Skillful facilitation of House Meetings is one of the most challenging, but also most impactful, aspects of providing a treatment experience. Developing a group of troubled kids into a high-performing team, that absorbs each other's misbehaviors and promotes maturation, is a difficult task. Storming behaviors are common among kids in residential treatment. In House Meetings, a significant number of kids will deeply struggle with inappropriate meeting behaviors – ranging from aggressively menacing the whole room to simply not paying attention or actively distracting others.
However, storming behaviors, that sabotage team-building efforts, can be leveraged by staff to actually speed up the team-building process. One of the best ways to do that is to focus not on the misbehaviors, but on the impact of those misbehaviors on team-building. That is greatly enhanced by repeatedly explaining to the kids the purposes of forming a strong team, the purposes of House Meetings, and really the purpose of their entire residential treatment experience.
