We’re pleased to bring you this bonus episode of ResEdChat where Paul shares more details about a brand new resource from Roompact to help residence education leaders create a framework for their practice. Focused on the “Three C’s” of Community, Competencies, and Care, Paul explains how this eBook came to be and how he hopes professionals across the country will use it to elevate their work.
Guest: Dr. Paul Gordon Brown, (he/him/his), Director of Campus Experience, Roompact
Host: Dustin Ramsdell, Independent Higher EdTech Content Creator
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Roompact’s ResEdChat podcast is a platform to showcase people doing great work and talk about hot topics in residence life and college student housing. If you have a topic idea for an episode, let us know!
Transcript:
Dustin Ramsdell:
Welcome back everyone to Roompact’s, ResEdChat podcast. Every episode, our team of hosts brings you timely discussions on a variety of topics of interest to hired professionals who work in and with university housing, residence life, residential education, and for this episode, it is sort of a special episode helping to inaugurate and celebrate and extrapolate and explore a new resource from Roompact. It is all about Three Cs, residence, life and education, community curriculum case management, but I will not steal Paul’s thunder here, our guest to help explore this new resource. He helped create this and so we’ll get into how it came to be, how this resource can be used, and all that kind of good stuff. So Paul, please take it away. Super excited to have this time with you to explore this new resource.
Paul Brown:
Yeah, no, thanks, Dustin. I’m glad to be back. This is something I’ve been working on in some way, shape, or form for at least a year, but with a big push here in the spring, and what I’ve been attempting to do here is I have the privilege working at Roompact is that I work with a lot of different schools, so obviously in schools that implement our software, but also schools sometimes when I would do workshops with them, just practice things kind of outside the software realm, and so I kind of get this insider view as to how organizations work. I pay attention to what they say. I pay attention to data that shows that things are working, things are not working or culture, all that kind of stuff.
And so I learn a lot just by being exposed to all these different departments, and so when I think of residence life and education practice and what that looks like, what I really wanted to do is take all of my knowledge from my formal coursework and my formal work with things, but also with my informal work and looking at schools to figure out what really works, what does this model look like? How can I frame something in a way that makes it accessible, that allows people to think through the problems because I see certain problems repeatedly occur or people get stuck in cycles, which is actually, if you read the introduction of the book, it talks about that cycle of being in a meeting and a department leadership meeting and us going, “Oh, we’re going to do this and it’s going to be new and it’s going to be great.”
And the admin assistant who’s been there forever who takes notes and watches but doesn’t always participate going, “Yeah, actually as the keeper of the history, we did this approach two years ago and prior to that, we did the other approach three years ago.” And just trying to really break the cycle, how can we move forward rather than sometimes it feels like with our models and the way that we look at things, it feels like we’re just cycling through the same different model. “Okay, this one works, but we’re not happy with this, so we’re going to do this.” And it just kind of keeps going without making a lot of forward progression. So that’s kind of really my hope in doing this book is to try to bring that forward.
Dustin Ramsdell:
Even just with the idea of okay, you make something and I think for me, always when you’re creating content, it really helps to connect dots and develop the idea of like, “Oh, I’ve been observing this and talking to people and seeing things.” I need to put it in a way that’s sort of digestible and all that, but even just sort of having a gimmick or something to get people in to be like, “Oh, okay, tell me more.” The Three Cs and sort of alliteration, whatever else. Just helping to be catchy in that way. I guess if just want to that sort of concept, it’s in the title, this residence life and education model, community curriculum and case management. I don’t don’t know if that was a journey for you to like oh, what are three C words, or if that was the easy part? Just anything else around just how this book came to be, that core concept that you explore throughout the whole resource.
