Group Work Personal Essay

This paper is a detailed examination of my theoretical orientation to group work and the ways it has changed as a result of my involvement in this course. It considers the personal qualities that I bring to involvement and interaction in group processes, as well as the what I learned from two textbooks (the second edition of Group Techniques by Gerald Corey, Marianne Schneider Corey, Patrick Callanan, and J. Michael Russell and the sixth edition of Groups: Process and Practice by Marianne Schneider Corey and Gerald Corey) and how my own involvement in a number of groups has had an impact on the evolution of my attitude about the effectiveness of working as part of a group. It looks at a diverse range of techniques and leadership styles that I have experienced and studied, and evaluates each one for its personal relevance. It examines related issues, including ethnicity, ethics, and the ages of the group's participants, as they relate to group work. Finally, it uses the stages through which the texts posit that groups pass in their formation, work together, and conclusion of their work, and discusses how I have experienced these stages in a number of different kinds of situations.

Groups are a fundamental structure for accomplishing a wide variety of human tasks. Corey and Corey (2002) write, "Groups are the treatment of choice, not a second-rate approach to helping people change . . . Groups are designed to remediate specific problems or to prevent problems" (p. 7).

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irection for which I have talent and enough interest in continuing to explore in depth. The two textbooks that form the center of the course are the second edition of Group Techniques by Gerald Corey, Marianne Schneider Corey, Patrick Callanan, and J. Michael Russell (1992) and the sixth edition of Groups: Process and Practice by Marianne Schneider Corey and Gerald Corey (2002). The books provide a blueprint for formulating therapeutic groups and overseeing their work through the five stages of development of a group, from pre-group preparation through the initial, transition, and work stages and concluding with the ending of a group once its work has been accomplished. The fact that both texts share Gerald Corey and Marianne Schneider Corey as authors makes them a little too homogeneous as the primary resources for studying the group process, though the books are separate texts and do consider some of the issues raised in slightly different ways. Nevertheless, I would have expected to have been given more diverse references to study, especially since a core argument of both texts is expressed in Groups: Process and Practice by Corey and Corey (2002): "Neither of us subscribes to any theory in its totality. Rather, we funct

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