Self-Esteem Building Group Case Study

Case background Eleven adolescents aged 15 and 16 years-old (4 boys and 7 girls) have joined a group which aims at improving self-understanding and self-esteem. All teens, came from a Band 3 school, have difficulties in promoting to Form 5 because of poor academic performance. This was the third session of the self-esteem building group. The group was entering the stage of ‘power and control’.

Tasks

Eva, a school social worker, held a 45-minutes group session. Following a briefing, the session started by two games - ‘Bingo’ and ‘Fall backward in double circles’ promoting ice-breaking and trust respectively. Then, discussion about ‘What is trust?’ and finally debriefing were conducted. Actually, time allocation was listed as follows: 5 minutes for briefing, 20 minutes for games, 20 minutes for discussion. No debriefing was done due to limited time.

Skills

Strengths Eva did try her best in planning the session with an appropriate flow – Group norms reminder  Games  Discussion. She showed responsive actions towards groupmates who have inquiry and resistance, for example, ‘That’s good.’ Furthermore, she demonstrated how a caring, encouraging and supporting social worker with high level of respects is.

However, because of limited experience in conducting a group session,

For example, ‘What should the outer-circle groupmates do to make those in the inner circle safe while falling backwards?’ Open-ended questions have to be raised to facilitate the discussion, for instance, ‘Are all of you considering this trust game dangerous?’ In order to enhance self understanding and increase communication among groupmates, reflection of content should be often applied to clarify groupmates’ thoughts and feelings, such as, ‘Let’s tell everyone why you don’t want to play the games.’ Wording like ‘Let us …… together’ is good to motivate groupmates’ participation