Paul Brown:
Yeah, I mean I’m a residence life person at heart, so who doesn’t love a little alliteration or something like that? So I came to it after the fact. So when I started going down this path, I didn’t know exactly where I was going to land, and so as it kind of evolved and I’m like, “Oh, then there’s this component and started putting it together.” That’s where I was like, “Oh, we’ve got some Cs going on here.” I think one of the categories was actually a non-C word, and I’m like, “Oh no, I can make it a C word. So we’ll do that.” And so it’s really organized around this what’s called the three C framework and it’s community development, curriculum, and case management, and so what it tries to do is take those three things as kind of a main thrust of pretty much all residence life departments of how do we think of our efforts in all of these three areas.
Sometimes I find schools that are really good at one and maybe don’t touch another one or marginally good at one and really great at another and things like that, or sometimes I think people get into this forced choice of we’re not about curriculum here, we’re about community development, and it’s almost like, “Well, I think you need to actually also think about what you students need to learn too.” That’s also important and so what it attempts to try to do is kind of put these three things on an equal ground. I don’t think it’s either this or that or you choose one and you can’t do the other. I think you really need to think about all three, and so if you kind of back it up from the Three Cs, it’s really talking about how do we work with residents in finding belonging on campus and engagement on campus?
How do we focus on what they need to learn and what residence life can uniquely help them learn? And then how do we provide individualized support for them? So how can we help if they fall down, if they’re doing really well, how can we enhance that? And so the Three Cs are really attempting to hit those kinds of broader goal areas, and that’s kind of how they came about is how can we look at this all three things and maybe a department’s more advanced in one than the other, and how do we look at how they all interact?
Dustin Ramsdell:
And I think that’s what is interesting sometimes is you might have the title and you’re like, okay, how do I build this out into a whole sort of resource? And other times it’s like yeah, you have the kind of content and then you try to put a catchy title on it, but I think yeah, it’s such a powerful way to look at this work in a way that honors and respects all those kind of facets, but simplifies it, distills it. It’s clear, concise, and two more C words there, and what I like even too, just to really bold and circle and underline the case management because I think on first pass, I was like, “Oh yeah, conduct. It’s negative, punitive holding people responsible consequences and all that.” That is a part of, okay, you, my case, student, resident, how am I managing you and how you’re behaving and treating other people and those sort of things.
But it can be exactly what you were saying of just sort of like you said, falling down, tripping, let’s pick you up, dust you off and help you out, or even enhance that you’re doing really well. You’re this kind of model citizen, star student and everything. Can we get you into leadership positions that can further your learning and development, and I think you start to see where things blend in together of okay, a curriculum or something else. What are ways that we’re enabling learning for you in all facets of your experience and all that. So I think it was just something that I definitely was getting really kind jazzed about and geeking out on of just sort the way that you work and able to create these sort of pillars that obviously are all sort of supporting the same kind of outcome, but finding that balance between distinctness, but also that they’re all going to blend together
Paul Brown:
The case management C, that’s the one I kind of wish I could change that one, but it’s a C, right? So I got to go with C, because really what I talk about, I mentioned it’s about individualized support and I feel like the case management term feels clinical in a way that I don’t really care for, but the idea behind it is that we’re looking at specific kind of interventions, and that doesn’t mean it’s always a case. It could just be the RA connecting one-on-one with the student and helping them through things. It doesn’t become a quote unquote case so to speak, but I had to fit in that third C. So there is a case management aspect. It could escalate, it could become something that goes to a behavioral team or something like that, that’s where the real true case management kind of comes in, but it could also not be that, right?
And I think there were kind of a confluence of things where we started to see this become more important on college campuses. There was the shooting at Virginia Tech many years ago now that really clued campuses in that they need some form of usually what’s now called a care team or something similar to connect dots between offices when students get lost in between, and that kind of led into a lot of the more behavioral kind of interventions, and so that kind of took off, but then you also had a lot of people doing early residential curriculum curricular approaches that started doing intentional conversations. That’s really mostly where the modern flavor of that came out being, and that was focused more on the educational pieces and they kind of merge in together, and so you kind of had those two things going on that now if you talk to most schools, earlier on when I started working at Roompact, it wasn’t the case that everyone did intentional conversations.
