ResEdChat Ep 101: Paul Gordon Brown on Structuring Intentional Conversations

Dustin Ramsdell:
Welcome back everyone to Roompact’s ResEdChat podcast. If you’re new to the show, every episode we feature a variety of topics of interest to higher professionals who work in and with university housing, residence life, residential education, whatever you might call it. But we are back again with an episode here. Paul is back with me. We’d like to do this every once in a while, talk more about larger concepts and contextual factors that inform the work that happens every day in residence life, residential education, everything. This one here today: intentional conversations. We’re going to break it down, talk about why is important, challenges, opportunities, ways to assess these efforts as we often do, share some just advice and resources. We will start off though, Paul, always appreciate the opportunity to hang out and chat and get deep on these things, but we’ll start just to make sure we’re all on the same page. Can you give a brief definition of what an intentional conversation means in this context?

Paul Brown:
Yeah, of course, Dustin. Intentional conversations are a pretty common feature of most residence life departments these days. Sometimes they go by different names, so intentional conversations is probably the most common one. But sometimes they’re called intentional interactions, or even some schools may brand them a little bit. Let’s say your mascot is an Eagle, we’re going to call them Eagle Chats or something like that. Really what they are is one-on-one, sometimes one to a small group conversations typically between a student staff member and some residents. The idea behind it is really to provide a mentorship type of relationship.
So a check-in with a student, “How are you doing? How are things with your transition, how are things going with your classes?” Et cetera.
Because the idea is really, it’s not just a conversation meaning, “How’s your day? What do you think about the weather?”
It’s an intentional one, meaning we’re going to go in and probe around some things that we know that our residents might be struggling with, or maybe that they’re having success with and we want to be able to increase that success or help them out even further. They’re really an attempt to create a more one-on-one relationship where a student staff member really gets to know their residents, and really develops an opportunity to have a mentorship relationship or that of a helper or advisor or things of that sort. And so that’s really what intentional conversations are, they’re both conversations, but they also have an intention behind them.

Dustin Ramsdell:
I think in my mind, as much as residential curriculums and everything is this natural evolution and maturation of the work that’s happening on campuses in the halls, really trying to make that specific and measurable and things like that, this is that evolution of, yeah, RAs have always just colloquially, earnestly just try to go and check in and all that, but it’s adding that level of intentionality, maybe trying to pry a little bit deeper sometimes if it’s like I know what I want to be… Check in with people at this point in the semester or something, people might be feeling homesick or something.
In my mind, it feels like a natural evolution of what a lot of people would say, “Oh yeah, I do that every day as an RA,” or in the halls, whatever my role is, so that’s interesting.

Paul Brown:
I mean, it’s definitely connected into the curricular movement as it came about. There are certainly schools that do intentional conversations but do not have a residential curriculum, but I’ve never found a school that does a residential curriculum that doesn’t do intentional conversations. I think what that speaks to is one of the essential elements of a curricular approach was you should use multiple strategies to engage students in the way that best fits what learning goals you’re hoping for them to achieve. That means thinking beyond the program. Programs are really one size fits all. We’re going to do this, we’re going to one to many on this, and you might be able to facilitate it in a way that speaks to individual students that are in the group, but it’s certainly much harder than if I’m having a one-on-one conversation with you.
I think it was a lot of the folks that started the curricular approach said, “Well, we can do these other educational efforts, but how can we personalize it to the individual students’ circumstances and contextualize it to them and know what their struggles are or what their successes are and help them with that?”
It’s hard to do that if you’re not doing it one-on-one. I think that’s where intentional conversations really got a lot of weight behind them was we had always maybe done some kind of form of that, but it certainly wasn’t as developed in the past. That’s where the idea stuck. I think schools that even don’t use residential curriculum will look at it and say, “Oh yeah, this is a good thing.” This is something that we should also be doing whether we have a curriculum or not is to provide this more individualized support.
And that, I think dovetails with a lot of trends in the field of looking at retention more specifically. Intentional conversations can be a great vehicle for catching early warning signs of a student potentially not continuing at the university and intervening on it much earlier, so it fits in with that really well. But I think it also fits in with trends with what students want, meaning these all big programs, I mean, we’ve always struggled with attendance with them, but it also seems like we struggle with it more now than we ever have before because there’s just more competition for student time. Is there a way that much our phones are personalized to us and show us the things that we’re interested in or talk about those things, can we create a little bit more of a personalized environment for those students? I feel like intentional conversations also fits with those trends in terms of generational differences in terms of what they expect, in terms of support, and things of that sort.

