Abstract
How many different “residence life models” have you seen in your career? Probably a lot. It’s time to break the cycle. In this webinar we’ll go over the 3C Framework for Residence Life Practice. It takes from all of the models to help you distill down what’s important for your residents and what’s on campus. As a framework, it’s flexible and draws from best practices across the field.
Outcomes
- Describe what’s important in implementing any type of residence life model.
- Identify pitfalls that can hold back departmental progress.
- Explain (and implement) the 3C Framework as an organizing principle.
Presenters
- Paul Gordon Brown (he/him/his), Roompact
Date Of Recording: 11/17/2025
Watch the Video:
Links and References:
Roompact produces a monthly series of free webinars on residence life practice. Live webinars are exclusive to Roompact schools, but recordings of most webinars are made publicly available for the benefit of all.
Transcript:
Amanda Knerr:
All right. Good afternoon everyone, and welcome to today’s Roompact webinar. We are so glad you could join us today. My name is Amanda Knerr and I will be your host for today’s session. Before we get started, just a few housekeeping items for us. Today’s session is being recorded and that recording will be available on the Roompact website within the next few days. All participants are currently muted, and we ask that you continue to remain muted to minimize background noise during the presentation. If you experience any technical difficulties during today’s session, please let us know in the chat feature, and I’ll work to get that fixed for you right away. And finally, throughout the session, feel free to submit your questions or comments in the chat. I’ll be actively monitoring it and we’ll make sure our presenter has time to address those questions at the end of our presentation.
Now, I’m excited to introduce today’s featured speaker, our very own Paul Gordon Brown. Paul will be leading today’s session called Breaking the Circular Cycle: the 3C Framework for Residence Life Practice. Today, we will be exploring the 3C framework for residence life practice. It takes from all the various programming and Res Ed models to help you to distill down to what’s truly important for your residents. As a framework, it’s flexible and draws from best practices across the field. Paul, thank you for joining us and sharing your expertise with the Roompact community. The floor is all yours.
Paul Gordon Brown:
Great. Thanks so much, Amanda. I’m excited to be presenting today. So this is something that’s relatively new, so this is something that I, along with Roompact released earlier this year, so here in 2025, and I think it can be really helpful for folks. So let me give you a little bit of context about how it came about. So obviously in my Roompact role, I work with a lot of different campuses. And so I will hear from them, “Oh, we use this model or that model or things like that.” Of basically how do we organize our Res Ed program. Sometimes there are things I’m familiar with, oh, we use a wellness wheel. Got it. I know exactly what that probably means, but occasionally people said, “Oh, we use an engagement model.” And I was like, “I have never seen that in the literature, nor know exactly what that means.” I mean, I can make some educated guesses as to what that means, but I don’t know.
So in looking at kind of the whole of Res Ed practice, we use this term model, but then if you look at the formal literature, there’s not really a lot of true models. Or if there is a model, it’s kind of ill-defined and people talk about it in very broad terms. It’s not like this researcher theorist person came up with this model and here is how the model is formally defined. And so I found a lot of schools either using that term very loosely, kind of creating their own and saying, “This is what it is.” And I thought, how can we kind of advance Res Ed in a way that makes sense that people have a common language, some kind of scheme for talking about things. And so that’s really where this kind of came about in there.
And so what I did was of all the schools I work with, or even those that aren’t Roompact schools that I know of that are doing cool things, I was like, what are schools that quote-unquote do well? What is it that they’re doing? And what are those common elements that you can find? Now one thing in working with schools is sometimes schools are really good in one area but maybe not as developed in another. And another one could be the opposite where they do really well in this other area, but maybe not as well in the other. So if I kind of look at what all schools do well and I were to kind of say, “Well, if we all did this, this would probably be an ideal. What would that look like?” And so that’s where this idea behind this framework came from is it actually draws from a lot of different pieces at different schools, as well as what there is research or leaders in the field saying this, that or the other thing. And so it tries to pull that all together.
