Counselling Sessions

In addition to the guides for class sessions, you will also find four Counselling Sessions; these are designed to allow participants to exchange ideas and learn from one-another in a more informal way than is possible when the whole group is together.

These sessions are very important, and you may find it desirable to include more of them, focussing on different topics where the participants want more individual attention. The whole group should be divided into sub-groups of no more than four women; each should have a counsellor, who is willing and able to commit the necessary time to the task.

If there are enough instructors or other staff who are in close touch with the course you may use them as counsellors; if not, you should ask members of the group who appear to be more confident in the particular topic to act as counsellors. If you do this, be sure that as many of the participants as possible have the opportunity to serve as counsellors, in order to avoid giving the impression that some participants are "better" than others.

You should use the results of the counselling sessions as input for the subsequent full class sessions, since they will give you a very good indication of what participants need to learn. It should also be possible to arrange individual meetings with participants who need individual instruction on particular topics, and the counselling sessions will show you when this is necessary.