Dustin Ramsdell:
I think within the RA context, this near peer thing I think is always going to be really valuable. And then just mentoring broadly, or I worked in a very different context in empowered and enroll as a professional staff member, as a “coach.” There was a lot of proactive outreach and being very accessible to people to talk through things, whether it was just time management, organizing your life, or it was more oriented towards the academic side, but just what am I registering for when? Am I combining two courses that are going to go really poorly together, because they’re a lot of work or something? There’s all those sort of things, and then just being very well plugged in that coaching context, a lot of this is reminding me of it. It results in exactly the things that you’re mentioning of retention and early indicator.
You might know, hey, a lot of people are saying they’re really confused about X, Y, or Z because you’re having all these conversations, you’re getting a lot of anecdotes. You can maybe orient programs around it, or orient communication around certain things that you’re learning. But certainly, yeah, if nothing else, one-to-one, this person has a problem. I’m here, I’m positioned to help. I can serve them and giving them the resources that they need, or just talking through just things on their mind, whatever else.
I wanted to make sure we gave some space and gave time to emphasize what makes these conversations so important for residential education. I think it is that, so if you want to continue to expand on this, that idea of it’s making me think of just the climate or the environment. The idea that you as the RA especially, I think they’re the tip of the spear for this tool and this effort, the idea that you are really being out there seen as a helper and people feel supported and all that, versus it being more with the one-to-many like you’re saying for program. I guess any thoughts on that idea of it being a little bit of a tonal shift in just the way that RAs or different people are making themselves available and being more maybe engaging when they’re having these intentional conversations?

