Throughout the process of acquiring social work skills and experience I've been interested in the overlap between what's transferable from effective teaching to clinical settings and vice-versa. Shechtman's description of group work comes the closest to what the field of education was starting to strive towards when I left teaching (and honestly what many theorists from Dewey and Friere onward noted)--that the intentional cultivation of a culture within a classroom plays a dominant role in allowing the work (education or therapy) to occur. The current ideal for a classroom is one in which the teacher plays a role in establishing structure and beginning to build culture at the beginning of the year towards a trajectory in which they progressively play a facilitating role while the students collectively and individually take on more agency and responsibility for their education. This transition is difficult and requires major shifts in pedagogical methods and shifts in educator training to focus on cultivating engagement, trust, respect, and a shared sense of purpose within classes (and schools). Personal change (whether mastery of content, development of life skills/career skills, personal goal-setting and achievement) work in conjunction with the larger social sphere via different levels of connectedness. Practitioners begin with pre-established goals based on research-based positive outcomes and then scaffold backwards in order to chuck out the process in order to make the dynamic process somewhat more linear than it might otherwise be.
This is turning into a more personal musing on my experiences with teaching and what I hope to bring forward into future social work practice. It also continues to convince me of the power of work done in groups to build more complex and nuanced skillsets (social, emotional, rational) that map onto both what the research says children need and the dynamic nature of what daily life presents most of the students I've taught and clients with whom I've worked.
That said, I appreciated the way that Shechtman began chapter 2 by pointing out the two broad assumptions guiding group work with children and adolescents, as well as the tension that they create by requiring a balance to be struck between the individual and the group. I appreciated the conversation about how various out the models of therapeutic change influenced the development of expressive-supportive therapy in a trans-theoretical model that found ways to integrate the most effective tools and qualities of often competing theories (psychoanalysis, CBT, and client-centered).