DMI 717 Assessment and Appraisal of Groups and Their Functioning III
This course is an unstructured group experience in which students process together the impact of their training on their professional and personal lives. As they acquire new skills and insights, identities inevitably deepen and shift. This group experience promotes recognition and exploration of these changes. In addition, aspects of group as a whole dynamics emerge through the group process, and they are identified as they emerge in vivo. Among these dynamics are phases of group development and the issues that pertain to each (trust in the beginning phase, deepening of content and affect in the middle phase and working through unfinished business and loss in the final phase), factors that dilute group cohesion (scape-goating, the group isolate, the group dominator, intellectualizing, out of the room vs. in the room content and mirroring) the different impact of interventions that focus on individuals vs. ones that focus on the group as a whole, and recognizing the group unconscious by appreciating the connections between manifest and latent content of group communications.