Paul Brown:
There’s certainly, when you think about intentional conversations, there’s some RAs that always did this anyways, right? They’re just good, that is how they view the role. But student staff members come with various different strengths. You have one that’s really good at programming, you have one that’s really good at connecting and knowing their residents one-on-one. You have one that’s really good on the policy and the paperwork. Different student staff are going to have different strengths just like any person that you hire for a job.
I think what this really does is it says, “No, this is really going to be central to the role.”
That we need to hire people that can have those conversations, have them comfortably, authentically get what the purpose of them is. And we can certainly train you on that, but some raw skills and connecting with folks to surface those things. If I look at broad trends in terms of what residence life kinds of important, I see three buckets. One is community building, fun things, getting to know each other. That’s always been core of residence life. I don’t think that has ever changed ever in our entire history. That’s still important. But then there was the curricular movement that says, okay, there’s some educational work that can happen in the halls. How do we structure that, right?
In previous iterations where it was just a program model or the things, RAs would come up with their own educational programs and design them, say, here’s what the outcomes are and things like that. And the curricular approach said, “Hey, maybe not the best people to design it, maybe deliver it, how they do it, how it’s engaging,” things like that.
But maybe we need to be a little bit more clear on our educational outcomes. But then there’s also a strain of case management. I think that has really come up more increasingly. Typically, out of care teams, behavioral intervention teams, things that are usually coming out of a dean of students’ office to go all the way back to the unfortunate incidents that happened at Virginia Tech with the shooter, which woke up institutions to say, “Hey, we need to do more individual student case management. We need to look out for these kinds of things and stop them before they become something much more serious.”
That thread has continued, and it also expanded into some of the efforts with retention. If I look at those kinds of three buckets, the nice thing about intentional conversations is, one, they’re a way of building community and making connections between a staff member and a student. Two, they offer a space for some education to happen or connection to resources or referrals or take-tos to programs and so there can be opportunities to connect people to education. But then they also offer some form of that case management of let’s look at the individual student and, hey, if there’s something that they’re really struggling with, can we get them connected higher to intervene on that? Or if they’re not, can we enhance their success in any way? And so I feel like intentional conversations are a nice strategy vehicle that hits a lot of the different goals that a residence life department may have.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Right. It’s still flexible just as the idea of, okay, we’ve always empowered RAs to be those community builders, relationship builders, and all that kind of thing, but it’s like how can we harness that really target those things that you’d mentioned? Yeah, I mean just the movement generally I think of trying to get as focused and humanize, personalize retention efforts and to be more proactive versus, oh, okay, well, the students who are failing courses or have low GPA can react and respond to it.
It’s like, yeah, but if you’re doing your due diligence, making the rounds, checking in with people, making yourself as easily available and accessible to have these type of intentional conversations, because I think it can obviously be catalyzed and initialized by the RA, but even the idea of if you are priming your people to be well-equipped to have these conversations, then you can’t be responsive when somebody is saying, “Hey, I’m really stressed out.”
Which then, if that isn’t addressed then, that is the, well, three months from now at the end of the semester you flunked out of your courses because you’re struggling managing your time, which is making you struggle. You can start at the core problem versus treating that symptom later where it’s like, “Oh, you’re failing your courses, you need more tutoring.”
It’s like, “I don’t have time because I’m doing a bunch of things. Trying to fit in a tutoring session is honestly probably going to make me more stressed,” or something.
So it’s that idea, you have that additional conversation three months ago, it’s like, “Oh, okay, yeah, here’s the things that I use or whatever to help manage my time.”
Or, “So we’ll see how that works and I’ll check in with you maybe a week or two, see how it feels,” or whatever.
Yeah, I think a lot of great benefits and why this is important and a lot of positive outcomes we can see. I’m just curious because I think I just want to acknowledge this is going to be hard work depending on the buildings you’re in or like you said, maybe the different strengths that people have, it could be easier or harder. From your perspective, what are the common challenges people might face trying to implement this? And I guess just any thoughts around ways that you can support staff to overcome them.

Paul Brown:
There are certainly some schools that will do check-ins. Not necessarily intentional I would not say, the word intentional, will just be conversations, which is better than not doing anything at all in my opinion.
And that just means, “Hey, how are things? I’m going to check in with you.”
The intentional part comes in because you’re going to say, “Oh, well, I’m talking to a first year student that’s here for the first time and it’s October, and so maybe I should just ask for questions around these.”
The intentionality is how can I gear it towards where I know this student may be, or at least start there and see where they take me. I think that’s in part one of the challenges is training your student staff to know what are those things that they should be looking out for?
So know what, hey, if a student does say this, “I’m homesick.”
What do I do? How do I help them work through that? What does that look like? One of the challenges is making them more intentional. I think sometimes us as professionals, we just do it so matter-of-factly out of the way that we don’t even realize a person said this, so I’m going to respond with this. It’s almost like that counselor mindset of you’re following where the person’s taking you, but you’re also doing a little bit of challenge to push them in different directions knowing that, hey, this seems like you’re unclear about this.
And so training students now on those skills and understanding that, hey, this isn’t just a check-in and you just, “How’s things?”
“They’re fine,” and then you just leave it at that.
You would say, “What do you mean by fine?” You probe a little bit more.
Teaching them those skills I think is one of the challenges. That then of course leads to a different challenge, which is when you start to introduce some structure to that or some intentionality to that, sometimes the staff that are executing that feel like then they have to follow this like it is a textbook, which is not the intention. These are meant to be authentic conversations that can be different with different students and go in different directions because students will take them in different directions based off of their needs. There is a difficulty, especially for a school that’s introducing these for the first time that some people will find it seems prescriptive.
Finding that right balance between providing some structure but not giving staff the freedom and the agency to say, “Here’s the loose structure, but you need to adjust this according to what feels good for you, what feels good for that conversation with the resident,” and things like that. That’s another one of those challenges is the training aspect and getting used to it. That’s probably the biggest one that folks encounter.
The other one is if you’ve never done these before, it’s just the change management of we’ve never required us to do this before and now you are. What is this? What does it look like? Things like that. In particular, I know we’ll probably talk about what about assessment? What do you do with the data that comes from here?
It wouldn’t be uncommon for a school to say, “Hey, write up some notes after you have the conversation with the student just so that we can do appropriate follow up.”
And some staff that when they’re writing notes struggle with, because they’ve never been asked to do that before, is this an invasion of privacy? What’s going on here? And so there’s also a challenge with that because you have to be really clear, we’re not looking for every single detail of a student’s life, we’re not trying to catalog that. What we’re looking for is are there areas where they’re struggling that we can help? Are there areas that they’re doing well that we can enhance? And beyond that, we don’t necessarily need to delve in that. So being clear with your intentions when it comes to if you collect any data or have any kind of follow up to that, what is it you’re looking for? What is it you’re not looking for?
And make sure staff are really clear on, “Hey, this is what the purpose of this is.”

Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah, I appreciate mentioning the change management piece. I think that’s always the X factor of things like this is just being sure that there’s the follow through. But then the training piece, which I think can always be continuing because I know you usually we’re going to have monthly all-staff trainings or whatever is you might zero in on certain pieces of the process of intentional conversations. I feel like people are maybe faltering on because, yeah, when I worked as a coach, it was super important to log your calls and do a sentence or two, very objective of students stated this, coach did this, whatever, just so there is a little bit of paper trail.
And then you can even, it’s like, “Hey, look at this for yourself.”
You could check back and be like, “Oh yeah, I did talk to that person two weeks ago about this thing,” and whatever.

Paul Brown:
They’re in part helpful for you, right? Leaving notes is not just because someone else is going to do something with it, but it reminds you that when I next meet with this student, “Oh, okay, this is what we talked about.”
Notes are not necessarily for some other person other than you in developing that relationship. I mean, I think one thing we struggle with the training on intentional conversations is it focuses too much on the structure. Meaning you need to do X number, here’s how you should record it afterwards, and just that and not the, “Okay, you’re meeting with a first-year student, here’s the issues that you’re going to look for.”
How do you coax that out if a student doesn’t want to? The actual practice of them and practicing that, that’s I think sometimes, especially with the change management where it can go awry is if you focus too much on the structural things, then it does feel prescriptive, then it does feel like that’s all the only thing that matters and you’re like, “Actually, the intentionality and the authenticness of the conversation and the helping that matters more than anything else.”
And so that can be a source for it. It’s a part of it, but if you make it seem like it’s the most important or the only part of it, then it becomes a checkbox activity, which is really not what you want these to be.

Dustin Ramsdell:
I like too what you’re talking about around… Because part of it is, okay, we’re doing intentional conversations. You might be like, “Here’s the playbook, all RAs use it for all students everywhere, always.”
But you do want to be like, “Well, actually you’re talking to a first-year student in the first month or the first semester at college,” whatever, because you just want to be very intentional but thoughtful of how are you equipping the RA to contextualize how they’re navigating these conversations with the audience. Who am I talking to when and how and whatever else, because I think that’ll make them that much more powerful. Just that value of, because I remember this a lot from my coaching training was just asking good questions.
That idea of when somebody says, “Oh yeah, I’m doing fine.”
“Tell me more,” whatever.
Not just accepting everything on face value, especially I need to rely on you for a lot, so I need to ask as many questions as I need to understand fully what’s going on and not just trust you that everything’s fine.
It’s just, “Well, I’d like to know more.”
Now my brain is definitely going to, exactly what you’re talking about is the assessment piece. How do we know when these are successful? I think we’ve already mentioned in passing, so certainly expand on this if you’d like to, but the retention piece and everything that is in honor of the broader goals I think that are happening across student affairs of how can we equip any number of people to be really empowered to sustain and grow retention rates and everything. But otherwise, through the assessment that’s happening, how do you know that these intentional conversations are being successful?

