EDUCATORS’ PROGRAMME – COURSE CONTENT

The online training has two components:

Weekly Online Experiential Group:

Participants will form a Median Group with a maximum of twelve members. Educators are drawn from diverse socioeconomic educational settings which enables a rich and unique learning opportunity. The experiential group is  a supportive and confidential setting that allows for both meaningful connection and engagement with organisational dynamics. It provides a contained, safe space for teachers to explore some of the frustrations and difficulties they experience.   Run as a therapy group, the process has the potential to engender greater self-insight and personal growth while promoting insight into group processes.   As a result, educators are able to respond to their work environment with more understanding and less stress.

The experiential group will meet with an experienced group analytic conductor on a weekly basis for 1.5 hours during school terms on a Monday evening from 18h45 – 20h15.

Four One-day Webinars:

Webinars will provide teachers with the formal theory of group processes and insight into the group dynamics that influence teaching and learning with constructive ways to negotiate the complex and multifaceted relationships that occur in schools. Attention will be paid to the destructive group processes that can lead to social phenomena such as racism, bullying and gangsterism and to approaches that may facilitate inclusive diversity in schools.

As an integrated series, each webinar builds on the theory and experiential learning covered in the previous workshop. Participants will be provided with reading material to enrich their learning and practical experience of large and small groups to gain an understanding of group analytic concepts.

Webinar 1: Coping with anxiety provoking experiences at school.

• • • How anxiety is inherent in any new learning experience and can present itself in the form of challenging feelings and behaviours. Understanding the triggers and events which exacerbate anxiety can be helpful in preventing and managing stressful experiences in the school setting.
    • The influence that early life experiences have on how a learner responds to the learning environment and to how she/he relates to their teacher. 
    • Ways for teachers to manage some of the challenging emotions that can get stirred up in the classroom in order to build strong working relationships and manage stress. 

Webinar 2: Stages of development and their impact on the class.

• • • The psychological, emotional and social developmental tasks and challenges facing learners from preschool age to adolescence.
    • How the developmental stages of children shape how they typically present individually and collectively in the classroom/playground, creating unique group behaviours.
    • How to appropriately consider and address learner needs from a developmental and group analytic perspective.

Webinar 3: Group dynamics in schools.

• • • Understanding how individuals and groups influence each other as well as exploring how unconscious relational dynamics can contribute to creating a complex web of interactions in organisations.
    • How, by developing insight into these dynamics and paying close attention to them, can help to build healthy working relationships with colleagues and learners to enhance job satisfaction.
    • Making sense of the triangular relationship between school, parents and the child and how to successfully navigate the dynamics of this triangle bearing in mind the link between current behaviour and early relationships.

Webinar 4: Dealing with diversity in schools.

• • • Schools as microcosms of society can become fertile grounds for destructive unconscious projective processes that are enacted through group behaviours associated with human diversity such as gender, race, sexual orientation, language, culture, (dis)ability etc.
    • How specific early life experiences can shape how individuals manage and tolerate difference and how primary thought patterns can lead to various forms of exclusionary, racist and bullying types of group behaviour.
    • How a better understanding of the underlying psychological mechanisms that underpin these behaviours can help shift organisational structures, beliefs and attitudes towards socially inclusive school environments.