Co-working Sessions for Grad Students

I am an alum of the University of Michigan interested in offering co-working sessions for grad students. When my partner and I were working on our dissertations, we found co-working with a group of students invaluable in helping us get our dissertations written. I think we happened to have gotten lucky to have hit upon benefiting from co-working, and I'd like to make getting to benefit from this accessible to more students.

Things are so much more unstructured for grad students than for undergrads. I'd like to offer some structure that students could benefit from, in terms of times and places where co-working can happen and in terms of how to go about these sessions.

These sessions will have work periods where each student works on their own separate tasks interspersed with short Teddy Bear Talk Support periods where students each take a turn getting to talk out loud with the listening partner they are paired with.

Teddy Bear Talk Support provides a framework for benefiting from listeners who say very little. We’ll call these listeners teddy bears. When a teddy bear does talk, it is because the talker has asked the teddy bear to do something small, like ask some open, honest questions or reflect some things back. Big changes can happen for the talker as a result of the little things the teddy bear might do or say to just “jiggle” things a bit for the talker.

Teddy Bear Talk Support is about making it more likely that the talker has plenty of room to work through what the talker is wanting to talk about without having the listener get in the way. It's about supporting the talker in harnessing the power of talking out loud.