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Bringing Back Small Groups

By Brian Mathieson posted 07-18-2016 22:25

  

At my high school we are trying to bring back small groups.  Once a staple of school counseling programs, small groups have fizzled out at the secondary level.  The reasons small groups have disappeared are numerous.  We are making an effort to revive our small groups because, among other things, they are an essential component of a comprehensive school counseling program and an efficient way to deliver responsive services.  If you would also like to bring back small groups, I have a couple of suggestions.

Calendar
The first thing I would recommend you do is decide when you plan to run your groups and add this time to your annual and weekly calendars.  In so far as our annual calendars, we decided to run our groups just after the six-week mark to coincide with our first grading period.  We picked a day of the week and a time and scheduled six meetings to occur on the same day of the week but during a different class period each week.  You will need to find a day and time that works with your schedule but the key is planning ahead.  Also, don’t be afraid to get creative and consider homeroom periods, club time, or lunch as possible meeting times.  Next, I suggest you add your group meetings to your weekly calendar and add some planning time. I co-facilitate a group with our school counseling intern and we meet to briefly plan our next meeting and reflect on the week prior.      

Tie your group to your school counseling goal(s) 
We aren’t bringing back support groups simply for the sake of it.  We’re trying to promote achievement, attendance, behavior and/or school safety.  So, we’re using data to identify students who would benefit from a group and using groups as an efficient means to intervene with them (more efficient than, for instance, individual counseling).  In our case, we’ve identified students who have low grades (achievement) but aren’t being served by other interventions.  Many of our sessions have focused on social/emotional ASCA Mindsets & Behaviors, but our ultimate goal is to increase their academic achievement.  

Perception Data
I highly suggest that you collect some type of perception data from each of the students in the form of a survey.  You can find lots of great surveys through a quick search on the internet or you can generate your own.  I have used (for example) a Gallup survey on hope, engagement, and well-being and a survey on grit.  Collecting survey data can help you plan your group meetings and evaluate changes in students’ knowledge and/or behavior at the end of your group.    

Broad variety of student needs
My final suggestion is that you consider running groups for a broad variety of student needs.  We typically think of small groups for social/emotional issues but you can also run small groups for first-generation college students.  This is a great way to get started if you are a secondary school that has goals related to college readiness.  You can also form small groups for students who need additional assistance with their college/career readiness plans.

Once we started running groups again I remembered how impactful they can be for students and how fun that can be to run.  If you’re trying to bring back small groups to your secondary school, I encourage you to just start with one.  Once you get started, you’ll find it’s pretty easy to keep them going and make them a fixture of your program.

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11-15-2016 13:42

Hi Stephanie.  Good questions.  You’ve identified one of the major challenges to starting small groups - identifying the best time to do so.  The answer, I’m afraid, is that it depends.  First I would say that you have it right, you want to minimize the amount of class time students are missing.  If you have some convenient structure during the day such as an advisory period (or homeroom or tutorial) this is a good place to start.  If you are trying to launch small groups in a building wherein none have existed before, this is a path of least resistance.  You can try to make it work during a shortened time frame and then, having data to demonstrate your effectiveness in improving behavior, attendance, or academics - start expanding to a longer time frame.  You can also try getting students to meet before school, after school, or during lunch.  This isn’t easy, but you can incentivize it with food, fun, and/or relationships.  Even in buildings wherein I had a lot of support for small groups I would rotate them through the day so students only missed class once every six weeks or so.  I also communicated with teachers the mindsets and behaviors that I was working on and got their buy in by having them refer students.  Last, but not least, I held students accountable for meeting with teachers upfront, collecting makeup work, and taking responsibility for hallway passes.  Another random idea is to collaborate with another staff member such as a prevention specialist or a school psychologist to run groups together.  This doesn’t necessarily help with the time frame but it does communicate a message of being efficient with time.

11-10-2016 13:59

When is the best time to conduct these sessions? I'm still in school for counseling but am wondering when it would be appropriate to have students meet.. I would hate to have them miss class but am worried they might not be able to come early or stay after school so then when would there be time? Is lunch enough?