Group management tips

The following are tips that may help you to manage challenging behaviours in a group.

Noticing and naming

This is a good way of alerting people to their behaviour, but you want to do this without ‘shaming’ anyone. For example, ‘I notice that people seem to be talking all at once’ or ‘The group seems flat after this session.’

If the energy is low because of a topic, you may find that a short discussion about how they feel might help to re-energise the group. If something has been said, then bringing it to the fore might help to clear the air. If people are tired, doing an energiser like jumping up and down, can help the energy.

Sitting with hotspots / difficult situations

This can happen when strong feelings are expressed, when conflict erupts or when people get upset or angry. It is good to sit in difficult situations even when people want to run, avoid or make a joke of it. It’s often difficult for us to ask more about a difficult situation because we are trying to pretend that it is not happening. When we do that, we are not at the service of the individual or the group.

We need to ensure that difficult situations are dealt with. As an example, when talking about complications of diabetes, someone starts crying. It would be very tempting to take the person out of the room and keep the session going. However, we are then not at the service of the group because emotions are left up in the air. We need to hold the space. This allows people to express their feelings, to be heard and validated, and move on. It takes lots of practice.

Standing by

During particularly powerful moments or ‘hotspots,’ we need to support people who are expressing what is difficult to say, even if it’s not said in a ‘nice’ way. At the same time, we need to stand by those who are having difficulty listening to it; for example, when someone gets angry because they feel that DAFNE is not helping them.

Instead of getting defensive, we as facilitators need to listen to the person’s feelings and let them know that we have heard them by saying ‘ok’ or ‘yes’ or ‘wow, those feelings are powerful’. You can then ask them more.

To manage group learning you must be prepared to give the group direction, manage expectations and challenging behaviours, and keep the group on task. Refer to group management handouts 1–3 (available in the resources section) for tips on managing the group. Some of these strategies may be familiar to you, some may be new because you haven’t considered using them in Remote DAFNE. Make sure you are familiar with the content of these handouts as some questions in the end-of-unit knowledge assessment relate to the content of these handouts.