Understanding Groups In Classrooms And Schools
Roberta Slavin, PhD, CGP, and Helen Scharff, MA

I (Roberta Slavin) am a school psychologist, teacher, and group and individual therapist. Most of my school career was spent in economically deprived areas in the Bronx, New York. I have mostly worked with children in grades one through six. I consider myself a clinician with an educational background. I (Helen “Nell” Scharff) am a long-time teacher in a prestigious public high school in Manhattan, New York. I have taught middle and upper grades. I have had extensive group dynamics training. I consider myself an educator with a clinical background. Together, our experience and training has taught us that understanding and using group psychodynamics helps improve school and classroom climates. More specifically, we have learned that through the use of group dynamics, teachers and school personnel can help their students develop their learning capacities and their ability to work together cohesively. 

Group dynamics, both positive and negative, occur whether school personnel recognize them or not. Some examples of school dynamics are as follows. 

• A teacher who continually points out the bad behavior of a particular child is possibly setting up a scapegoat situation that will allow the students and the teacher to vent their anger and aggression, while at the same time, they avoid facing their own anger and aggression.
• A teacher who openly criticizes a particular manual that she is required to use is, without realizing it, encouraging the children to resist the work associated with that manual. One of the reasons for the children’s so-called negativity may be their identification with the teacher. If she does not like the manual, they won’t like it or want to use it. So, although the pupils’ behavior is reflecting their alliance with the teacher, their negative behavior may be interpreted as disobedience. If the teacher goes on this assumption, without checking with her students, she may feel justified to reprimand the students. Unconsciously, the children’s behavior gives the teacher the excuse to scold them, rationalizing that they were not doing their work properly. She feels justified in showing anger toward bad kids rather than acknowledging her own anger and frustration.

Often teachers and class, or the whole school, staff and pupils, “the group as a whole,” struggle with such problems as severe anxiety from the WTC disaster, fear of other attacks, discomfort within the school itself, and diversity of ethnicity, country of birth, and language. The enormous psychological power of many individuals in a group situation may create behavioral reactions that would not occur in a one-to-one situation. The group-as-a-whole produces an entirely different persona than that of the individuals from whom the persona emerged. In other words, the characteristics of the class group are broader and more encompassing than that of one individual student. “Class as a whole” issues also lead to role-taking by individual members or role assignment to members via group pressure. For example, if a lesson is boring, some student will invariably become “time keeper,” letting the teacher know that the class has had enough, or the “class clown” will distract the lesson with jokes and jocular behavior. Excessive anger may result in the class and or teacher designating a scapegoat, thus not dealing with his or her own raging feelings. 

Children’s methods of developing a sense of safety within the class setting are understandably tenuous and often regressive. The methods they use will be determined by ego and superego development, as well as control over impulsive behavior. This developmental process will determine how much psychic energy is available to focus on the subject at hand. There are many other dynamic conditions that emerge in school settings without the knowledge of the participants. For example, teachers may use punitive disciplinary tactics because of their own overly strict upbringing, or they may encourage raucous acting out because of their desire to be rebellious. Most teachers would agree that class order or class control is an important challenge (Bany & Johnson, 1964). In order to address the issues of class order and to create an environment most conducive to classroom learning, it is helpful to understand the causes of class management difficulties. 

Causes of Class Management Difficulties

Transference/Countertransference: In individual therapy, transference refers to the patient perceiving and acting as if the therapist is some other significant person in his or her life. The concept is similar in group therapy, only more complex as the transferences may involve other members of the group as well as the leader. There is a similar structure for countertransference in which the therapist experiences reactions that are either induced by the patient(s) or a result of the therapist’s unresolved conflicts. These same dynamics occur in classroom groups, although unbeknownst to the participants. Although many teachers intuitively understand the importance of relationships in facilitating learning, teachers generally have no training in the ways that both students and teachers bring a whole history of past relationships into classroom interactions. Training in this area could help teachers react less defensively with difficult students—particularly the ones who seem to know just how to push the teachers’ buttons. 

This concept is modeled after Winnicott’s idea that the mother acts as a holder for feelings that threaten to overwhelm the immature child. If the children feel safe, they will eventually be able to manage difficult feelings such as rage, despair, hostility, and suspicion. In schools and classrooms, the teachers and administrators are also affected by their feelings of safety or lack of safety. Teaching adults to provide containment would enhance the climate of the class and help students to manage a “nameless dread” that often accompanies learning (Bion’s term, cited in Salzberger-Wittenberger, 1983). Studies have implied that teachers who were critical and punitive tended to create an unsafe holding environment that led to the children behaving with counter-aggression or passivity. When the teacher focuses on the pupils’ needs, academic, social, and emotional, the children are able to respond to the rules and regulations stipulated by the school (Bany & Johnson, 1964). In addition, the group itself serves a maternal, containing function (Wells, 1990). Learning ways to maximize group cohesiveness gives teachers new strategies for creating safe learning environments.

