Group Leadership Skills provides a road map and a practical toolkit for users to lead all types of groups effectively. Drawing on extensive teaching and clinical experience, authors Mei-whei Chen and Christopher Rybak give readers numerous skills, techniques, insights, and case illustrations demonstrating how to tap into the heart of group therapy: the interpersonal processes. The text covers group processes from beginning to end, including setting up a group, running the first session, facilitating the opening and closing of each session, working with tension and conflict, and using advanced skills and intervention techniques to facilitate member change. The Second Edition expands on group leadership skills to include methods of running mandate groups, semi-structured groups, basic level unstructured groups, and advanced level here-and-now focused groups, as well as using psychodrama techniques to heal unresolved grief and loss.
Dr. Chen is a professor at Northeastern Illinois University. She teaches group counseling, individual counseling, theories in counseling and
psychotherapy, mental health counseling, grief counseling, and stress management. In addition, she maintains her own private practice, on the
side, in Illinois.
She has received three Faculty Excellence Awards from Northeastern Illinois University. As well, she received the Beverly Brown Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Field of Group Counseling from the Illinois Association for Specialists in Group Work (IASGW).
Besides the text of Group Leadership Skills, Dr. Chen also publishes Individual Counseling and Therapy: Skills and Techniques (3rd edition coming out in 2018) and has published many journal articles in related areas.
Dr. Rybak was a professor and chair of the Department of Educational Leadership & Human Development at Bradley University and a specialist in group work. He taught group counseling, counseling diverse populations, practicum and internship in counseling, theories and techniques of counseling, and pre-practicum in counseling.
Dr. Rybak served as the director of the ELH Counseling Clinic and several times as president of the Illinois Association for Specialists in Group Work.
He received awards for innovative teaching and integrated learning, a research award, two Fulbright scholarship awards, and the Beverly Brown Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Field of Group Counseling from the Illinois Association for Specialists in Group Work (IASGW).