So it’s trying to really create kind of an organizing frame. The other thing that I know in working with schools is that organization and culture and stability matter. So sometimes I work with one school that, “Yeah, we do this model and we’re doing really well with it.” And then key leaders disappear and then the whole thing falls apart and then I could talk to that school a year later and they’ll be like, “We don’t do that. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” So the organizational culture, the leadership, is it infused into the organization matters. Things can ebb and flow within there as the organization and culture grow or staff change or things like that. So is there a way to create a scheme that creates a common playing field that can at least mediate moderate some of the effects of the different cultures and changes and staffing and things like that. That’s kind of where this came about. I’m going to share in the chat.
So the formal book that’s out there can be found on the page that I just shared. This will give you all of Roompact’s books, but it’ll be the very first one that’s listed there if you want to want to take a look, this is what I’ll be drawing from today. But when I began that book, it starts with a story. So I was working at an institution, in Residence Life, and I remember we were making a decision of, oh, we want to change up some of the practices in Res Ed. And if anyone’s worked in student affairs for a long time, you know that those administrative assistants that have probably been with the department the longest are the keepers of knowledge. So our administrative assistant had been there in that department for I think 20 years at that point, longer than any of us had been there.
And she was taking notes while we were discussing what changes we wanted to make. And usually she just would take notes and not necessarily interject unless she felt like she had something strongly to contribute. And so we asked her, we said, “Hey, what do you think about this?” And she said, “Oh yeah, we used to do it that way 10 years ago.” And I feel like working with that administrative assistant, she had seen the cycles that the department had gone through and it was circular, meaning we did something, people changed it for a reason, they did that, leadership changed, they changed it back to what it was, and it just kind of cycles through. And so it’s this bit that kind of the title alludes to, which is breaking that cycle. Sometimes I’ve noticed with campuses, it just feels like depending on who [inaudible 00:07:18] it’s just going to cycle through all these and there’s no kind of consistency in change leading towards a goal.
Now goals can change and that would make sense that you might need to shift, but sometimes it just feels like swirling with that. So that’s what this attempts to address. All right, so what is this? You’ll notice I call it a framework as opposed to a model. That was very intentional. The reason I call it a framework is it’s meant to highlight, here’s the important things that a Res Life program could, probably should focus on, but could focus on. Meaning some schools may give more weight to one of the aspects of this than another, and that’s totally fine because your institutional contexts are different. Your cultures and histories of your institutions are different, your student populations are different. So certain elements of this might be more or less important on your campus. The framework is really there to provide the flexibility, a common knowledge, a common set of language to use to talk about these and a starting place.
I feel like that’s as opposed to a model, which tends to I think be treated as more rigid. Meaning here’s the things that you need to do and everyone should be doing these kinds of things in that. So the framework is intended to be broader, more flexible. You could have a model, and it exists under this framework. In fact, this framework borrows from a lot of different kind of models and different concepts from that. But the framework is kind of meant to be a way of mentally organizing things.
And so with this, it’s an attempt to give schools a way to organize their thinking and approach, what do we do in this area? Will this make sense for us on how to do that? That’s why it’s called a framework and not necessarily a model. What is this framework? It’s called the 3C framework. You can see the three C’s here, community, curriculum, and care. They comprise the three major functions of Res Ed departments. I’m going to delve deeper into those, but those are the three. You’ll notice that in this visual, it’s presented as a Venn diagram where there’s overlap. That’s because all the efforts that we don’t do don’t neatly fall into one of these categories. So for example, I could have our student staff do an intentional conversation with a student. There’s going to be a learning aspect to it, curriculum, there’s also going to be a relationship building aspect to that, community, but there’s also going to be an aspect of looking for students that are at risk or maybe struggling, which could be a care aspect of it.
So presented as three buckets, I don’t want you to think this only exists in one space or another. That’s why you kind of see it here presented as a Venn diagram. All right, so in developing this framework, what are some of the things that I thought it needed to have? There were certain things as I developed it, I said, “Oh, this is necessary. What are some of the common principles?” So I was trying to develop a framework that doubles down on the unique strengths of a residence hall environment and encourages the not placed at the center other outcomes that are not Res Life’s core.
