Synopsis
The Practical Handbook of Group Counseling is written mainly as a primer to be used in group work with children, adolescents, and parents. The first edition was used by over three hundred colleges, universities and public school systems in the United States. Its unique design allows the reader to use it as a ready reference for practical information. It is presented as a text that can challenge the individual s ideas and upon which the counselor can develop techniques that will fit his/her personality and meet the needs of the group. The text was the first comprehensive practical book in this field. It is a synthesis of the various problems and successes that the counselor may encounter and offers one model that may be useful in resolving and/or enhancing some of these issues. The author utilizes the public school setting as the vehicle for presenting his material. Since the school is a cross section of the population, the model proposed here can be adapted to other social agencies that utilize group counseling techniques. Group counseling can be a very useful technique in the school program. It has been used in different school settings for various purposes. Counselors, teachers and administrators have used it with above-average children with leadership skills, average children, potential dropouts, under-achievers, disruptive children, developmentally-disabled children, adolescent pregnant girls between the ages of eleven and eighteen, and specialty groups such as peer counselors, fashion design students, and students with specific somatic problems. It has been used specifically for college orientations and vocational guidance. When Dr. Glass began doing group counseling in the schools, less than 5% of counselors were doing group work. Most of the counseling was done on an individual, one-to-one basis. Dr. Glass noticed how different group counseling in the publics schools was from classical group therapy. After developing a preliminary group counseling model in three different middle schools, Dr. Glass used this experience to train all of the elementary school counselors in Baltimore City, subsequently training all the middle and senior high school counselors. After working with the schools in Baltimore City, Dr. Glass trained all the counselors of the larger school systems in Maryland, using a systems approach by working with counselors of a particular school system at one time. For the school systems that were not involved in this project, Dr. Glass trained professors from junior colleges in Maryland. These professors became the trainers for the remaining smaller school systems in the state. Dr. Glass introduced the first formal group counseling course in the Department of Education at the Johns Hopkins University. The second edition of The Practical Handbook of Group Counseling reflects Dr. Glass s practical experience, utilizing questions and suggestions that counselors and his students have made.
About the Author
Dr. Sheldon D. Glass is an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is one of the few people in the nation to have completed formal training in education, pediatrics, and child and adolescent psychiatry. Dr. Glass is currently chairman of the Counseling and Human Service Council in the Department of Education at the Johns Hopkins University. While on the faculty of the Department of Education at Hopkins, Dr. Glass introduced the five new courses to the curriculum including its first formal group counseling course. He has had a wide range of experience including being a consultant to the departments of education in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland, where he developed the first state wide training program for public school counselors, including the Baltimore City Public School System.
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