By Rod Paynter
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Table of Contents
Small Group Development and NewStart Life Skills
Progressive, Cyclical, and Non-Sequential Models
Transformative Learning And Small Group Development
Metacognition as a Group Development Tool
This review is intended to
inform my dissertation topic: Assessing
NewStart Life Skills and its Role in Community Economic Development. As such, NewStart Life Skills (NLS) practice
and theory are reflected on in the light of the literature. Correspondingly, the literature is critiqued
in the light of NLS practice and theory.
Possible topics for this review included androgogical approaches to
teaching skills, skills assessment, program evaluation, small group
development, and the role of skills similar to those of NewStart Life Skills in
Community Economic Development (CED). I decided to look into small group
development because it was the topic into which I had done the least
investigation, and because NLS and small groups are inextricably intertwined.
The major gap that I found in the literature is the lack of a group
development theory that synthesizes the simultaneously occurring linear,
cyclic, and non-sequential developmental aspects that are extant in long-term
NLS groups. Various of the theories are
useful and applicable in various group situations, but none gives a
satisfactory summation of how things really happen in such groups.
A second gap concerns NLS
theory more than it does the small group development literature, though both
are affected. In that transformative
learning is becoming a compelling pedagogical/androgogical theory, and that NLS
practice is in many ways consistent with transformative learning theory, NLS theoreticians would do well to update the NLS
literature in transformative learning terms.
A third area of interest also points up a gap in NLS theory
more so than it illustrates a gap in the small group development
literature. Transformational leadership
theory brings together many disparate pieces of NLS leadership practice under
one umbrella. NLS theoreticians would
do well to update the NLS literature in terms of transformational leadership.
As a final point of interest, metacognition as a group
development tool may turn out to be a fruitful field of study in NLS and in
small group development.
A PsycINFO search for ‘small group development*’ provided me
with 25 references (I didn’t use the quote marks in the search. I use them here to distinguish the search
terms from the text). I downloaded them
(that is, the references, keywords, and abstracts, not the articles) into a new
EndNote library that I named
Small Group Development. To expand the
‘small group development*’ search, I extended the search to 10 more
databases: Academic Search Elite; CINAHL with Full Text; Pre-CINAHL; CINAHL; EJS E-Journals; ERIC; MLA Directory of Periodicals; PsycARTICLES; PsycBOOKS; and SocINDEX. Disconcertingly, this added only 17 more articles
to the PsycINFO results. I added their references,
keywords, and abstracts to the EndNote
library. On the one hand, it looked
like it was time to expand my search parameters with different search
terms. On the other hand, a cursory
review of the titles, keywords, and abstracts of my gleanings to date showed
that I had found a lot of interesting material. I decided that I would review what I already had before expanding
my search terms. I began to download or
request the most interesting/relevant appearing articles and books. This process left me in the peculiar
position of having requested 25 articles to be sent to me through Interlibrary
loan and having only three articles downloaded. (at least nine of the articles
that I’d requested by interlibrary loan had been published since 1990, and I
had expected them to be available online, but they were not).
Needing something more to work with, I searched the eleven selected
online databases listed above for ‘group dynamics’, which is a frequent keyword
from the ‘small group development*’ article entries in my EndNote library. Oh joy, there were 20,977 hits. A search for Subject Terms rather than for
Default Fields narrowed the number of hits to 16,406. I then limited the search in Academic Search Elite to Full Text,
Primary Source Document, Article. For
CINAHL I limited the search to Peer Reviewed.
In ERIC I selected Journal Articles.
With MLA and PsycINFO I picked Peer Reviewed Journals. In PsycINFO I selected English and Original
Journal Article. In PsycBOOKS I picked
Chapter, and in SocINDEX I chose Periodical and Article. This brought it down to 774. Another trip through the article keywords
brought up ‘leadership’. I added it to
‘group dynamics’ as a Default Field search. Down to 74 references! I added the search to my EBSCOhost
folder. Investigation of the new
results provided 10 more interesting articles, and nine of them were
downloadable. Finally I had something
to work with, and in addition, articles and books soon began to pour in from
the inter-library loan system. From
this point on the process was one of reading, checking the occasional
reference, chasing down the occasional article (often ones mentioned in other
articles), and trying to make sense of what I had. I think it important to note that the journals Journal for Specialists in Group Work and Small Group Research were both particularly
useful and unavailable online. Happily,
Small Group Research
is in the SFU stacks.
For the purpose of this paper, a small group
is something more than a small random gathering of people. In NLS terms, “A group is more than one
person. A collection of people becomes
a group when members:
·
See
themselves as a group
·
Share
the same purpose, goals or ideals
·
Begin
to identify with one another
·
Interact
with, influence and react to one another (Allen, Mehal, Palmateer
& Sluser, 1995, p.110).
As Brower (1996) has it, “…for [a] group of individuals to become a “real” group,
members must develop a shared group schema – a shared understanding of the
norms, rules, roles, and meaning of their actions and interactions. The process occurs in stages” (p.343). More rigorously, Guzzo and Dickson (1996,
pp.308-309, as cited in Morgeson, 2005, p.592) offer that teams are made up of
people who
(a) “see themselves and who are seen by
others as a social entity,” (b) “who are interdependent because of the tasks
they perform as members of a group,” (c), “who are embedded in one or more
larger social systems (e.g., community, organization),” and (d) “who perform
tasks that affect others (such as customers or coworkers).”
NLS student groups and coach
training groups meet these criteria.
