A New Group Worker's Struggles and Successes in a Host School

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Traditional graduate school social workers (MSW level) begin their full-year field placements immediately upon entering school; it is a “baptism by fire” approach that presents many challenges. In my first-year graduate school field placement, my assignments involved individual and group practice. I found that group work practice was the more challenging. This was partly due to my inexperience and lack of formal group work education, and partly due to a clash between the values of my placement and those of the host school at which I did my field internship. One group I facilitated was particularly challenging in terms of learning. It was not a well-planned group; its development and execution was not a model for preplanning, cohesion, or mutual aid. However, by learning to focus my practice work on two important group work concepts: the role of the group work facilitator as a mediator between the group members and the agency environment, and the importance of the group facilitator attending to purpose, I learned a lot, and the group realized some accomplishments. The purpose of this article is to help group work students or new group workers who might be presented with similarly difficult circumstances to have some success in spite of a difficult assignment.