My experience, and I am guilty of doing this just as any other residence Life professional is at times is creep. Because Residence Life touches so many aspects of a student’s experience, you kind of start to feel like you have to do all of the things even though there might be other departments on campus who are maybe better suited to do that. Oh, well our students need wellness, but we already have a Wellness Center. How are we going to do wellness? Are we duplicating what the Wellness Center is doing? Are we kind of pulling them in? So the framework attempts to say what is really the core of Residence Life, meaning the things that Residence Life is uniquely best suited to achieve, and let’s focus on that as the framework and the other things are also important, but maybe not central to a Residence Life mission or at an institution you might say, for us that’s really important, so we’re going to pull it in, but at other institutions say, our students already get that in another avenue, so we shouldn’t kind of hang our hat on that.
So that’s kind of one of the first things in developing this. The second one is a framework that leverages and doesn’t duplicate the campus offices and resources. This kind of hints at that first one where I said, “What’s the core of residence life, and how can we use other offices and the collaborations with them to do it?” Again, anyone who’s worked in residence life for a while knows, let’s say at the start of the year you get the, Hey, can you distribute this to your students or can you have your students come to this event that we’re doing? The collaborations we have with other departments are sometimes very transactional. And so what this framework tries to do is think how can you leverage those? Meaning how can we be proactive in saying, Hey, your content’s really important. Let’s bring this in an authentic way. Or your content’s really important, but we don’t have the bandwidth to take that on. Here’s other things we can do to kind of help you out and things like that. So a framework that allows for those better collaborations in there.
The other thing I wanted to find was a framework that focuses on both collective and individual student needs. One of the things when I was in a residence hall, so this has been a little while ago, it was last century, so to speak. So it was before 2000, I was used to the program model. RA does a program, everyone’s invited. One of the things about that model is it kind of assumes a one-to-many kind of approach to things. So here’s something that we’re going to speak to this group of people about or have them go through this group experience and that may be more salient for some of them than others, but what are ways we can kind of find out the individual context of a student and help them out with things as well. So we need to look at the collective needs of the whole, but each student’s also going to have their own unique needs and experiences in there and create a model that addresses the whole but also allows space where we create an individual relationship with a student and their unique set of circumstances.
I also wanted to try to create a framework that gives staff a clear purpose and structure for achieving their work. So shouldn’t be surprising to many of you that we’ve had issues with the great resignation and staff really demanding more of us in terms of making sure that their positions are right-sized in terms of workload as well as compensation, but also the tendency for Residence Life departments, particularly entry-level positions to be an everything position. And so the framework that I was hoping to develop was maybe provide a more clear focus thing so that staff can go, “This is what my responsibilities are. Got it.” That’s what it also attempts to do. Specific enough to ensure consistency to assess, but flexible enough to empower frontline folks. One of the things when I work with schools is I find this kind of push-pull of if we standardize the student experience across all of our communities, that’s going to make assessment so much easier, right? Because now we’re getting consistent data that’s coming through. We’re all doing the same thing.
So we can compare and contrast. We can look at data as a whole, but then there’s kind of a counterbalance, which is sometimes in communities they’ll say, “Well, our students need these particular things and that’s different from this other community. So I want to do my own thing in my own space for those particular needs.” Neither of those is wrong. They’re actually, I think both correct. And so part of, I think what this framework attempts to do is find a balance of say, here’s the things that we need all of our students to experience that should be uniform for everyone. But here’s also the things where your individual context in your community matters and you can and should do these things specifically for your community. The other thing in the framework, and I discuss this in the book, which is just because these things are consistent doesn’t mean if your community has an emergent need, you can’t also do that. There’s sometimes this feeling that if you do this, then you can’t also, no one said you can’t also do those things.
And so building that into the framework so that it’s clear, here’s the consistent, but there’s also a space for you to develop things for your own individual communities and their needs and their students needs to fit in there as well. A framework that does not overwork staff and allows staff to focus on positional strengths. So those of you familiar with a curricular approach. This is borrowing a little bit from some of those elements. In fact, a few of these things are borrowing from those elements. But one thing that’s in those elements of a curricular approach says staff are doing the roles that they’re best suited for. Meaning we’re not asking a student staff member to be an educational expert and design the perfect program on alcohol education, however that may be defined, probably not something an 18 to 20-year-old is best suited to do. So we’re not going to ask them to do that.
