Week 1

I personally feel very intimidated by the idea of working with groups.  I understand the efficiency of the idea, but I anticipate feeling a lot of pressure to produce results with group work, which is intimidating regardless of the circumstance.  Basically, I would probably be more confident with so much responsibility once I had more experience.  If I could get to a place where I was completely confident running groups, I think I could do very well and be successful.

The students in the Sweifach/Heft-LaPorte study were motivated to do group work by a number of factors, including perceived self-efficacy, prior experiences, the expectation to succeed and be successful as a facilitator, and the intrinsic satisfaction that they found in their work.
The finding implicated that the field and job opportunities are requiring more and more group work based on factors like cost efficiency, and even though social group work education has declined, it is necessary to maintain a solid base of group work in education, because it will still be needed in the future.  Perhaps if students felt more confident in their skills as facilitators, they would consider investing more in group work.

As I mentioned about, I find groups to be very intimidating, but I would like very much to be able to confidently and effectively run my own groups.  I personally see a lot of value in this skill, and even though my main interest is working with individual clients in a 1-on-1 setting, I would still like to be able to work well in any circumstance.

I honestly do not remember very much from my undergraduate group work course, so my hope is that this class will provide more lasting information and skills that I can directly translate into my field work and career.