Abstract
Competency frameworks specify what effective group work requires, but less is known about how beginners develop an understanding of group work. This qualitative study examined how students with limited prior group counseling experience understood group work during a five-week experiential component of a group counseling course in a Chinese master’s-level Mental Health Education program. Using reflexive thematic analysis, we examined 536 weekly reflective journals from 108 students, including comparisons of individual participants’ reflections across the five weeks. Three interconnected themes were developed: learning to see the group as a structured, developing relational whole; learning to facilitate through purposeful design, the fostering of member-to-member interaction, and attention to the relational consequences of facilitation choices; and positioning the self through revised self-appraisal, awareness of influence, and emerging professional orientation. Students connected these understandings with participation in a continuing peer group, rotating facilitation roles, and opportunities to revisit experiences through reflective writing and instructor-guided review. Taken together, the findings point to an emerging process-relational perspective on group work, in which facilitation skills are considered in relation to how actions shape group processes and members’ opportunities to participate. The study adds group-specific detail to accounts of early professional learning, while recognizing that reflective journals capture emerging understandings rather than demonstrate stable behavioral competence.