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Working with the Ladder of Inference – a guide for group workers.
Have you ever been in a Mexican standoff? How about an Australian standoff? A standoff is where you and the other person or groups refuse to budge and you know you are right and they keep insisting, clearly wrongly, that they are correct and you are wrong. “How can they not see the obvious” you think to yourself. Another way to put it is to see each person or group as stuck in symmetrical roles (ways of being), where there is some imperative or need to convince the other that they are ‘wrong’ and you are ‘right’?
Perceptual Positions for Communications By Scott Arbuthnot (edited by Peter Howie)
When was the last time you contributed to a discussion and you just weren't heard? How many times have you noticed people talking at each other without ever really hearing each other? Demanding they be listened to without really listening and really hearing the other person except to bolster their own argument or position?
It happens all too frequently. It's no wonder poor communication is one of the greatest ills of modern organisational and family life. This column introduces an elegant and respectful set of tools to improve your interpersonal communications skills.
Levels of Learning - A model by Peter Howie and Elizabeth Synnot
Levels of Learning is a working heuristic (rule of thumb) that is easy to use as both a reflective tool and a planning tool. Diz Synnot and I have been working with it in groups and on it from a theoretical perspective for many years. When combined with other sophisticated models of human learning and functioning it is one pointer to the variation of human experience and lend confidence to planning or analysis of learning situations.
Role-Play Realising it's Potential for Workplace Learning - Jenny Hutt
Jenny Hutt has worked as an organisational learning and development consultant for nineteen years. She is based in Melbourne and works with public and private sectors in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific. Jenny is a Sociodramatist and TEP-in-training. She is on the teaching staff of the Australian College of Psychodramaand is Immediate Past President of ANZPA.
Moving from Restrictive to Progressive Learning Systems in Professional Healthcare Training
When a trainer works with a group for the first time there are dynamic forces already in play. The trainer approaches the group with a particular warm up and vision for the training that is going to take place. Within the group there will be particular roles and role relationships that participants will have warmed up to. There is a curriculum or negotiated objectives, which provide a basis for the work that the trainer and group will do together. This paper describes how these dynamics come together in the first session of the interpersonal skills module of a 3-week training program in palliative care for registered nurses.
Walking with Moreno in the Organisational Jungle - Jane Morgan
Jane is an advanced psychodrama trainee who is a senior manager in the public sector in Brisbane. She has been a change agent and leader in organisational and people development for over two decades. Her passion for creating successful organisations that enable people to grow into their potential capability has been a driving force in her work.
The Spectrogram in Psychodrama
The spectrogram is both diagnostic and therapeutic. It clarifies issues, makes abstract issues concrete, and forces the participation and commitment of usually nonverbal members. It is particularly useful as one method of warming up a psychodrama group.
Making Interventions in a Group
Interventions are the actions you take in a group as the group facilitator, leader, participant or coordinator in order to develop its functioning with regard to the groups purpose. Looking at the Tuckman model, it could be to develop and implement some process to assist the group to deal with conflict rather than suppress it in order to move from storming to norming.
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