Now, it’s nearly universal with every school that I work with. I don’t know if that’s because I’m working with a select group that’s motivated to use our software, because it’s so helpful with that, therefore, those are what I see, but it’s what I hear is that it’s more common, and so I feel like that’s deserving of a look of why do we do those? How does that fit in with things? It might involve a conduct angle. In some cases it could, but it’s broader than that, right? How does it fit into the web of all the other things, the other two C’s so to speak of what we’re doing?
Dustin Ramsdell:
And that’s what I think and I promise I’ll stop doing this, but another C word of invites curiosity, but the idea of case manager, I think it’s just like, “Oh, interesting. What do you mean by that exactly?” And I think that’s the other thing is they each feel distinct, but they’re also not so narrow and distinct that it’s almost limited because yeah, the other C word you could use would be conduct, and that would be like, “Oh, it has so many other connotations.” “Well, no, it’s all conduct the way that people conduct themselves.” So I think it is that idea of trying to find those kind of areas because I think when you’re trying to make a model or a framework or just go about how you’re sort of putting some bounds to something like, here’s what we’re talking about and here’s how we kind of share the language of what we’re talking about here.
So I think it is that idea of if you are choosing your words intentionally or how we kind of talk about things and all that, I do, just like you said, I think it kind of capitalizes on the trends of intentional conversations and all that where it’s kind of like, “Okay, I have my case load of students, the residents on my floor, how am I engaging with each of them?” They’re all going through their own things at any given moment in time where it could be, okay, this student is looking for experiential learning opportunities. How am I working with other resources on campus? This student just feels like maybe they need to get some mental health support. This student is always violating quiet hours and I need to address that in some way that’s going to be meaningful and positive or whatever.
So I think, yeah, it’s a great kind of basis and I think as a final quick follow-up on the genesis of this, I was just curious of what made you think that a book was the best vessel for this idea versus blog posts and everything? I’m kind of anticipating the answer in my head, but it feels like obviously because we just put out a lot of content in general, a book was the way that the avenue, the modality that you pursued for this, what felt like a book was necessary for this model?
Paul Brown:
That’s an interesting question. We’ve put out books before, but a lot of those other books started as blog posts, and then those blog posts were kind of put together to form a book to give people more of a narrative was how, especially one of our main books that was about residential curriculum, that’s how that came about. So it was almost like we’ll do lots of little chunks and then, “Oh, if we package this together and kind of add in transitions, people can get the look at the whole rather than in bite-sized chunks.” And this really fell in from a different angle. This started out as a unitary concept, which produces the book. I’m sure we will do other follow-up content and things like that, blog posts, pull out pieces, things like that, and so this kind of happened in the opposite direction. And I think in looking at all the ideas, one of the ways that I open the book is here’s what I think we need for this generation of students, the contexts, environments that we’re in now, things like that.
And then here’s where we go wrong. So here’s issues that we need to address of overburdened staff, things like that, and so it kind of sets the framework of, “Okay, here’s what we need. Here’s what we’re trying to avoid, so let’s try to put this all into one hole.” And I think the book format kind of setting it in stone a little bit is really one of the things that we need to address one of the places where we go wrong, which is nothing really pulls all these threads together. There’s a lot of good work, and you go in there and there’ll be one article on developing a sense of belonging with a student, another article on here’s how you promote student learning and design those experiences, and another article on care teams and behavioral interventions.
And they’re all good, but I’ve always felt like someone needed to put this whole thing together in a hole that is easily understood and accessible, and so really that’s what this book is an attempt to do is to really say, let’s take all of this good work and let’s weave it together. Let’s put it in a way that maybe someone new to it or was in doing it from while, can make connections between things that will hopefully resonate for them or there’ll be new connections or things like that, and so this kind of vehicle was a nice way of pulling that all together into a contained hole.