Likewise, we’re not going to ask a 40-year-old mid-level administrator to think of what’s cool with the kids today to design the program appealing to them. And so that was kind of what this framework attempts to do is how can we use people’s positional strengths in the smartest way possible, but also use it as an opportunity to say, “Let’s look at workloads and right-size those workloads. Let go of the things that we don’t need to do anymore. Pull in the things that are most important, that have the highest impact.” The framework is grounded in research and theory, but doesn’t require an advanced degree to understand it. Residence Life as a profession isn’t really a profession in the formal sense of the word all the time because there’s no necessary certification process like a true quote-unquote capital P professional would go through.
We have a lot of diverse staff that do a lot of diverse things that have a lot of different educational backgrounds. And so in developing this framework, I want it to be informed by that research, but I want it to be accessible even to people that don’t necessarily have a background in that. Something that they could immediately grasp and go, “Okay, I got it.” And then if your staff want to go deeper into the research behind it, they can, it’s there, but we’re not going to place that in the front and require them to be able to know that in order to implement it.
And then finally, is a framework that’s as simple as possible, kind of what I hinted at in the last one. How can it be as clear cut, simple, easy to understand as can be within that? And so that’s where this framework, thinking about community curriculum and care, those three C’s follow through. If you have questions, please feel free to throw them in the chat. I’m going to kind of semi-pause here, both to take a drink of water but allow you to ask questions if you want to. But if you have them, feel free to throw them throughout because I’m following it out of the corner of my eye here.
All right, so in that book on page, I believe it is 11, you’ll find this chart. And this really is the one-pager of what is this 3C framework. It’s organized around the three of the areas. So why is this important? Why are we doing it? What is it? So what are our goals? What are the things that should be achieved in that area? And then how do we do it? So I’m going to break this down for you, so don’t worry about trying to read this small text on the screen. This is more just for the visual to give you a sense as to what’s there. So the why. The why of the three C’s. The first one, community, it’s about belonging and engagement, help residents build relationships, get engaged, feel a sense of belonging, make memories and have fun. This is one of the core features, if not probably truly the core feature of Residence Life is this sense of community, belonging, engagement, things like that.
I said all aspects are important. This one though is, I mean this is what you think of when you think of Residence Life. And so this is an important aspect of the overall framework that you’re going to look at. The second one relates to learning. So we want them to feel like they belong. We want them to get engaged, but we also want them to learn something while they’re in the residence halls. So help residents learn about themselves, how to live and work with others and how to achieve personal goals. I’m going to go into this more deeply the second half a little bit. But why these three things, learn about themselves, live and work with others, achieve personal goals. Show up in there is in looking at all the learning aims of all the schools that I work with, these are the ones that consistently come up over and over and over again, maybe with slightly different language choice, maybe with a stronger emphasis on certain parts of these than others. But there are things that are pretty common and it’s usually these that I’m going to see.
The third why relates to care, which is what I consider individualized support. Help students who are struggling overcome obstacles and help residents who are thriving to teach higher levels of success. So this is that individual intervention of, “Hey, I want to make sure that you don’t fall through the cracks.” Or, “Hey, you’re doing really well and I want to keep help removing barriers so that you can do even better.” And so that compromises the third one is an individual support for our students. That encompasses the why. So let’s get them belonging and engaged. Let’s have them learn something while we’re here, and then let’s be there to help through their individual circumstances and support them through it.
Next comes up the what. So these are basically the goals for that. So when it comes to belonging and engagement, residents will establish relationships in community. Residents will engage with community and campus activities, and residents will feel a sense of inclusion and belonging. So if we were to try to say, “What does that really, we know why it’s important. What does it truly mean? What are we going to narrow it down to and say this is it. This is how I define what those three goal areas are for that belonging and engagement.” When it comes to learning. What are the goals for that? Now this curriculum pillar, of course there was formerly the Residential Curriculum Institute. Now the Institute on the Curricular approach that’s done a lot of work on this particular aspect of the framework. I was on the faculty of that for a number of years. I still play in that space. Know many wonderful people including Amanda on this call from that space. In fact, she wrote a book on it, which I highly suggest.
