Young people and group work

Young people are super-physical, super-influenced by their emotions, and respond super-impulsively to what’s going on around them. So with all this in mind this workshop will take you through a process that looks at how to harness all this for the good of a group. We will look at the skills, ways of thinking and practical strategies needed to run/facilitate groups with teenagers who at times can be challenging and difficult. We will look at the pivotal idea of Engagement and how to maintain that engagement over time. This is what we will cover:

• Experience 15 + activities
• Use of music and video, physical movement, scaling activities, super simple theatre activities, drawing, conversation and silence as part of groupwork
• How to plan a group ‘on the run’ with very little time
• How to work with young people who may seemingly, be grumpy, scared, angry, bored, don’t want to talk and/or just don’t want to be there
• How to create strategies for the verbal and the not-so verbal, including drawing, theatre-based action-based, physical movement oh and yes…thinking and talking…
• Embedding ‘learning’ within activities
• Blending process and content
• Managing the ‘difficult’ stuff
• Rules without rules
• Being surprising and unexpected
• Groups not as rehearsal for change/growth, but as a real experience of change/growth/development.