The most frequently recorded ‘beginning’ was in 1946 with the invention of the ‘T (training) group’ at a conference in Bethel, Maine, USA. Thirty local community leaders (teachers, social workers and business people) met to work in three groups to discuss social problems of concern to them. The aim of the conference was to help these men and women develop the skills they needed to work more effectively in the community. A member of the training staff worked with each group and there was also a researcher present. The researchers, under the leadership of Kurt Lewin of MIT’s Research Centre for Group Dynamics, were collecting observations on the interaction of group members to study the different ways the conference affected how delegates were able to transfer their learning ‘back home’. In the evenings, Lewin would meet with his researchers and the training staff to analyse the data. Lewin apparently thought the participants should not be present at these sessions but some of them invited themselves.

The quality and interest of the discussions, as trainers, delegates and researchers jointly tried to make sense of the data and of the additional observations of the delegates, excited Lewin and his colleagues. As they wrote of it afterwards, they realized that by chance they had hit upon a powerful method of enabling people to develop their understanding of group behaviour and of themselves as group members. The ‘T group’, or ‘Human Relations Laboratory’ was the outcome, a method for learning about group behaviour and of developing group skills through the experience of being in one.

A few years before, though from a very different route, a similar development was taking place in England. Wilfred Bion, a psychiatrist, was conducting therapeutic groups for soldiers returning from the war. He used groups chiefly because most of the soldiers’ difficulties were in relating to others. Bion believed that support and ideas from group members made this potentially a more useful approach than the more conventional one-to-one consultant-client relationship. This work provided the foundation for the later programme of study groups developed by members of the Tavistock Institute to help professionals in many kinds of organization learn about group and organizational processes, an approach which was to be widely used in higher education, though mostly within the social science and management areas. In 1967 the ‘Intergroup’ approach was added, enabling participants to learn about relations between groups and the effects of these relations on internal group dynamics.

Also from therapeutic origins in the mid-1940s, Carl Rogers was running groups for psychologists training as client-centred counsellors for American war veterans. Rogers became interested in the possibility of applying to education the same philosophy of ‘group-centredness’ that had seemed to work so well in the therapeutic setting, not only in the social sciences but in support of learning of any kind and at any level. He wrote up his ideas on student-centred learning in his book Freedom to Learn (1969), inspiring a good many educationalists to try out this approach, although not always as successfully as Rogers had hoped.

The preoccupation with groups in education and at work

These starting points illustrate the sort of thinking and ideals which, in one way or another, have led to the use of groups in education. The role of therapeutic methods in all this may seem odd at first, but it illustrates the connections between learning, change and development, especially in the common interest shown by social scientists, educators and therapists in wanting learning to be grounded in personal and social experience and to be within the responsibility and, to varying degrees, the control of the individual.

Developing group methods for learning also answered the wish of many teachers for education to mirror and reinforce the values of democratic society. For all these reasons, groups came into their own as an educational approach. A group of people could make prior experience available for learning, could generate fresh material through experiential activities and could provide a forum for collective decision making about the content and direction of learning and development.

But that still does not explain why the development happened when it did, nor explain why most interest initially was shown in vocational and professional programmes. After all, games had been used to encourage learning long before they were established as an educational method in the 1960s; role playing was developed as early as the 1920s from Joseph Moreno’s work with psychodrama; and, as Carl Rogers (1969) points out, interested educators have probably always looked for ways of getting their students more involved in their learning. The late Gurth Higgin, co-inventor of the intergroup exercise developed at the Tavistock Institute, believed that it was all part of the socio-economic change which followed World War II. Increased living standards gave people in the middle class in North America and Western Europe a greater interest in reflecting on the human quality of work, social life and relationships in general.

All this was matched by the growing emphasis on work group behaviour, begun in the 1940s and which stemmed from the famous Hawthorne studies in America (Roethlisberger and Dickson, 1939) and, later, from the Tavistock Institute’s Longwall mining studies in England (Trist and Bamforth, 1951). These and similar studies provided the basis for a lasting preoccupation in organizations for developing group and team effectiveness through the application of group methods for education and training. Since those early days some of the pure forms of groupwork have had periods of decline, as Rogers, for one, suspected they might. Nevertheless, the principles which these approaches were based on still flourish in a range of experiential methods.

In the sections which follow, I will briefly describe some of the more familiar examples of group methods, introduce a way of distinguishing between them in practice and summarize the reasons groups are used in education and training.

