Groupwork
Groupwork played an important part in my formative years as a social care and therapy practitioner, from running cookery groups in a mental health day centre to co-facilitating one of the small psychotherapy groups at an adolescent psychiatric unit - one of the activities that led to my receiving the Certificate of Experience in Social Psychiatry with Adolescents in 1987.
I also chose the groupwork elective during my qualifying social work Masters course, in 1989. Working in and working with groups have an important part to play in developing collective solution-focused practices, and I am interested in and open to collaborating in activities involving groupwork, so do make contact if you want to explore ideas. Call me on 07795 176356, or email.
Two examples of solution-focused groupwork
Let’s talk about parenting - a group with parents
I wrote about this group, which I ran together with a learning mentor in a primary school in Whitechapel, in Context magazine.
Drawing on your strengths - a group with children
I wrote a blog post reporting on the initial pilot one-off session, which cartoonist Tim Sanders and I did at a West London primary school. We followed this up with a successful six session programme at a school near where we live in East London, and we are always on the lookout for new opportunities like this.
Some comments we received about this work -
“Simply brilliant!!”
- Sue Young, author, Solution-Focused Schools.
“Really fun activity! I'll file it for future use.”
- Alison Johnson, licensed psychologist, California.
“I think this is absolutely brilliant.”
- Yasmin Ajmal, educational psychologist, co-author, Solution-Focused Thinking in Schools, co-editor, Solutions in Schools
“I like the stuff about drawing with kids about ‘what you are good at?’... must give it a go!”
- Dave Harrop, adoption specialist
“A really fun way of encouraging co-operation between children!”
- Clare Firth, clinical psychologist, London
“What a great idea! As a teacher and solution-focused counsellor, I love it!”
- Ella de Jong, Netherlands
“So solution-focused. So clever. So much focus on individual strengths.”
- Sussan Öster, Department of Public Health, Sweden.
The slides I used at my workshop on ‘Solution-focused cartooning’ at the 2014 European Brief Therapy Association conference in the Netherlands are in the Resources section.