Group Leadership Assessment Week #1

Completing the Group Leadership Assessment reminded me a bit of filling out my self-assessments for field last year. I had to reflect on many of the skills mentioned in the group leadership assessment, such as: active listening; reflecting, clarifying, and summarizing; evaluating; empathizing; and interpreting. The field assessment focused on general relational skills, not group work. Fortunately I was able to work on a lot of these skills with groups during my field placement.


I'm good at reflecting, clarifying, summarizing, active listening - anything that you get a lot of practice with in individual work. I spent most of my time at field doing individual work, and I had a lot of practice in the relational and listening skills. Sometimes I worry that I'm not a great listener in daily life, because I can be kind of absent minded and daydreamy, but when I can focus on a client without too many distractions, it's not a problem. Active listening in groups is more difficult, because I want to focus exclusively on the person who is speaking, but I also have to be aware of the behavior of the other people present. This is why it can be good to have a cofacilitator; I can worry less about missing something.


Facilitating a group is probably the skill I'm least comfortable with. Even though I had more practice than most of my classmates during field, I didn't get a lot of group-specific guidance from my supervisor, and we didn't cover it very much during class last year. I worked on facilitation mostly through trial and error and practice, and discussion with my cofacilitators. Additionally, most of the groups I facilitated were psychoeducational, and I was encouraged to focus on that, not really on group member interactions, and the use of the group dynamic to facilitate change. That is something I'd like more practice with in final field, potentially.

I'm good at looking for patterns in abstract stuff, so I like linking in groups - taking something one person said and drawing connections to what others have said. I had a lot of practice blocking in my groups, because my clients were high schoolers and they like to talk over each other and derail the conversation. I'm less comfortable with confronting because I worry about pushing people before they are ready and putting them on the defensive.