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
Jensen’s (1977) stages. “It is the complex and
dynamic nature of group development that calls for a richer understanding of
the process of group development beyond the traditional sequential (linear)
models of development” (Ashby & DeGraaf, 1998, p.162). Davies (1996)
suggested that all five stages (after Tuckman & Jensen, 1977) could be seen
to operate within each of the first four stages of group development. In this model, during each of its first four
stages a group forms around the new task, storms about roles and
understandings, norms around agreed guidelines and structure, performs the
task, and then adjourns the stage before forming around the next stage’s
task. Davies (1996) speculated that in
the fifth, adjourning stage, the five stages are done in reverse order. McGrew et al. (1999) seem to concur, saying “The data suggest the need for an extended stage model of team formation
that includes analogous decay stages: de-norming, de-storming, de-forming. The
data support a pattern of increasing and decreasing performance that mirrors
the formation and dissolution of teams” (p.209).
Schutz’s (1982) recurring cycle
model of Inclusion, Control, and Openness (which also suggests that in the
final group stage – or in this case, in the final cycle – the order of stages is reversed) can be seen
to operate in long-term NLS groups.
Schutz’s theory might be seen as a spiral of ever-increasing
interdependence, with each loop building on the accomplishments and
difficulties of the previous one.
Poole’s (1983) Contingency Model
(non-sequential) recognizes an underlying developmental structure that is subject
to alteration in response to contingencies that arise in the group. Contingencies could include a change in
membership and/or leadership, a scheduling disruption, the intrusion of an
unexpected and urgent topic, lack of time to complete a task, etc. These sorts of contingencies can arise at
any moment in a long-term NLS group.
McGrath’s (1991) Time, Interaction
& Performance (TIP) Model (non-sequential) speculates that there are
multiple group development processes happening simultaneously. McGrath created a grid that inter-relates
three functions (Production, Well-Being, Member Support) with four modes
(Inception, Problem Solving, Conflict Resolution, Execution). This model, of all those that I’ve looked
at, seems to best describe the “messiness” of a 12 to 20 member long-term NLS
group.
The major gap that I’ve found in the
small group development literature is the lack of a group development theory
that synthesises the simultaneous linear, cyclic, and non-sequential aspects
that are extant in long-term NLS groups.
Various of the theories are useful and applicable in various group
situations, but none give a satisfactory summation of how things really happen
in such groups.
Transformative learning (Mezirow,
1991, 1995) is the heart of the NLS enterprise, though
the language and theory of transformative learning were not yet developed when
NLS was created.
At its core, transformative learning theory
is elegantly simple. Through some
event, which could be as traumatic as losing a job or as ordinary as an
unexpected question, an individual becomes aware of holding a limiting or
distorted view. If the individual
critically examines this view, opens herself to alternatives, and consequently
changes the way she sees things, she has transformed some part of how she makes
meaning out of the world” (Cranton, P., 2002, p.64).
In NLS terms, learning and using skills such as listening, questioning,
giving and receiving feedback, identifying feelings, identifying assumptions,
arguing fairly, problem-solving, helpful and harmful group behaviours, and
evaluating (Adilman,
Maxwell & Wilkinson, 1994; Allen et al., 1995; Conger & Himsl, 1973),
lead to cognitive restructuring and conceptual growth, and thus to Balanced
Self-Determined behaviour (Mullen,
1985; Smith, 1982). The NLS Balanced Self-Determined individual (Allen
et al., 1995; Curtiss & Friedman, 1973; Curtiss & Warren, 1973)
can be said to have experienced transformative learning. As BSD behaviours are learned and adopted,
group development is enhanced (London,
2003).
NLS uses small groups to promote transformative learning, i.e.
encouraging members to become Balanced Self-Determined individuals. While
transformative learning is implicit in much of the small group development
literature, it is rarely directly addressed as an influence on the group
development process, or as an outcome.
This may well be because transformative learning theory is a relatively
recent construct (Mezirow,
1991, 1995). The skill and ability of group leaders, the
skills and attitudes that group members bring to the group, and group member
growth and interaction in and across the stages of group development, are all
influential factors on personal transformation. Nonetheless, transformation cannot be taught or forced, it can
only be supported and invited (Cassidy,
2001; Cranton, P. A., 2002; Ritchhart & Perkins, 2000). NLS theoreticians would do well to update
the NLS literature in transformative learning terms.
NLS coaches are typically trained to model the skills that they teach
and to support their students’ learning in what may now considered to be a
transformational leadership style (Curtiss
& Friedman, 1973; Kivlighan & Tarrant, 2001; Stockton et al., 2004; Sy
et al., 2005; Wheelan, 1990).
The collective action that transforming
leadership generates empowers those who participate in the process. There is hope, there is optimism, there is
energy. In essence, transforming
leadership is a leadership that facilitates the redefinition of a people’s
mission and vision, a renewal of their commitment, and the restructuring of
their systems for goal accomplishment (Roberts, 1985, as cited in Leithwood,
1992, p.9).
If there is a direct relationship between transformative learning
theory and transformational leadership, it may be that leaders must themselves
do their own transformative learning in order to honestly exert
transformational leadership (Price,
2003). Small group leaders who practice
transformational leadership are likely to avoid Shambaugh’s (1996) negative
orientation in the forming stage (Sy
et al., 2005). NLS coach training includes conflict management
skills (Ellis & Fisher, 1975;
Kormanski, 1982; Wanous, Reichers & Malik, 1984), which are important and useful in the storming stage. In general,
transformational leaders maximize the possibilities for task and process
achievement throughout all stages of group development (Burghardt,
1977; Johnstone, 1995; Kent, 1996; Leithwood, 1992). NLS theoreticians would do well to update
the NLS literature in terms of transformational leadership.
Some authors (Allen,
1991; Burghardt, 1977; Goos, Galbraith & Renshaw, 2002; Johnson &
Iacobucci, 1995; McKendall, 2000)
discuss the positive impact on group development of educating and enlisting the
group members in following and monitoring the group development process. This sort of research-based discussion seems
to be rare, perhaps due to a predominant research focus on understanding group
development rather than explicitly seeking means to influence it.
Alternatively, and quite possibly, the situation may simply reflect a gap in my
own research and review process.
The
literature provides background and opportunity for further research in small
group development as it relates to NewStart Life Skills. Existing theory does not adequately address
the complexity of the group development process in long-term, heterogeneous
groups such as those typically used in NLS training. Opportunities for NLS theoreticians to update NLS theory in the
light of developments in transformative learning and transformational
leadership are also apparent.
Deliberate use of metacognitive learning holds interest as a group
development tool.
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