Run an anger management group

Some of the methods known to work for young people include:

• breathing exercises: these are a very powerful tool for helping the body relax and bringing the heart rate down to more normal levels. Breathing exercises should be taught professionally and are one of the most effective methods of helping a young person calm down.
• walking away: removing yourself from the source of the anger sounds obvious, but it’s often the last thing young people think of when they’re faced with a difficult situation. This doesn’t mean walking away from a teacher who is addressing them, but it might mean arranging to leave a classroom if a young person senses they are beginning to be in danger of getting angry. Some young people have negotiated a traffic light system where they have green, amber and red cards on their desk. If they feel there’s a problem they can put a red card in sight and the teacher will allow them to step outside the classroom to go and sit in Learning Support for a few minutes before returning to class. This method obviously involves the cooperation of the school, but it’s sometimes possible to make arrangements through the Learning Support Team.
• stress balls: because anger affects the body in such physical ways, movement and exercise is often a good way of helping a young person calm down. Where running or some other normal form of activity is difficult, using a stress ball is the next best option - the kind of soft executive stress reliever that you crush with you hand. This is often helpful if a young person feels themselves getting tense.

Alternatives to anger

Helping a young person avoid anger is only one part of a good anger management programme. If they are going to successfully change their behaviour, they will need to learn new ways of coping with conflict. This means thinking about negotiation and assertiveness skills. For young people this may also involve the even harder of backing down or accepting authority. This is often very difficult for young people who have ongoing behavioural difficulties.

The group programme will need to look at how young people can develop these conflict resolution skills. Role playing is often a helpful tool in rehearsing common situations and the group can also report back on progress as the course continues.

Setting up and running a group

Organising and running an anger management group presents some challenges in a school environment. Some of the most common issues are:

• Selecting young people to take part in a group: It’s vital that young people really do want to be part of the group and are genuinely ready to begin to tackle their problem with anger. Sometimes teachers will be keen for a particular young person to take part, but it’s always important to establish for yourself that the young person is willing to take part. Groups full of young people whom the school have selected without the young people being genuinely willing are doomed to failure! The best practice is to meet each potential young person yourself and conduct a short ‘initial assessment’ where you can get to know them, explain the course and ensure that they want to participate.
• Finding a suitable time and room is also vital. Often schools will be willing to allow you to meet during classes, with group members missing a lesson each week for the duration of the course. For practical reasons this is usually better than using a lunchtime, where time is likely to be too limiting. The room will need to be suitable too: perhaps the most important thing is to make sure it’s private. Having pupils or staff walk through a room or appear at the door can be very disruptive. so you will need to choose somewhere where you will not be disturbed. Of course, schools may have only a few rooms available at any point, so you will need to choose the best available.
• Ensure the time the group meets is suitable. Running a group during the last lesson of the day, for example, is likely to be difficult since the kind of students in the group are also likely to find good behaviour more difficult as the day progresses.
• If possible, it’s much more useful to have two group leaders working together. This allows you to share the different exercise and elements of each meeting, and enables one person to be concentrating on watching the reactions and input of group members whilst the other leader runs an exercise.
• Groups vary in size and there are no hard and fast rules. However, as a rule of thumb, groups tend to work best with between 5 and 7 members. More than 7 begins to impact the intimacy of the group and also makes group exercises last too long.
• Anger management groups can run as long as is deemed necessary. Between 6 and 9 weeks is often about right, but much will depend on how long it takes to work through the planned curriculum. The most important point is to make a positive difference in the lives of the young people.

First meeting

When a group meets for the first time, the group leaders face the challenge of ‘creating’ the group dynamics. Students may not know each other and will need to learn to trust each other if they are going to feel safe enough to talk honestly. The first meeting is also crucial in establishing the basic group rules that everyone will need to promise to keep. Group leaders will need to suggest these rules, but everyone needs to accept them. It’s good practice to write these rules out and display them prominently during each meeting.

Group leading skills

A detailed look at group leading skills is beyond the brief of this guide, but it almost goes without saying that these are essential. These skills involve not only being able to keep order and introduce exercises, but also to know how to frame and put questions to group members, show good reflective listening skills, and be able to help the group develop its own identity. These skills can be found listed in numerous books, but are also learned through experience. Again, the benefit of having two group leaders is that there is someone who can be listening and thinking about some of these issues whilst the other leader is coordinating an exercise.

Developing course material

This guide is not meant to be a curriculum for an anger management group: it’s simply an outline of the areas that a group should cover. If you want to run a group you will need to either develop your own material or purchase a ready-to-use course.

There is a proliferation of anger management courses on the web, but many are very basic and geared towards individual study. The kind of course that works best for small groups will contain plenty of interactive exercises the group can work on together so you should make sure anything you consider buying contains these kind of practical resources. You may need to adapt the material you buy, including ideas from other sources and creating something suitable for the young people you’re working with in the group.

• The Conflict Center in Denver produce a range of material including a middle school curriculum (for Keystage 3 in the UK): www.conflictcenter.org.
• Lucky Duck Publishing has a range of workbooks including ‘Crucial Skills’, a course for young people aged 11 to 16: www.luckyduck.co.uk/shop.

Training

You can check the training pages at schoolswork.co.uk for the latest list of training courses and events for leading anger management groups.

Feel free to use and distribute this guide but please acknowledge schoolswork.co.uk as the source.