Unit 1: Effective Group Skills And Team Building

Students are taught the importance of effective groups and begin practicing essential group skills. The unit emphasizes cooperation, synergy, appropriate risk-taking, clear communication, and positive mental attitudes.

Unit 2: Anger Management

This unit is a cognitive approach to managing anger and frustration. Students are taught skills to help them reframe anger and use it as a positive force in their lives as opposed to a destructive force. The model helps students identify their own triggers and cues to anger, and helps them develop alternative coping strategies.

Unit 3: Effective Communication

This unit is the cornerstone of the Discovery Program. The emphasis of this unit centers on teaching and practicing the three different modes of communication in Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis. This is a two-week unit that requires sufficient blocks of time to teach, practice, and receive feedback on role-play scenarios. Students demonstrate knowledge of these skills by writing and performing a final role-play and passing objective quizzes and tests on content. Application of these skills to a students’ life outside of the classroom is imperative.

Unit 4: Assertiveness Training

The goal of this unit is to help students distinguish the difference between aggressive, assertive, and passive behaviors and responses. Assertiveness Training compliments previous lessons learned on Transactional Analysis. Students identify their typical behavior types and role-play assertive responses. While the model only takes a relatively short time to learn, it is a skill that must be continually practiced and reinforced.

Unit 5: Problem Solving

This unit focuses on solving problems in a systematic way utilizing five basic steps: Stop, List, Choose, Do, Evaluate. Although this unit appears to be concise and basic, it is the “umbrella skill” of the program. This unit takes time, and students need to be aware of the overall importance of approaching problems in their lives in an effective manner.

Unit 6: Conflict Resolution

This unit focuses on conflict and conflict management. These skills build directly upon TA, Assertiveness Training, and Problem Solving units. First, students are asked to identify the difference between problems and interpersonal conflicts, and then they are taught a systematic approach to dealing with conflict in a positive manner. We want students to be assertive and have the courage and skills necessary to resolve conflict in a positive manner.