Paul Brown:
I think one of the things that comes up is, because if I’m a student staff member and I’m meeting with all of my residents, which in some cases, depending on the institution, can be quite a few. Typically, schools will say, do an intentional conversation at least twice a semester as a pretty common metric. But that could be a lot of checking in with folks. It always goes back to only collect data that you’re going to do something with. I think one of the issues that, and I’m guilty of this just as anyone else is, is over designing an assessment that collects so much data but you don’t actually need it and that burdens your staff with an administrative weight that you really don’t need to be burdening them with.
And so really, when I think of the assessment, I want internal notes so that the staff member themselves can review those, look back on those, et cetera so as for their own purposes. Two, I may want to know what are some themes that are emerging? So if there’s certain things that we’re hearing over and over again as common themes, that would be another source of assessment data. And that can just be as simple as here’s the click, click, click, click, click, here’s the themes. It doesn’t have to be a big paragraph of this, which is much harder to work with. So a lot of schools will do tagging, hashtagging.
It’s one of the things that they do when they use our software, Roompact software is select the themes and then they can run reports to see how often things are coming up and where they are so it gives them a broad-based view of, oh, looks like around 300 of our students are indicating they’re homesick. This is when it’s showing up, things like that.
And then I think the other metric for success would be referrals. So if a student is struggling and we do make referrals to whatever that may be, how many referrals did we make? Did they follow up on those to the extent that we could know that, what would those be? So you’re functioning on a few levels, what’s happening in the conversation themselves so we can understand going on with our students, what’s happening with our intervention when we do encounter a student that maybe needs additional support, are we providing that?
Or are we just saying, “Oh, you should go to the counseling center,” and then we never talk about it ever again.
Are we making those kinds of connections? Are we surfacing those students? Are we making sure that that handoff to a support service or a resource or a program is occurring, or do we just let it go? I think those are the kinds of things that you can reasonably expect out of this conversation. I think beyond that, you also want to look at metrics more summative in nature of do our students feel connected to their student staff member? That could be a survey question at the end of the year. Hopefully, intentional conversations are helping build that relationship, but you wouldn’t necessarily do that in any data you collect from the intentional conversation itself. There’s some broader effects you’d probably want to look through also.
That’s my main piece of advice when everyone goes down this path is be very clear on what you want to know and what you’re going to do with it. Don’t ask anything beyond that, don’t burden staff with administrative processes beyond what you’re going to use because then they can take it less seriously, collect data that’s not as much useful, and then it’s not helpful for anyone. So you want to be really clear about that when it comes to these.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah, I appreciate you mentioning those things because I think I just feel like there’s sometimes the weird thing of it’s looked at as a negative thing if, “Oh my gosh, all these students have all these problems,” or something.
Actually, no, that’s a sign of the system working is that we’re flagging these things and like you said, we’re referring them and then absolutely is that one piece of it, but you’ve got to do the follow through of saying, “Did these people? Can we?”
Even just ask the student, “Did you get a chance to go there? Did you find it helpful?” Or whatever, log that conversation and put the notes or whatever.
But certainly, you can work with your colleagues to try to verify things as well. But yeah, because I think the quantitative, the summative things are definitely what I think. I’m sure people would be, the first layer is just, “Oh, how many conversations did we have? What percentage of residents have intentional conversations logged?” Or something.
That’s the natural place to start but I like that you were giving a little bit more of the qualitative, the emotional piece that people feel satisfied, they feel supported, they are being referred, they’re utilizing service because that is what’s going to move the needle on greater residency rates, greater retention rates.
All these things versus it just being like, “Well, we had a lot of conversations. Wow, look at that. Let’s pat ourselves in the back, how many conversations we had.”
It’s like, yeah, but, because that’s always what I think about. Some people do just stop there. They’re just wanting scale for its own sake, but it’s like, well, you could be talking with everybody about nothing. And that’s obviously when you’re starting at that place of traditionally, yeah, the RAs are just going around, checking in with people, having chit-chats and stuff. But if we’re doing this the right way, you’re seeing exactly what you’re talking about and that’s the thing that’s going to drive the outcomes that you’re looking for.

