The following article was
written for the British Association of Group Psychotherapists’ Newsletter
(Winter 96 edition).
It was subsequently published
in April 1997 (issue no. 10) in Group-Analytic Contexts, the International
Newsletter of the Group-Analytic Society.
Group
Psychotherapists and Schools
The
working milieu of the vast majority of teachers, whether nursery, primary,
secondary, further, higher or adult education, is the group. Teaching is group
work, if it is anything. Yet the theory and practice of group psychodynamics
seem to play little part in informing the work of teachers and teacher
trainers. I think there are undoubted and excellent opportunities for an
organisation such as BAGP to begin to establish links within the teaching
profession, to market groups and group work training and, in so doing, play a
considerable role in ‘the great education debate’. In my view there are
services we can offer in two key areas.
The
first is the more straightforward and I think well within our means. Each
school is required to provide five training days per year for its staff and, in
my experience, often struggles to fill these days with meaningful task relevant
experiences. I see no reason why we should not be seeking to put the weight of
BAGP behind a range of one or two day packages specifically tailored to
developing the group skills of teachers and promoting group psychological
thinking within schools and colleges.
The
second is more challenging, as it is essentially groundbreaking and would
promote a shift in the culture of our schools towards psychoanalysis. It is
about finding a place for the group-analytic group in education, forming spaces
in which teachers might be allowed the luxury of talking openly about their
work at ‘the chalk face’ and in the wider institution . This may not sound too
revolutionary and exciting, but in terms of the current narrow frame in which
education is debated and fought over, it would entail a complete change of
emphasis.
Teacher
Groups
In
1995, with the backing of the Westminster Pastoral Foundation, along with some
limited time, money and guidance, I launched a pilot project called ‘Teacher
Groups’. The modest aim was initially to set up one ‘Professional Development
Group’ (PDG) drawn from the secondary schools of two west London boroughs. The
aims of a PDG are to
The
ideas underpinning ‘Teacher Groups’ slowly evolved out of a wish to apply my
newly acquired skills as a group psychotherapist to my first profession, teaching,
in order to establish some sort of bridge between two compatible
professions, which in (my) reality have little to do with each other. From my
work as a mainstream and offsite teacher I know that teachers are generally
poorly supported and rarely supervised, that space is not provided for teachers
to reflect upon and process their practice, and, for whatever reason, that
teachers tend to avoid talking openly about their work. There is no money or
space in the timetable for regular support and supervision for any space in which one is paid to
reflect upon what one does. To suggest to teachers that such a place should
exist is often to invite incredulity. As a ‘professional’ you ‘should be able
to cope’ and if you cannot ‘then you should not be a teacher’.
Failing
Schools and Bad Teachers
According
to the dominant ideology of the day, there are failing schools and bad
teachers, albeit occurring in small numbers but nonetheless with high public
profiles. With the preferred solutions arising from school inspection and
teacher assessment being the closure of bad schools and the driving out of bad
teachers, little mention is made of possible alternatives. It is all too easily
forgotten that the workload of a teacher
involves more direct contact with people than any other profession. And
yet, how many teachers are supervised or receive any degree of formal
support? Many teachers feel close to
breakdown. In an environment so hostile to their difficulties, increasing
numbers are dropping out of the profession, taking flight being the only way
of avoiding the more severe
consequences of the job. Very few teachers are paid to talk with their peers
about their work on a regular basis. On the whole, teachers are not expected to
talk about what they do. If they were then a regular and intimate space, which
allows for an ongoing dialogue between colleagues about the fine detail of
their work, would be provided for them to do so.
The
demands of delivering a ‘broad and balanced curriculum’ and, increasingly so,
of achieving academic success, dominate
the culture of most schools. Resources are not made available and the
opportunity to talk, intrinsic to psychotherapy and relatively common in social
work, is portrayed as a luxury, thought of as superfluous or even irrelevant to
the essential tasks involved in simply getting the job done, which for many is
keeping one’s head above water and surviving. Those that are unable to cope,
and these are the bad teachers, are overstressed, all too often sick,
constantly talking about leaving the profession, taking early retirement or
actually leaving the profession. The costs are great for the teacher, for the
school and for the child. In the politicised culture of education, the
needs of pupils and parents, the customers, are seen as separate from and
hierarchically more important than those of the teacher. So, for example, the
threat of exclusion hanging over teachers in difficulty is dissociated from the
threat of exclusion hanging over pupils in difficulty. The needs of teachers
and pupils have become dangerously polarized to the degree that teachers
behaviour suggests that they now experience their pupils as the enemy and are
counterattacking by refusing to work with disruptive pupils, sadly resorting to
the same strategy used on them as the sole means of dealing with the
difficulties of their work. "If we could just get rid of the bad teachers
and the bad pupils....."
Before
training as an analytic group psychotherapist, I worked as a fulltime teacher
in two secondary schools. Both were vast communities. Each day was an
immeasurably long chain of individual interactions, verbal and otherwise, with
hundreds of young people, often in a swirling and rapidly moving maelstrom of
bodies, actions, noises and smells. I would be filled with foreboding and
apprehension from Sunday evening. Walking through the school gates was like
voluntarily sacrificing myself to an awesome and terrifying monster. Washed-up
at the end of the week I would miraculously find myself still alive, ecstatic
and exhausted. Later, while training I worked in offsite education, where class
sizes were much smaller but the behaviour of the ‘pupil’ was much more
challenging. Only in the latter was there any inbuilt possibility of regularly
reflecting on relationships with colleagues and pupils. However, this was only
if the space was argued and fought for
it was never thought of as part and parcel of the work.
PCSR
Education Group
In
1995, Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility (PCSR) was formed
and, along with it, the PCSR Education Group. I have been working with this
group since its inception and our current project is the collection of data,
evidence and testimony regarding ‘Education, a System in Distress’. The group
hopes to document the material gathered and widely disseminate it. We are
hoping to provide a public platform for psychotherapists and counsellors in
order to contribute to the current education debate. I think that, as Group
Psychotherapists, we can make a particularly valuable contribution to this
process.
A Role
for the BAGP
There
are many areas of debate to which we could and should contribute as group
specialists. For example, arguments rage over
whether size matters and what style of teaching is most effective. One view
suggests that bad teachers are unable to control any group, no matter what
size. We know that dynamics vary according to the size of the group. However,
how exactly might we apply small, median and large group understandings to the
debate over classroom size surely
something we should be concerned to do. Another view is that bad teachers are
bad because of their trendy permissive ‘pupil centred’ teaching methods and
that what is needed is a return to traditional didactic ‘teacher centred’
approaches in which the teacher is a strong authority figure. An application of
Bion’s ‘basic assumptions’ might elucidate much in this polarized debate.
How do
we as group analysts view what happens in schools and why is our view so poorly
represented within the mainstream of education?
'Teacher
Groups' is currently on hold and as yet there are no Professional Development
Groups. There has been certainly a good deal of interest and a degree of
support from local teaching institutions. However, I have felt very isolated
and up against it. I realized that 'Teacher Groups ' is a project requiring
many heads, much work, more publicity, money... It is a project requiring
commercial, lobbying and diplomatic skills, a good deal of confidence and
courage ... and colleagues.
I am
therefore proposing that BAGP set up a Committee to explore and take further
the above ideas. If you are interested in participating contact me on 0181 523
3061. I look forward to hearing from you.
Peter
Zelaskowski