Group work and group therapy- Padlet

23/01/2017

Group work and group therapy- Padlet Name educator: Hervör Alma Árnadóttir Name partner organisation: University of Iceland
GENERAL INFORMATION The overall aim of this course is to introduce group work and group therapy as methods in social work. Students should be able to recognize concepts and development of group work. By the end of the course students will: • Be able to identify the historical and social development of group work and group therapy • Be able to identify the definitions of various groups and have experienced appropriate methods in seminars • Be able to create a plan for group work in social work, present the plan embedded with their own experience • Be able to organize and manage group work within varying groups • Be able to reflect on ones own experience Aim of testing project: Use digital tool padlet to reflect on our experience in the course.
PRACTICAL INFORMATION Date(s) of the testing project: 3 weeks in December Target group: 30 MA students in Social Work Number of participants: 30 Nationality of the participants: Icelandic Sex of the participants: ⁮females 26 ⁮ man 4 Age of the participants:23 to 51 Amount of meetings with the learners: 12
A	Number of people reflecting:		x Solo (1 person)	x Small group (< 20 people)		x Large group (> 20 people)
B	The way(s) of sharing:
Verbal:			x
Non-verbal:			x Pictures / ⁮ drawings	x Text	x Embodied	⁮ sculpture	⁮ Other forms of expression
Digital:			x Padlet	⁮ Social media		⁮ Digital diary
C	Place of reflection (where)		x Indoors	⁮ Outdoors		⁮ On-line
D. Steps taken to implement How did you organize your testing project (or to put it differently: as this is a testing project for experimenting, what will be different comparing to the same course you run the previous time)? Testing project 1 – Group work For me using the padlet was very challenging. I prefer to use a book to write down my thoughts rather than use digital tools as padlets. I decided to challenge myself and try a padlet as a fundamental tool in my course. My focus was to examine the ownership of ideas by reflect on our padlet work. I wanted to see if and how we could use reflection by using padlet as a tool to enhance significant learning and then ownership. I offered the students to use padlet to share ideas, feelings and thoughts about leadership in group work and connect them together. Students could also add to others their feelings and thoughts. I was surprised that students were willing to try this method. Jakob visited us and it was helpful to have him supporting our first step in the new world. After having opened the program on padlet the students decided to write one status per day at least, try to connect with other thoughts. We would try and continue in 10 days. After that period we had more text in context and less without connection and some random photos. We talked about it and they decided to look at it and try to make any sense from it or it was also a option to quit. They worked on it but its made no sense at all. The students decided to continue with new wall, but they thought it would be necessary to have it more framed. We made some rules together. Ten days later we looked at it again, there was actually very little on the new wall, students said it was not interesting and they didn’t want to share personal things on the wall, that was it.
E. Your assessment of the outcome In general, how do you look at the results of your testing project? Students said in the feedback that this could be useful to share some kind of information on the wall but they would rather use facebook. For me it was interesting because I was learning with them, trying to find how we could use it as a tool for reflection. My idea in the beginning was to explore the feelings or thoughts that arose when someone else added to you feelings or made the thoughts or feelings expressed misunderstood. But people didn’t express such emotions only some objective things. The new approach in my teaching “padlet” didn’t succeed but the process was very interesting.
F	Connecting with principles: which principle(s) were you taking into consideration mostly when facilitating reflection with learners? Please add 2 sentences about how you were translating the principle into practice. For more information: see postings on principles.
⁮x		Raising awareness within learners to ‘own’ their learning in personally meaningful way
⁮ x		Developing a relationship between educator and learners based on trust, openness, empathy, honesty, dialogue and feedback
⁮x		Co-creating the reflective process
⁮		Managing the steering paradox of intrinsic learning processes
⁮		Creating the right reflective attention of learners
⁮		Slowing down and value moments of not-knowing,
⁮		Deepening your questions progressively
⁮x		Recalling that reflection can never be imposed, only kindly invited.
⁮x		Always consider reflection as a broad and deepening process, that should be holistic.
⁮x		Being careful how to assess reflection (or not at all)