Group-as-a-Whole: This is a complex concept with many ramifications. One key aspect is that through projection and projective identification, individuals in groups feel, speak, and act not only on their own behalf but also on behalf of others who have disowned or split-off corresponding pieces of themselves. For example, a child who is repeatedly confused about assignments, who is always the one to ask annoying obvious questions about the homework, is likely to be expressing confusion on behalf of others in the group who need not feel so stupid or confused if someone else can feel it for them. There are many instances when attending to the problems of an individual child isn’t effective since the problem lies with the group as a whole. If the teacher sends a disruptive child to the principal, a second disruptive child may spring up and take the first child’s place. This is a signal that it is not an individual problem and that the class problem has not been effectively addressed. 

Group Roles: As in group therapy, individual students may adopt particular roles that in some way influence the direction of the learning process. These roles may include the provocateur, the instigator, the self-righteous judge, the caretaker, the clown, and many others. It would be helpful for educators to understand what is motivating these roles, including the ways in which individuals enact these roles on the behalf of others in an interconnected system. Teachers could help students learn how to adapt these roles in order to enhance the academic learning process. 

A Systems Approach: A systems view of group dynamics draws attention to the impact of different layers of a system on each other in an interconnected web. Just as individuals in groups take on roles on behalf of others, groups take on roles within institutions, as do institutions within society. As an example, the practice of tracking may allow those who are on the top rung to feel smarter and more accomplished by comparison with those who are on the bottom rung. Success in this structure depends upon the failure of others. Loading up schools with the responsibility for “leaving no child behind” without allocating the resources necessary for success dooms schools to failure, providing a convenient scapegoat for nearly all of society’s ills. School organization itself—epitomized by large, anonymous classes moving through a fragmented, eight-period day—may be structured as a defense against anxiety (Menzies, 1960) rather than in the service of learning. Such a structure defends teachers from the anxiety that a more personal, intimate relationship with students might arouse. In addition, if schools were structured to better support real learning and were no longer cemented in the convenient role of societal scapegoat, others of society’s institutions would be forced to examine their own roles and might be forced to change as well. Longstanding resistance to change in school organization (Cuban, 1993) cannot be fully understood without examining the roles schools play in society as a whole.

Parallel Process: One aspect of systems thinking is parallel process. This refers to dynamics on one level of a system being played out in other levels of the system. A teacher who is made to feel like an infant by an administrator, for example, may be more likely to make her own students feel like infants. Following is an example of parallel process in action. Children expect that teachers will have the role of the good mommy, will give them everything they want, and remain uncritical of their wrongdoings. When this fantasy is not realized, the teacher becomes the bad mommy who punishes and denies. This dilemma occurs frequently in classroom groups. A similar scenario took place when I (Roberta) led a teachers’ stress workshop at lunchtime in a New York City Public School (Slavin, 1996). A member of the group described her frustration at not having access to books that were locked in a closet and were only available when the principal opened the closet. All the members agreed that this was a very frustrating situation and they felt very deprived. I concluded from this incident, that they were also concerned whether I, too, would deny them emotional nourishment. Parallel process began when the group was able to bring up the topic of emotional nourishment, thus indicating that trust was beginning to develop in the group, with each other and with myself. Secondly, I was willing to listen to them in a way that the principal wasn’t. And finally, by identifying with me as leader, they could utilize my leadership in their classrooms. Thus their leadership in classrooms began to parallel my leadership with them. Awareness of parallel process can help teachers and school personnel recognize the reasons underlying regressive behavior.

Most teaching and learning takes place in groups; however, school personnel have little understanding of either the anxiety that group membership arouses or the learning opportunities afforded by the power of a group. The quality of the relationships and the level of safety that is present in the group in which children learn will determine the extent to which they can explore the unknown and take risks, both of which are necessary for learning. An understanding of the covert processes of groups will help teachers to understand the group’s enabling as well as destructive power. It will also help them to allow students greater access to the full range of their own feelings and behaviors, and use them more positively in the work of learning. A greater understanding of the roles schools play in society will help teachers recognize cases in which it is impossible to resolve dilemmas without looking outside a particular class, school, and even at times—the school system itself.

In summary, group dynamics occur consciously and unconsciously in classrooms and schools. The list of ongoing dynamics, is of course not complete. More research and observation is needed. We hope however that we have stimulated interest in this important area of group dynamics.

Roberta Slavin, PhD, CGP, is Co-Chair of the Groups in Educational Settings SIG. Helen Scharff, MA, is a member of AGPA.

References

Bany, M. A. & Johnson, L. V. (1964). Classroom group behavior: Group dynamics in education. New York: Macmillan.

Cuban, L. (1993). How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms, 1890-1990. New York: Teachers College.

Menzies, I. E. (1960). A case of the functioning of social systems as a defense against anxiety. Human Relations, 13, 95-121.

Salzberger-Wittenberg, I. Henry, G, & Osborne, E. (1983). The emotional experience of learning and teaching. London: Routledge.

Slavin, R. L. (1996). An on site workshop for teachers: The creation of a therapeutic environment. Group, 20 (2), 131-144.

Wells, L. (1990). The group as a whole: A systemic socioanalytic perspective on interpersonal and group relations. In J. Gilette & M. McCollom (Eds.), Groups in Context: A New Perspective on Group Dynamics (pp. 55-80). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The maturational process and the facilitating environment. New York: International Universities Press.

This article was published in the October/November 2002 issue of The Group Circle