Paul Brown:
You reminded me of something too. For schools to do intentional conversations and utilize our software, one of the reports that is pulled the most, almost more than anything, one of the assessment reports that we have that’s pulled the most is the how many did? Well, there’s two really. How many did my staff member do? Which is a supervision type report, so is the staff member doing the ones that they say that they’re doing? But the other one is, which of our students did we meet with? Which one of our students did we not meet with? And that can also be a great source for this assessment of, okay, let’s run this report. We see some students are being met with, what about this group of students that either the RA hasn’t connected with?
The resident just is like, “I don’t really want to have this conversation with you.” What’s going on with them?
So who we’re having the conversation with is just as important as who we’re not having these conversations with. And that in and of itself can be an important tool for follow-up and things like that. “Oh, hey, student staff member in my supervision meeting with them, let’s just look at the residents you haven’t connected with. Can we just talk through why?”
Is it because they’re never here because they’re always home? Maybe there’s something else going on there, we should check in with them on that. What are those reasons? And so that can also be a source of assessment is who are we not connecting with? Can we pick up those folks who maybe fall through cracks and things like that? Because that’s absolutely critical.

Dustin Ramsdell:
And again, that honors that individual approach and personalizing and humanizing and all that is that zeroing in all that and just that earnest desire to understand because it could be maybe nothing’s wrong. I just want to know that for sure. I want to trust but verify or whatever. The student might be like question whatever, but you could flag those and from a case management perspective or whatever because it could be, “Yeah, I never see them.”
Or, “I’ve never just been able to talk to them and I keep missing them,” or whatever.
And it’s like, “Okay, well, from their academic perspective, they’re doing fine.”
Or, “I can see that they’re swiping into the,” whatever, “Yeah, I’m just missing them,” or something. You can try to start to do that and then approach that in a different way as you are trying to have those conversations.
But it could be, “Oh my gosh, yeah, this flagged something to me,” and just trying to get that early indicator.
Versus being like, “Oh, they flunked their course. Let’s try to now offer them some support,” or whatever.
Definitely good insight there. I think certainly if you do have any more amazing advice, you’ve shared so much great advice already, please do. But as we wrap up here, I want to give you the opportunity if there are any particular resources that you wanted to call out specifically or just final thoughts to wrap things up, advice. I’ll give you the last word here.

Paul Brown:
We put out a lot of resources related to intentional conversation, so I’ll make sure to provide those so folks can access them in the show notes. Many moons ago I wrote a blog post series on intentional conversations that included how do you train on them, how do you design them, what do you ask in them? It was a six-part series that’s actually been pretty durable over time. I’d say it’s pretty much just as accurate then as it was now. I think my level of sophistication in the field as a whole amount has gotten a little bit deeper, but that’s still is a pretty good primer is that series.
We did also offer, and by I mean Roompact and me, a training session on intentional conversations, the integrated aspects of our software in it, but was also a little to folks maybe that don’t use our software so they would take something out of it too. Even though I think you’d quickly realize that you can do this without specialized software, but if you do have it certainly makes it a lot easier. There’s also some training and video bits also that we have. That two-on-one training, occasionally I’ll do it live, in which case it’s open to anyone. And then we do record it, but we make that only available to folks that use our software. So if you do use our software, you can access that in the two-on-one training resources.
I mean, those are two of the primary vehicles. There’s also been additional blog posts that we put out that I’ll include for folks related to it. But if you look elsewhere, formal literature, gray literature, et cetera, there’s not a lot out there. You’d have to go tangentially into mentorship, coaching, things like that, but not a lot that’s been contextualized specifically to the residence life environment and intentional conversations as we’re talking about it. There’s not a lot out there with that specific one. You have to go ancillary to the stuff that’s related and into it. But yeah, that’s some of the things that I would point folks towards.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Awesome, yeah, so a bunch of good stuff to check out to keep moving your learning forward on this important topic. Just appreciate you always, Paul, for jumping on, hanging out with me, and having these conversations here to I think hopefully spur some people’s learning to dive deep on all these, a variety of topics and everything. Always a pleasure, and just appreciate your time as always.

Paul Brown:
Thanks, Dustin.