Noelle Lefforge, PhD, ABPP
With the Education and Training Guidelines for Group Psychology and Group Psychotherapy on the horizon for publication in Training and Education in Professional Psychology (Brown & Lefforge, in press), it is only fitting that I would find myself back in the classroom teaching group psychotherapy after a hiatus of several years. I had the opportunity to teach the group psychotherapy course for our Clinical Psychology PsyD program over the summer and now I am teaching it for our International Disaster MA program. It’s truly a gift (and a challenge!) to be able to integrate the academic concepts of education and training into action with the next generation of group psychotherapists. As any professor will tell you, it’s harder and harder to hold the attention and interest of students these days, especially after years of Zoom and general destabilization. It is common for us group-oriented psychologists to be islands in our institutions, which is difficult when we are…well, group-oriented. For this last column as President-Elect, I’d like to try to build some community and share what have come to be some of my favorite activities for teaching group psychotherapy.
Activities for Engaging Students in Group Psychology Courses:
- I spend a lot of time on teaching students about doing good pre-group orientations to increase patient engagement and retention. I spend a substantial time discussing how to address common pre-group hesitations. I provide a demonstration and then they role-play with one another. For the capstone activity for this skill, I have them generate a handout to summarize and disseminate what they learn. The handout is either intended for use by other clinicians to orient them to key concepts before a pre-group orientation or intended for use by clients and provided during the pre-group orientation. The more user-friendly, the better!
- One of the major graded components of my course is a group presentation in which they present an effectiveness/efficacy study on a particular group therapy and demonstrate a sample of the therapy for the class. This has been a great way to highlight the scientific underpinnings of group while exposing the class to an array of group therapies.
- When teaching therapeutic factors of group, I break them up into small groups and assign a therapeutic factor to each group. For each factor, the group generates: 1) what group leaders do/not do to facilitate the factor, 2) what group leaders do/not do to hinder the factor, and 3) what cultural considerations should be kept in mind when working with the factor, particularly in consideration of including minoritized identities in the group process.
- We often watch video of group (e.g., the YouTube series Group that Elliot Ziesel has released) and I have them practice working at all levels of group process. What do they think is happening intra-psychically for the individual members; what’s happening interpersonally among the dyads and/or between individual members and the leader; what’s happening with the group as a whole?
- Perhaps my favorite activity is in-vivo teaching of the “good goodbye”. I borrow from Leann Diederich’s column on Semi-structured termination exercises. They pick the one they want to try, and we adapt it to the classroom. It provides a great opportunity to emphasize the importance and complexity of endings.
I hope that reading about a just few of my favorite classroom activities got you thinking about your own! I’d love to see some posted on our Division listserv: DIV49@LISTS.APA.ORG There will be a lot more to come this year in terms of solidifying group as specialty (see the Group Specialty Council update in this issue) while promoting that health service psychology training programs at all levels provide at least a basic level of training in this much needed modality.