In an experiential program such as NLS, the group provides the context
for learning (Cassidy,
2001; Fenwick, 2003; Jackson & Prosser, 1989; Kormanski, 1991). Students learn skills, experiment with them,
receive feedback on their skill use and give feedback to others (Himsl,
1973). Himsl described three levels of group
utilization by students: safe group
use, careful group use, and risky group use, with movement up the scale
paralleling the growth of trust in and within the group. Neither he nor any other NLS theoretician of
the time included Tuckman’s (1965) stages of group development in NLS theory or
training, though Tuckman’s four stages and Tuckman and Jensen’s (1977) five
stages of group development have since been included by subsequent Life Skills
theorists, coach trainers and coaches (Allen
et al., 1995,
pp.123-132).
Tuckman (1965) reviewed and analyzed 50 articles about group
development and came to a four stage synthesis: forming, storming, norming, and
performing. Tuckman and Jensen (1977)
added a fifth stage, adjourning (Table 1). Although Shambaugh (1978)
had doubts about the validity of Tuckman and Jensen’s (1977) work, he later (Shambaugh,
1996)
proposed an elaboration of Tuckman and Jensen’s model that follows the work
of Lacoursiere (1980),
who split the forming stage into two options, positive orientation or negative
orientation. Shambaugh (1996) added disenchantment (a second storming stage)
between norming and performing. The
usefulness of Lacoursiere’s (1980)
distinction between positive and negative orientation in the forming stage has
received tangential support from other researchers (Ashby
& DeGraaf, 1998; Cowan, 1976; Kivlighan & Tarrant, 2001; Stockton,
Morran & Clark, 2004; Sy, Côté & Saavedra, 2005). Shambaugh eventually concluded that Tuckman
and Jensen’s (1977)
five stage model had come to be the standard model of small group development (Shambaugh,
2000,
p.222).
Wheelan’s (1990) extensive review of the literature yielded results
similar to those of Tuckman (1965) and Tuckman and Jensen (1977). Wheelan, however, added depth to Tuckman and
Jensen’s five stage model with her Integrated Model of Group Development (Wheelan, 1990; Wheelan
& Lisk, 2000) (Table 1).
Perhaps the most thorough recent meta-analysis of group development
models is that of Mennecke, Hoffer, and Wynne (1992). Mennecke et al. identified three types of
group development models, with subsets in each:
1. Progressive
Models: Equilibrium Model; Linear-Progressive Models (e.g. Tuckman &
Jensen, 1977);
2. Cyclical
Models: Life-Cycle Models; Recurring Cycle Models (e.g. Schutz, 1982);
3. Non-Sequential
Models: Contingency Model (Poole,
1983);
Time, Interaction & Performance (TIP) Model (McGrath,
1991);
Punctuated Equilibrium Model.
Mennecke et al. noted that several phases recurred throughout all of the models with the exception of the Punctuated Equilibrium Model (p.541). They presented a synthesis (Table 1) that they offered as a baseline for research rather than as “a predictive model for group interactions” (p.541). Their study appears to be a confirmation of Tuckman’s (1965) and Tuckman and Jensen’s (1977) theory of the stages of small group development. Indeed, the Tuckman and Jensen model has become so ubiquitous that it is sometimes used without attribution, but simply as though it is common knowledge (i.e. (Davies, 1996, p. 131).
Having found
that the stages of group development are generally agreed upon (Kormanski, 1990; McGrew,
Bilotta & Deeney, 1999; Mennecke et al., 1992; Shambaugh, 2000), I turned my attention to the relationship between the literature and
NewStart Life Skills theory and practice.
Table 1: A comparison of Tuckman and Jensen’s (1977) stages of group
development model with similar subsequent models
|
Tuckman and Jensen (1977) |
Kormanski and Mozenter (1987) |
Wheelan (1990) |
Mennecke et al. (1992) |
Shambaugh (1996) |
|
Forming |
Awareness |
Dependency and inclusion |
Orientation |
Forming (positive or negative orientation) |
|
Storming |
Conflict |
Counterdependency and fight |
Exploration |
Storming |
|
Norming |
Cooperation |
Trust and structure |
Normalization |
Norming |
|
Disenchantment |
||||
|
Performing |
Productivity |
Work |
Production |
Performing |
|
Adjourning |
Separation |
Ending / task completion |
Termination |
Adjourning |
“…real groups are often “messier” than an ideal
group” (Brower, 1996, p.337).
Asch (1952)
pointed out that researchers prefer to study groups with which they have
considerable control over variables.
This often leads to the study of small, short in duration groups. For example, Mayo, Meindl, and Pastor (1996)
drew conclusions about the deleterious effect that heterogeneous groups have on
their leaders after studying homogeneous and heterogeneous groups consisting of
three to six members that lasted only 30 minutes (small, short-term,
heterogeneous groups). In contrast, but still to the point, McGrew et al. (1999)
studied long-lived homogeneous groups of from five to ten members ( small,
long-term, homogeneous groups). NLS
groups usually have from 12 to 20 heterogeneous members, last for six to 12 weeks
(occasionally up to 16 weeks), and run for five or six hours a day, four or
five days a week (larger, long-term, heterogeneous groups). The Tuckmanesque progressive development
model, which admittedly can be seen to play itself out on a grand scale over
the life of an NLS group, is not in itself sufficient to describe the
development of these long-term groups, since there is such a huge amount of
interaction, learning, and individual and group development that takes place
before the final adjournment.
In response to their own understanding of the situation, Ashby and DeGraaf (1998) described an application of therapeutic concepts (working or therapeutic alliance, transference, and real relationship) in various of Tuckman and J