Lost at Sea:
Pedagogy and Process in an Undergraduate Group Counseling Course
D.W. Darling, PhD
Southern Utah University
This spring semester, I taught Human Relations in Group Dynamics for the first time. My main worry while preparing the course was that a class about group counseling could accidentally turn into a group therapy session if I wasn’t careful. The course had, in fact, been intentionally taught this way in previous semesters at our small rural college where affordable mental health care is often inaccessible to our students. Further, the closer I looked at the textbook I had chosen, which was very clinically focused, the less sure I was about how to keep that from happening. I learned quickly that in a course about group dynamics, group process tends to show up whether invited or not: students negotiate roles, work out authority, decide whether to participate, send signals about norms. This article serves as a description of what I tried in one iteration of this course, how students responded, and what I learned about pedagogy for this type of class from student reflections and course evaluations.
On the first day of class, I asked my twenty undergraduates to imagine they had survived a shipwreck, drawing from the well-known “Lost at Sea” exercise developed by Jones (1975). They had a life raft, fifteen salvaged items, and a job: rank the items in order of usefulness for survival. The items included such things as rations, a fishing kit, mosquito netting, drinking water, shark repellent, and rum. First, they were assigned to work alone on their ranking for seven minutes. Then, they were instructed to pair up and produce one ranking together, with the rule that they had to reach consensus by convincing each other rather than voting. Then, those pairs joined into groups of four and produced one ranking under the same rule. Finally, all twenty came together and tried, as a single group, to agree on a list.
The first task, in which they worked alone, allowed them a little bit of time to get familiar with the items and the exercise itself. Once the students moved into paired work, they generally got to one shared ranking with some friction, but without much trouble. Groups of four took longer; the conversation slowed and a few students stopped contributing as loudly. As the class finally came together to complete the activity as one large group, they were unable to completely finish in the time allotted; further, at this point in the exercise, only a few people did most of the talking. Predictably, students tried to find an expert (a student with wilderness training, a student veteran) to rely on. The rule that they had to reach consensus instead of voting kept the discussion going past the point where most of the room was still trying.
This activity is a well-traveled exercise in group decision-making. It illustrates process gain and process loss as group size increases, and it does so quickly: in about forty minutes, the class produced a usable demonstration of how group size affects coordination. I picked it for the first day because I wanted students to have a shared experience of group decision-making before they read anything about it.
Human Relations in Group Dynamics is an undergraduate course. It is not a graduate practicum and it is certainly not a group therapy training class. I was explicit on the syllabus, in the assignment instructions, and out loud on the first day that this was a class about group counseling, not a therapy group.
And yet, the course was structured to produce group-like conditions anyway. Chapter previews, which were student-generated concept maps, outlines, or notes, were due before each Monday class, which meant students arrived having already familiarized themselves with concepts I would otherwise have lectured at them. Friday class sessions were reserved for student-led facilitation: pairs of students took responsibility for teaching their classmates a chapter through whatever activity, demonstration, or discussion they chose. When I did speak in front of the room, it was rarely to deliver content. Most class time was discussion, with me serving as moderator.
The pedagogy underneath all of this was that a class about group dynamics could not be best taught as content. If twenty students sat through sixteen weeks of lectures on therapeutic factors and stages of group development and theoretical comparisons without ever feeling those forces at work in the room they shared, they would know about groups but they would not know groups. The structure I built was a bet that a sufficiently discussion-heavy, student-led, ambiguity-tolerant classroom could become enough of a working group that students would experience some of what they were studying, even without my explicitly saying so.
Whether the bet paid off depends on what evidence you accept. The quantitative evidence (exam scores, completion rates) told me students learned the content. From my perspective, the more interesting evidence was in the students’ end-of-semester evaluations; any comments referenced below are paraphrased composites.