Types of group methods

• Games and simulations. I have included these together because they overlap so much in practice. In both, the aim is to recreate or represent in a limited time in the classroom particular situations which exist in the world outside. They may have a competitive element and may be based on someone’s model of the way factors interact in everyday settings. Economics or business games are a good example of this kind, often using a computer program which incorporates the model on which the simulation is based. Alternatively, simulations can be free of any underlying model or framework. In Chapter 5, I describe a simulation where the intention is to provide participants with an opportunity to create a temporary organization on whichever model they choose. In either type, the purpose is to learn from the consequences of decisions and choices made within the exercise and to gain understandings which can be useful in the workplace.

An exercise often used in the selection of applicants for secretarial or administrative posts is to have them deal with a pile of memos while answering a number of telephone calls. This is an example of a simulation which can also be used in training. Simulations for training include research skills, interviewing, industrial relations and decision making.

• Role plays involve participants in taking roles and acting them out. The aim is sometimes to gain insight into unfamiliar roles in different situations (for example family, occupations, social groups), by trying to imagine and express the attitudes and feelings the people in them might have. Role play is also used to help people develop the skills and understanding they need in their work (interviews, negotiations, meetings, etc.) or, through role reversal, understand more of the other person’s position in these situations. Participants may be given a detailed brief from which they act out the role, or may be asked to respond to the situation out of their imagination or experience.

• Discussion groups. These are the most familiar of all group activities (Hill, 1977). Yet some ‘discussion groups’ are little more than lectures with the lecturer sitting rather than standing. A discussion group, whether led or leaderless, ought to involve dialogue between group members or they are more an audience than a group.

• Action learning is used in organizations, mostly by managers. They learn by meeting in small groups or ‘sets’ at regular intervals to discuss individual work problems or projects. They are helped by group members and a consultant or ‘set adviser’. The idea behind this method is that, in contrast to curriculum-based approaches, ideas are drawn in because they seem relevant to the problem or project (Pedler, 1983).

• ‘Experiential exercises’ is often used as a generic term for many of the other examples in the list, especially games, simulations and role plays. More precisely, the term describes activities in which learning is by reflecting on observations and experience of a task specially designed for the purpose. The task can be simple in design – as in an exercise to show the effects of different group structures on the quality of interpersonal communication – or more elaborate, as in teams of participants having to build a raft to cross a lake in the course of an outdoor development programme. What they all have in common is that they generate material from which to learn in the ‘here and now’.

Experiential exercises, also called ‘structured exercises’ or ‘structured experiences’, can be used to demonstrate particular ideas or theories, or to generate ideas from the students or trainees taking part. They are usually thought of as being quite prescriptive in focus, time, task and outcome. I will return to this assumption in Chapter 4.

• T groups and study groups. I put these together because they are both ways of learning about groups by being in one. T groups (sensitivity training) which commonly last for a week, are ways of learning about group dynamics and about oneself as a group member. Study groups have a similar focus and form part of ‘Tavistock Conferences’, together with intergroup and large group sessions. These ‘conferences’, which could last for a week or two, are based on the psychodynamic theories of people like Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion. T groups on the other hand tend to have a more varied theoretical base, depending on who is working with them. As with some of the other methods, distinctions are easier to make on paper than sometimes make sense in practice.

As the ideas used in both these approaches are helpful in making sense of what happens in any form of learning group, they will appear in later chapters and in the Bibliography at the end of the book.

Distinguishing between methods in use

It is tempting to draw up a more elaborate classification of the different types of groupwork in some system based on similarity or difference. Tempting, in the interest of order, but misleading. As I hope to make clear in later chapters, what makes this such a rich area for educators, students and scholars, is the variety of ways even the same basic method can be used in practice. So for example, in the preceding list you might say that study groups and T groups are examples of ‘unstructured’ groups and this would have some validity. The problem is that other methods such as role play or discussion groups may be equally unstructured depending on who is using them, and some T group facilitators may use quite structured role plays during the course of an otherwise less structured event. In any case, terms like ‘structure’ and ‘direction’ tend to be used as if their operational definition meant the same to everyone, which often is not the case.

Illustration:

Interpreting ‘structure’ in group activities

A lecturer has put on a two-day workshop on research methods for a group of student teachers. It is intended as an introduction to the research projects the students are to ca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. Why Groups?
• 2. Thinking about Design
• 3. Making Sense of Groups
• Introduction to Chapters 4, 5 and 6
• 4. Boundaries, Predictability and Control
• 5. Learning from the Milieu
• 6. Groups as Open Systems
• 7. Groups in Education and Development
• 8. Postscript
• Bibliography
• Index