Informing Your Teaching Through Coffee Walkabouts: Micro Social Work Skills in Action
by Marc Laferriere, MSW
Between meetings at work, I go on something I have been calling coffee walkabouts.
We live in busy times and are often rushing from place to place. I am not immune to this as an educator. We miss a lot in that rush as we clang around hurriedly from spot to spot.
So, I now take some time to grab a cup of coffee and just walk around campus and engage with students and staff from other departments and my own. I do this between meetings when going back to my office wouldn’t be a productive use of time.
A "walkabout" can be defined as walking through a public place to meet and talk informally. There's a business case to be made for this. "Management by walking around" is a term I remember first hearing in a business class. This is where a manager wanders through the workplace in an unstructured way, checking in with employees and various projects. It is a term that always stuck with me.
In an era in which we rely on email, it makes more sense than ever to actively seek out these informal opportunities to build rapport face to face. In social work, we know that interventions tend to work best when rapport is strong.
Interactions with students and other professionals beyond the classroom or meeting table are perfect opportunities for interventions as defined by social work. Beyond small talk (which has its uses), it is also an opportunity to build rapport and utilize traditional social work skills such as assessment, reflective listening, conscious body matching, and language mirroring.
During coffee walkabouts, I hear concerns and worries, I get to know about people's lives and perspectives, I get asked for advice, and I even get to share a few laughs. It is amazing how people will open up when they don't sense you have to immediately be somewhere else.
It is a really good use of the time between meetings and now informs my teaching. At times, it informs a lot more than my work. It sometimes informs my life.
When I was a clinical social worker, my time outside of counseling sessions was a vital way to inform my work. When I became a college educator, I was in my twenties and not much older than my students. When I started educating, having been a student informed my teaching a great deal, as well. As I’ve gotten older, building rapport has been an area I’ve had to pay closer attention to. Coffee walkabouts provide me with an opportunity to work on this and give it the thoughtful attention it deserves.
Grab a coffee. Go for a walk. Let me know how it goes.
Marc Laferriere is the Community & Justice Services Program Coordinator and a Justice Studies Professor at Mohawk College in Hamilton, Ontario. Connect with him on Instagram @MarcLaferriere or at Facebook.com/ProfMarc/.