Dustin Ramsdell:
That was my guess. The idea, it’s sort of warranted being presented all in tandem together and a greater sense of permanency or respect or all those kind of action verbs that were sort of what swirling around my head, but yeah, you could do all these sort of blog posts in isolation and try to carve a path for somebody and be like, “Hopefully you’ll click through and go through all these things that you feel like are sort of related topics and related articles and whatever else.” But all right, if you sit down and you have this and you go through it in its entirety, you’re really going to get the whole kind of narrative and point of view, the whole model versus you just coming one third of the way because it’s like well, I’m kind of more interested in this or whatever else.
Because I think that acknowledgement that you were making where feeling very strongly that every team should be working earnestly in all these areas versus being like, “Oh, we just do community development. We don’t do those other things or whatever.” It’s like you really should and this is why, and I’m going to tell you also getting steps of how to start going down that path.
Paul Brown:
Well, you mentioned this, so one thing is we’re going to give these printed. So we’ve done this before, so we’re going to get a physical copy printed because some people like that physical copy, which I totally understand, and the physical copy with the binding that I wanted on the book forced me to do at least 32 pages, and so I kind of set a goal of like, “We’re going to hit exactly 32. I don’t want to go over that.” So it also kind of forced me in writing it to be like okay, here’s the limit on what I have to fit this in and everything has to fit in this, which I think also, oddly without intending it was a benefit because I’m like, “I have to be succinct. I have to make sure that it fits within this 32 page framework.” And that really kind of helped it out quite a bit, I think actually.
Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah, that’s great. Need a little behind the scenes on how the sausage gets made kind of thing of just like, well, this is the choice that we have to make sometimes, the weird arbitrary thing sometimes actually do putting bounds on something versus well, it could be I don’t know, 300 pages of this, that, the other, it’s like, “Well, actually the printer needed it to be at least 32 pages.”
Paul Brown:
And then when I go to a conference or visit a school, it’s also a lot lighter and easier to transport if it’s slimmer. So there’s a practical piece of it.
Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah, I can only fit one in my book bag, so here you go. Yeah, and I think when you’re looking through it through the 32 pages and everything, there’s a lot in here of the classic theories and concepts that underpin our work. So if somebody’s just looking at this and just call out this general point and give you an opportunity to extrapolate on this of how do you see all of these classic student development theories and things and those frameworks and concepts working in harmony with where we are now in the present world, oftentimes very different from when these theories were developed initially, working in harmony with digital platforms, ad tech, and just acknowledging the present I guess is my general mindset of just I think you made that deliberate choice to I think bring in and anchor and ground a lot of this in those classic theories. So how do you see the harmony of all of that with our present moment and utilizing digital tools and platforms?
Paul Brown:
Really, if you look through the concept of, I’m not proposing some absolutely new theory or things like that. So this all draws from previous good work by a lot of different people. I’ve had some hand in some of it, but I’m not dropping something new that you couldn’t get from the literature yourself. What I’m really trying to do is package it together, bring all the pieces together in a way that makes it simple to understand. That gives you exactly like it says, a framework meaning okay, we got all these pieces and then you at a campus can kind of take a look at it and decide this is more important to us because of the students we serve, or I even go so far as to say here’s some learning goals that would be pretty common, but you could adopt these, but you should also adapt them, and so I’m not really giving people anything wholly new.
I’m packaging it in a way and trying to make it in a way that’s more accessible that people can understand it, which I don’t think has been done well in the past, and I mean that’s one of the things that relates to my day-to-day work, right? I work for a software company. The schools that come to us, I think kind of already get this, and when you start going down this path, you realize, “Oh, we need specialized tools to do the kinds of things that we want to do.” We have a housing management software, we have a star res, it might have a few little components that help with programs and things like that, but it’s not the main focus of that company or that software. You have student conduct software, things that help with case management. Most likely it’s going to be something like Maxia and that helps with that.
