Group Counseling in Schools: Annotated Bibliography

Crepsi, tony D (2009). Group counseling in the schools: legal, ethical, and treatment

issues in social practice. Psychology in Schools, 46(3), 273-279.

This article closely examines different ethical, legal, and treatment issues that arise in school group counseling. The author starts by looking at some of the psychological issues that effect school aged children. He also suggest some appropriate topics to offer group counseling on such as a divorce group, a drug and alcohol abuse group, or a physical abuse group. The article goes on to explain several different types of group intervention such as educational guidance groups, counseling groups, and therapy groups. Five different stages of groups; forming stage, storming stage, norming stage, and the performing stage are broken down into 4 subset stages for clearer explanation. After addressing the group types and stages, legal and ethical issues such as consent, confidentiality, notification, member selection, choosing group topics, dangerous behavior, parental disclosure, dual relationships, counseling/progress notes, and boundaries are explored.

I found this article to be very informative and helpful. I liked the way the author broke down the five stages of counseling into four more sub phases, these sub phases are ones that are easy to identify. Which can help in tracking how well or how quickly the group is forming and growing. Once looking back upon these stages I was able to reflect on my group work with preschoolers who have social, emotional, and behavioral disturbances. I could identify how most of the children who have been in my group for 3 or more months are in the commitment subset of the norming stage. However, two of my children who started less then a month a...

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...that compliments that specific phase of the play therapy. This article was very concise with not only suggesting activities but then describing the activities and defining the rules so that the reader could then add these activities to his or her own repertoire. This article made it very easy for the reader to replicate this combined form of therapy by educating the reader on both therapies first and then taking them step by step through the merger process. I found this article to be particularly helpful to me because I have been looking into classes and trainings on adventure based counseling because I would like to one day be a certified adventure based counselor. This article gave me some great ideas for activities to use. Some of these activities would be simple enough for me to replicate and use with my preschooler in my current job as a group therapist.