What is collegial counseling?
Collegial counseling is a form of peer-to-peer mentorship and support. Collegial counseling typically involves two or more peers who provide each other with advice, guidance, and assistance in relation to an area of common interest. It is often used to help individuals gain clarity and confidence when facing difficult personal or professional decisions. (source)
How can it help you?
Collegial counseling can be beneficial for everyone involved. Counselors can gain insight into how their experiences have shaped their decisions while those seeking help can benefit from the wisdom gained through those experiences. Additionally, collegial counseling can improve participants’ problem-solving skills and help them develop interpersonal relationships.
What are the roles?
Generally speaking, each participant plays an active role in the process, sharing stories, experiences, and advice with one another. You can do this with a different number of people, but aim to have 4-6 people in a group to cover all the roles.
- Case bringer
This is a person who brings the case to the table. He/She seeks advice to gain clarity and confidence when making decisions and looks for assistance in solving their problem.
- Facilitator
The role of the facilitator is crucial, as they are responsible for timekeeping, ensuring active participation from all individuals, and redirecting the discussion towards its intended focus if it strays off-topic.
- Protocol
The individual responsible for the protocol documentation takes comprehensive notes, recording the problem statement, proposed solutions, and any relevant thoughts or opinions. By doing so, they enable the case bringer to fully engage in the discussion without the added burden of note-taking, and also provide a valuable resource for future reference.
- Counselors
The remaining individuals are all counselors, who begin by actively listening to the problem statement before engaging in discussion and posing relevant inquiries.
What’s the process?
Step 1: Presenting and understanding the problem (5-10 min)
The first phase starts with the case bringer describing the problem or posing a question to raise disccusion. All other participants have an opportunity to ask questions to better understand the problem – facilitators‘s job is to guide the conversation so that the participants don’t offer any solutions yet, just asking questions). Case bringer answers all those questions and offers additional explanations, if needed.
Step 2: Defining the research question and/or hypotheses (5-10 min)
Everyone except for the case bringer should get involved in the case discussion by sharing their thoughts and ideas without being judgmental. Try to come up with questions and hypotheses to help you better understand the situation. If needed, case bringer reformulates the research question.
Step 3: Discussion of the approach (15-20 min)
The case bringer should step out of the circle and just listen while everyone else discusses the case. Together, you should talk about what methods could be used, what factors need to be considered, what obstacles might come up, and how can the success be measured. Feel free to share your own ideas, references to literature, or personal experiences to help generate more insights.
Step 4: Conclusion (5-10 min)
To sum up the discussion the case bringer receives the notes and upon reviewing decided what he/she can take away.
Step 5: Process reflection (5 min)
Once you’ve finished, everyone should chat about whether the process worked or not. It’s important to ask yourselves what you should do again next time, and what you should do differently to improve things. Don’t be afraid to speak up and share your thoughts!
Step 6: Break to refresh for the next case (10 min)
At the end, both the discussion and accompanying notes should serve to enhance your approach towards addressing the business problem, affording a clearer perspective and greater flexibility in considering potential solutions.
What are some useful tips?
- Make sure to have water, snacks, and other drinks available during breaks to give you the energy boost you need.
- Take longer breaks after three sessions so you can rest up and recharge.
- It’s really beneficial if everyone in the group has similar levels of knowledge but different perspectives, which means you can discuss best practices, different approaches, resources, and methods in your counseling sessions.
- It’s super important that the case bringer understands their role so they don’t interrupt the discussion.
- Remember that this process can be exhausting, so limit counseling sessions to three or four per day. This way, you’ll have enough time to think about each topic and come up with fresh ideas and perspectives.
How did it help COS students?
Overall, the counseling sessions were really helpful for most COS students as they were able to receive new ideas and methods for solving problems. One positive experience was when they changed the scenery and went out of the classroom. This helped them to clear our minds and come up with new ideas. However, several students suggested to shorten the number of sessions per day, since everyone’s energy was drained at the end of the day and it was harder to come up with fresh ideas.
During the discussions, it became evident that we were all experts in our own way. Everyone had something valuable to contribute and we were all able to provide actual suggestions for the problem at hand.
It was also okay to change the rules a bit as long as it suited everyone in the group and helped them to achieve the best possible results. For example, they found it helpful to give the case bringer the role of note-taking so that they could take down notes that were most beneficial for them.
All in all, everyone had a really positive experience and benefited a lot from the counseling sessions.