But then when it comes to this stuff, the life and the education, or as I usually say after they move into the halls, if you want to do deeper level things, you need a specialized tool, and that’s the only thing that we do. So that’s the thing that we try to do the best and that’s why I always kind of think of how all these things kind of fit together because of the schools that I work with in my day job, these are the kinds of things that they’re looking at that’s important to them. That’s the reason they came to us to get our software even in the first place is because they’re like, “Yeah, I’m looking at all these other tools and they’re not really going to be doing the types of things that I want to do, or I have to hack them, or I’m living in a Google spreadsheet trying to twist this thing to work the way that I want.”
We kind of come in and be like, “We already designed it for you.” And so to me, it very much fits in with my work. So I mentioned some things, especially for our schools that use Roompact software. This is where it would be useful, but you can adopt this model and not use our software. I think it’s going to be more difficult if you want to do some more complex things with it, but there’s nothing specifically in this that is precluding you from doing that, and so that’s why even when we put out content, one of the things we try to do is, is this in service in the field as a whole?
Whether that also includes our software clients, usually it does, but it’s not necessarily always like a, “Hey, this is a big marketing push for Roompact and give us your email address. We’ll call, email you.” And all that kind of stuff, because it’s not what we do. I think that if the field benefits, then we benefit as a company when we do it in the long run, people will come around to our way of thinking eventually if they’re not there already.
Dustin Ramsdell:
Well, yeah. Well, that’s what I think is the general advocacy for this and that idea of, because I appreciate this about higher ed so much is that I think there is more often than not sort of a grounding like, “We’re all on the same team. We’re all trying to create a more educated world and whatever else.” So we want to advocate for enabling more of this kind of work to happen because we think it helps to achieve that goal that we all share whatever institution we work with, whatever tools we use to do so, but yeah, and I think that sort of intuitive nature of just for you and for certainly just the way Roompact operates and everything else and what the tool and platform enables and stuff, because I think what was coming to my mind is the idea of you read this, maybe you’re already rocking in all these areas or whatever else.
You could be doing the most amazing job, but then yeah, if you’re just putting it all in a spreadsheet or whatever, you’re sort of mitigating I guess certainly the sustainability of it, because I think that idea of not just knowing sort anecdotally that what you’re doing is reaching as many people as possible, having an outcome or tracking things long term or whatever. I think you need to have the housing to keep all this in or something that helps to make sure you can check your work, share your work with your colleagues and things like that versus it just being like, “Oh, no, we got it. We’re doing all this. We’re doing all the things that are in this book.” And it’s like, “Well, but how do you know that you’re doing it, or how could you help to transition things or whatever?” There’s so many of the details of just having all of this work that is grounded in the classic theories or whatever else, working in harmony and feeling that much more enabled by good tools and digital platforms and stuff. So I appreciate you sharing that and yeah, go ahead.
Paul Brown:
That’s the specialization, right? Yeah, you could use a Google sheet, you could use other things to be like, “Did we do it?” Yes, no, maybe some light questions, but the deeper you go into this, you need stuff. It moves more into the realm of assessment and evaluation of like, “Okay, what’s going on in those spaces? How well are we doing this? How are we improving it?” And if we can make that easier, if there’s a way to make that easier for people so that they can turn around real-time data so that they can use data to inform their supervision or their practice, that’s the value add and that also I think hits with the framework is it’s trying to make those things more readily accessible rather than get lost in the wildness of a year when you’re going from one thing to next that if you turn into a checkbox behavior, which I can’t fault people necessarily for if things are really out of hand, you’re like, “I’m just trying to keep things afloat.” Can we make it easier so that you don’t have to feel like you’re just keeping things afloat?
Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah, absolutely. So I will give you the final word here because I think you’ve alluded to this a bit, but just to kind of wrap things up for folks, how do you hope that readers will use this resource individually, the teams department-wide, just whatever’s top of mind as we’re just pulling all this together. Final word is yours.
