Facilitating Group Session: Home Management and Establishment
Yesterday I had the opportunity to
facilitate my second group of this semester, except this time, I led the group
by myself. This was quite different from the time before because I had to come
up with the group activities and discussions by myself instead of working with
another classmate. I choose to lead this group on home management and
establishment, which when reflecting back on this group, I'm not really sure
why I chose this particular topic. This is something that I am not as familiar
with and so writing this group protocol was a bit of challenge. I found it
especially challenging to find both creative and engaging activities for the
group too to do together, but finally after a lot of thinking and searching I
came up with two activities. Yesterday I was so very nervous before
facilitating the group. I think I was worried that my group was going to be
boring and that I wouldn't be able to really get the group members to engage
because many of them do not currently own houses. Once I started, however, I
felt the nerves calm down. I introduced the group and the topic and myself to the
group and then had everyone introduce themselves and do a quick warm-up
activity. I forgot to communicate the expectations about the group at the
beginning of the session, and wish on second thought that I had done this
because I think it would have changed the group dynamics to be a bit more to be
more organized. For our activity, we created a visual schedule that each group
member was to personalize to their own particular home tasks. I may not have
explained the activity clearly enough and also may have provided too many
options for the stickers for their calendars because by the end of the activity
when members shared their visual schedules several of members had focused more
on tasks that weren't related to home management at all such as studying for
their upcoming tests, or cleaning out their car. Internally I was a bit
frazzled by this because I didn't quite know in the moment how to ask the group
members to think a bit more about the actual topic or about chores or house
tasks rather than other to do items. However, I did get the group members to
share whether or not visual charts and schedules were helpful to them to keep
up with tasks they needed to complete. I applied this activity to their real
lives by asking them to incorporate at least three tasks that they could put on
their calendar that week to work on or improve.
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