The warmth was there. Several students wrote something close to: “The discussion-based format helped me develop a deeper insight into the therapy models than I would have gotten from lectures.” Others wrote, “Even though therapy work is not where I am headed, this class helped me understand how people work in groups in a way I did not expect.” That is more or less the claim I had been hoping the structure would let them make.
The friction, however, was more interesting. One representative comment: “It would be helpful to have more knowledge of the final exam before starting the chapter notes, so we could write them in a more useful way.” Another: “I would have appreciated more structure for what to pay attention to.”
Read in any other context, these are the standard end-of-semester complaints of college students who would prefer to be told what to memorize. Read in the context of a course on group dynamics, they might be something else. These comments represent students articulating, maybe without realizing it, the exact pull that group therapy clients exert on their leaders: stop the process, give us content, tell us what to do, take the expert seat and fill it. The wish for the leader to take over, for a better-defined task, a clearer authority to defer to.
That a college student wishes for more structure is unremarkable. That they wish for it in language indistinguishable from what we read about in the textbook is, I think, evidence that the format had done some of the work the textbook alone could not.
Notably, because I got student feedback after the course ended, I did not have the chance to share this observation with the students themselves. I also did not explicitly explain what I thought might happen up front. Frequently, I chose to not stop a discussion to point out that what they were experiencing was here-and-now process. I did not pause Lost at Sea on the first day to ask them to notice what had happened to their willingness to advocate for a ranking as the group got larger, but rather waited until after the moment had passed to ask them what they had noticed. I did, occasionally, take a moment in our class to point out the parallel concept in the chapter being read that week, which arguably was not explicit enough. Whether to make the meta-frame more explicit is a pedagogical question I have not yet answered for myself, and one I am inclined to experiment with the next time I teach the course.
What I am claiming, I believe, is modest. Students ultimately named the group dynamics in their evaluations, unprompted, in the language of group process. The structural choices were sufficient, not optimal but sufficient, to produce conditions under which group dynamics could be observed by the people inside them.
Being an early career psychologist and new professor, eager to prove myself, also plays a role here. The hardest part of teaching this course was not the chapter on Gestalt approaches, which I was underprepared for, or the chapter on psychodrama as therapy, which I was underpracticed in. For me, the hardest part was the silence after a student asked a question and I prompted answers from the group, when every instinct I had as a newly licensed psychologist with a degree to justify was to fill that silence with something credentialed and correct.
Arguably, the pull to over-explain is the pull of credentialism, and credentialism is loudest in the years right after you earn the credential. It is also, not incidentally, the same pull a new group therapist feels in the first long pause of a session: do something, perform competence, justify the role. I suspect that holding back is harder when the credential is freshly earned than when it is decades old. Letting twenty undergraduates work out a Lost at Sea ranking without intervening, or letting a student facilitator stumble through a Friday session without rescuing them, or letting a discussion go where it wants to go past where I would have ended it: all of this asked the same of me as a new professor as it may have in my role as a new group leader.
The Lost at Sea exercise demonstrated process gain and process loss in one short class period. The semester demonstrated the same thing more slowly, and the open-ended questions on the final, paired with the end of course evaluations, told me where each had occurred. The students wrote about deeper insight into the models, and they used the language of the models to express their discomfort with ambiguity. These responses, to me, are evidence the class did its work.
This may be a small claim. But for an undergraduate course on group dynamics taught by a psychologist who was teaching it for the first time and who is still figuring out what she has to offer, a small claim is the right size. Often, the room can do more of the teaching than the lecture can, even when the leader is herself a little lost at sea.
References
Jones, J. E. (1975). Lost at sea: A consensus-seeking task. In J. W. Pfeiffer & J. E. Jones (Eds.), The 1975 annual handbook for group facilitators (pp. 28-34). University Associates.
About the Author
D.W. Darling, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Southern Utah University, where she teaches at both undergraduate and graduate levels. A licensed clinical psychologist and U.S. Air Force veteran, her clinical work has included individual, couples, and group therapy across military, university, and rural community settings.