It’s seemingly a tried-and-true Housing and Residence Life tradition for departments across the country – Behind Closed Doors – the part of student staff training that new Resident Assistants tend to dread, returners – who sometimes get more into the acting than learning – tend to love. This tradition leaves professionals feeling drained, and usually results in reports (or several) as a result of someone being triggered.
And, yet, despite its problematic nature, we continue to plan student leader training that involves this version of simulations. I know there are people out there that believe that this is one of the best parts of any August or September training period, but I believe it’s actually the worst – because, instead of training students leaders in how to respond to crisis and conflict, they tend to end up exhausted, overwhelmed, questioning their roles, and in its current format, the most memorable thing they take away from the experience is usually that it was traumatic. So, how do you cultivate a Behind Closed Doors experience that leads to effective training and preparation instead of feelings of being triggered?
The Problems with BCDs – The Triggers:
Staffing and Capacity: One of the biggest challenges with Behind Closed Doors is that in order to run it in its traditional, more well-known format, you need a massive amount of staff facilitators. If you run six to ten scenarios, you need a number of professional and/or graduate staff, and returning RAs who can act out and role play scenarios that new RAs can respond to. Most departments don’t have the ability to effectively facilitate a 20-30 person alcohol/party scene, along with a multi-person roommate conflict, among other scenarios that need actors like Title IX incidents or mental health challenges. Additionally, if you bring returning student staff into the fold, they sometimes get more into the acting of scenarios than is actually helpful, leading to “hazing-like” culture for new, responding RAs. Lack of appropriate staffing makes it challenging to run a Behind Closed Doors in the way it was intended. And, if you only have a few RAs practicing responding to an incident, other new and returning staff end up being passive learners, not actually fully engaged in the simulation experience.
Taboo and Mystery: One of my biggest qualms with Behind Closed Doors is how it’s shrouded in mystery for some reason – even the name suggests so. As a result, Behind Closed Doors is built up throughout the course of training so that it’s made to seem scary, traumatic, and triggering. The original intent behind the name, Behind Closed Doors, was to lean into the idea that responding RAs never knew what they were going to encounter in confronting an incident, and therefore they have to be prepared to respond to anything. And, in part, this is true. But when do RAs go into incident response where they have no context on what they are responding to? I would argue that it’s rare. And, by wrapping Behind Closed Doors in secrecy and building it up throughout training to be this impossible day, we perpetuate the idea that the RA role is scary.
Format and Scaffolding: One of the many challenges with Behind Closed Doors is that it leaves students and staff exhausted and emotionally spent. Traditionally, Behind Closed Doors takes every possible gut-wrenching scenario and compresses them into the same day leading to emotional burnout and overstimulation. For this reason, it’s not shocking that most of my student of concern reports come from this day of training for RAs.
Ways to take BCDs from Triggers and Traumas Back to Training:
Scaffold simulations and role play scenarios with case studies so that exposure to common incidents is less intimidating.
Foster a more conducive learning environment by allowing students leaders to role play in small groups in their own staff teams, allowing live-in hall staff to set the pace of learning with a standardized facilitation guide.
Consider relying on campus partners, alumni, or other university personnel to serve as actors, allowing Housing and Residence Life Staff to be present to staff needs and discussion/learning follow-up.
Consider if you really need to do a live role play of every scenario possible, especially for incidents where protocol and procedure remains the same, or incidents are highly emotionally charged. In these cases, would talking through a case study be sufficient?
Include positive scenarios in your role-playing. Reinforce the narrative that being an RA is fun, positive, and engaging.
Break up role plays and simulations so that depending on the topic or content you’re covering, you do a few scenarios per day as opposed to designing one day full of all of the incidents.
Change the name of BCDs on your campus so that it has a more positive association with learning and practice.
The Solutions for BCDs – Transforming Triggers to Training:
Small Group Learning in Safe Space: One of the hidden blessings of the pandemic for me was that I had to re-think the way I facilitated large-group sessions for student staff training. To be mindful of social distancing, instead of large group sessions, I had to train my staff team of 21 on my own using standardized facilitation guides. This meant that we did Behind Closed Doors as a team of 21, instead of a large departmental staff of 150-200. All professional staff followed the same facilitation guide of scenarios and simulations, but we were able to tailor the situations to the communities and buildings we were overseeing, and because we were in much smaller groups with just our staff, we could run scenarios more than once, ensuring the majority of student leaders had a chance to practice responding to a particular incident. This also facilitated learning because my team had developed a sense of trust with one another – they were less embarrassed to make mistakes, ask questions, and speak up because it was just our staff team, and not a massive group of RAs who they didn’t know as well. Additionally, if my staff demonstrated that they were proficient in one scenario, we moved on to the rest of the simulations at our own pace and spent more time role-playing situations that were more complicated.
Call It What It Is – Better Yet, Make It Fun: What if departments changed Behind Closed Doors to rhetoric less mysterious, and put a positive spin on the activity, and called it, “Life in the Halls,” or gave it a fun name personalized to your campus? And, in addition to including scenarios that go over procedures and protocols, including scenarios that help RAs to see that the job can also be fun. A few years ago at a previous institution, I changed “Behind Closed Doors” to “Hawks in the Halls” (our mascot was a Seahawk) and incorporated simulations that role-played a standard intentional 1:1 interaction, and a positive conversation about a roommate. Returning RAs were so floored by this twist that they struggled to know how to respond – but, it helped convey that not every interaction you have with residents will be negative, and in fact, many situations will be fun and engaging. During training periods it’s important to remind RAs that the job they signed up for is not all doom and gloom.
Reduce Emotional Burnout: What if we rewrote the script for Behind Closed Doors so that you covered role-playing for different topics on the days that you cover that respective content. So, if you’re going over documentations and student conduct violations related to alcohol and cannabis, build a simulation opportunity into your presentation of content, giving new staff a chance to role play during individual training sessions, and not sandwiched between a suicide ideation simulation and a Title IX simulation. This way, you spread out role-playing and simulations across the span of training, instead of compressing them into a single, emotionally-charged day. Even more, instead of starting with simulation opportunities, have students start with responding and debriefing case studies for how they would respond to an incident for scaffolding of learning.
What started as an interactive form of learning has become so antiquated and over-hyped that it’s lost its original intent – interactive, hands-on learning and reflection. Within Housing and Residence Life, we’ve kept a Behind Closed Doors model because it’s what’s out there and it’s what most people know. But, when training becomes more about trauma and triggers, it’s time to evaluate if what we’re doing is actually benefitting student leaders and their learning – what might happen if we got rid of Behind Closed Doors as we know it and tried something new?
