Drama Matters

Groups to Make Friends

While one-to-one work with children with Social, Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties can be very effective indeed, especially with children who have emotional and attachment issues, group work is better able to help children who find it hard to make friends and those who need help in resolving conflicts. Groups help children (and adults) empathise with other people and imagine what it might be like to be them.

The ability to take the role of the other person – to empathise with them – is at the core of emotional literacy programmes and forms the basis of all drama work.

Drama Matters offers schools half-termly and termly programmes of work with both whole class groups of younger primary school children and small group work with Years 5 and 6.

Rationale for the Group Work

We all live and work in small/large groups of people. The human condition is inherently social; so therapeutic work in schools in a group setting is of equal validity with individual one-to-one work of child and adult. Furthermore, children in primary schools are familiar with working in small learning groups.

Sylvia McNamara and Gill Moreton (2001)¹ suggest that sometimes teachers avoid putting pupils with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties into situations that they (the teachers) judge the children might find difficult. And this applies to group work; some teachers believe that these children need one to one work only. This leads to the isolation of the children with EBD and with no positive opportunity to practise social skills themselves and to witness the modelling of good social skills by their peers.

Where there are limited resources in terms of time and money, group work is cost effective and short-term groups in primary schools over a term have been found effective over a long term.

Children may be referred for several reasons, for example externalising behaviours expressed in anger, and an inability to co-operate with adults and with peers and for internalising behavours such as shyness and difficulties in making friends. Group work is often appropriate for these children.

The Aims of Group Work in Schools are:

• To give emotional support to group members, helping them to communicate their thoughts, feelings and beliefs through drama.

• To help group members find ways of expressing and resolving emotional difficulties and conflicts within the group process.

• To teach group members the skills of emotional literacy.

The Objectives of the Courses, both whole class and small groups, are that Group Members:

• will be better able to express themselves emotionally and

• will be able to get on better with their peers.

• Will transfer their skills and their positive experiences of the group process to the classroom and playground.

Course Duration

Courses run from between 6 and 8 sessions contained in one term. We come to the school once a week, for a morning or for the whole school day depending on the number of groups we are asked to run.

Contact Brenda Meldrum for availability and costs.

¹ Sylvia McNamara & Gill Moreton Managing Behaviour. London: David Fulton Publisher