Paul Brown:
Yeah, I think one thing that I found just in residence life literature in general is it’s very scant on this or it’s fractured into pieces, and so my hope is that by pulling it all together, at the very least, it provides a common read for a team to go through and say, “Hey, what resonates here? What do we do? How do you think that fits in?” Here’s what we like about it, here’s where we think we would be different about it, things like that. So it kind of at least gives a common thing for people to take a look at and reflect and start questions off of. I think if people go deeper with it, it really does try to give a structure for how to implement this in practice. So it’s not just here’s what you should focus on, but here’s how you actually put it into practice.
And also it tries to simplify that because I mean I’m guilty as anyone, as a well-intentioned smart person that has a penchant for designing things, I’ve learned that you really need to hold that impulse for over design as much as possible, and so in doing this, that lesson that I’ve learned personally, it attempts to try to pull that back from over design by stop here, do these minimal things, don’t make it more complicated and it really tries to hold people back, and so that’s my other hope. Because previously when I would kind of work with some of these concepts or teach some of these or do workshops on them, I started more with the broader, “Oh, what do you want students to learn? What do you want students to experience?” And then we kind of built that, but what ends up happening with that approach, not always, is you end up with this really complicated model with all these things that are ambitious and great and not wrong, but not workable in practice. They’re not very pragmatic.
And so what I’m doing with here is okay, let me be a little bit more directive and say, “Here’s a practical guide. Now start here and modify it rather than start with broad and then figure it out.” And I think this is a better approach for most schools. I worry that it risks making it a little too generic, but I encourage schools to customize it to them and their student population and their institution type and things like that, but I think starting with, “Here’s some particulars.” Here’s something that you could just even pull off a shelf a little bit is going to help people in that way. So I hope it also helps in their kind of planning and their structuring and their looking at how they use that time most effectively.
Dustin Ramsdell:
Absolutely. Well, and I always said I wouldn’t do it anymore, but I’m going to do it one more time. I feel like this is a good cookbook, another C word.
Paul Brown:
Oh, you’ve been thinking about that this whole episode, you’ve been waiting to pull that one out?
Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah, it’s like the idea of giving a recipe where it’s like you do it the way that it’s written the first time, and then it’s like, “Hey, feel free to razz this up.” If it’s like, “I want it spicier, I want it like the sauce a little thicker or whatever.” That’s in my mind, that idea where you’re like, “I worry I’m being too generic.” It’s like maybe it is, but you start with the sort of baseline version, do it like the recipe says, and then you can kind of iterate from there because you saw how it felt maybe for your team, your institution, your environment to kind of do it in this directive way. That’s kind of what popped up in my head is hoping that people feel comfortable and competent doing it that way of using this as this field manual where you can keep checking back and be like, “Well, actually, maybe I’ll do this.” And then blossom from there as these seeds are planted and then begin to grow and everything of like okay, you got to start from here.
Paul Brown:
I love that. I’m going to have to attribute that to you now every time I say it from this point forward, but really, I mean that’s it. It is like a recipe and take it and modify it and make the sauce thicker and things like that. It really is that approach. I couldn’t have summed it up better myself.
Dustin Ramsdell:
Well, I appreciate that and yeah, just feel free to put a little quote attribution there. Well, and so I mean just obviously this is a great resource. I appreciate you putting all this time into it. I mean you’re always just so generous with sharing your insights, jumping on the pod obviously pretty frequently, and just being kind of the engine that helps drive so much great knowledge sharing and everything that comes from the blog and everywhere else, and now in this great book as well. So appreciate you coming on to share more about it. We’ll have the link for folks to check it out in the show notes, but yeah, just appreciate you so much for jumping on to help get a little bit more in-depth with it.
Paul Brown:
Yeah, thanks so much Dustin, I appreciate it.