And one of the principles of that institute says that each campus should come up with its own goals and outcomes, which I agree with that everyone contacts. You shouldn’t just take the goals from one other institution, which might be very different from yours and use them. But as my thinking has evolved on this, at least as it relates to residents life, they’re the same things that keep coming up over and over again. And what I found is a lot of people if they’re going full on curricular model, they get stuck in the learning goals and writing outcome phase and don’t get into the practice phase and they end up swirling. And so what I’ve done is I’ve created a series of goals and say, “Yeah, you should contextualize these for yourself. You should think about what yours are. But hey, if you’re going to copy something, I want you to copy this. This is probably what will work for most institutions.” I’ll show you what those look like in a little bit, but they’re kind of generalized. You could tweak the language, things like that.
And so what of learning is learning about oneself. So a sense of identity and purpose. Here’s what I hope in my life, living and working with others, really a core residence life learning goal area, residents will peaceably live and collaborate with others. And then life skills, developing practical skills to navigate life’s challenges. Those are the things I most often see across all Residence Life departments that are pretty universal. And then finally, the what of individualized support. So residents will receive proactive support when they encounter difficulty or to further enhance their success, and residents will be connected to offices and support services according to their individual needs.
So are we connecting our students to the offices? Oh, you’re struggling with writing. Let’s get you connected to the writing center, but also are we looking out for those warning signs and making sure that students are being connected into some of the support networks they have if they need that. That’s the what of those three C’s. The final bit is the how. So how do we do that? The way I organized this was looking at it from broadly speaking, what does our student staff roles and what do our professional staff roles are? Now everyone has slightly different staffing models, but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a department that doesn’t have at least this somewhat kind of this breakdown to it. So trying to make sure that our roles are right sized and correctly organized for the staff members they are. That’s how I picked student and professional staff.
So with belonging and engagement, student staff are offering social activities, connecting residents with engagement opportunities on campus. They could be predefined. So hey, we’re all going to do these things. We’re going to have, the Aldrin is going to have a first floor meeting, or they could be spontaneous, Hey, we’re just going to go to dinner as a group community over into the dining hall. Or they could be campus-based. So the department is doing this thing and we’re all participating, or there is this lecture going on across campus and we’re all going to go to it or promote our residents going to it in some way so that belonging and engagement can be completely student staff driven. It could be things that are, hey, the department says we’re all going to do this together. Or it could be engaging into the campus community. That can vary I think, by the staff member as well as what the department says.
Here’s the things that are most important. We want you to keep doing floor dinner meetings, but we don’t need you to fill out a form and triplicate in order to do that. Just go do that. We want to empower you to do that. Professional staff check in and advise to ensure healthy communities and engagement. So this is their role. One thing that I’ve noticed in a few different campuses is I don’t know that this always occurs in talking with some professional staff that supervise students staff. I’ve found that sometimes those one-on-ones are more about checking in with how are you doing as a staff member? Are you doing well in your classes and things like that and not checking in on the community or the work. And so I wanted to put this in writing of that’s part of what it is. Yes, we want to check in how are you doing your classes, student, staff member and other things that is important, but that’s not the whole of what should be occurring in those one-on-one or supervision spaces for the learning.
How is the student staff are executing some of the strategies, agreements, campaigns, whatever those may be that are in service of the learning goals that we talked earlier. So they’re going to execute it and it’s the professional staff that help design and guide those strategies. This is classic curricular approach if you’re familiar with this. Basically it’s saying if something has an educational design, we need the student staff to help execute it, make it fun, make it interesting, make it engaging, be a peer to provide some of that education. But we’re not going to put the weight of, “Hey, you need to learn everything you should know about students’ alcohol choices and create a perfect program to help them learn that. We’ll take care of that for you and help you out with that.” So that’s how is for the learning is there’s going to be a few of those things.
Then when it comes to individualized support, how student-staff meet for intentional mentorship conversations, intentional conversations at regular intervals and check in with supervisors about individual residents, professional staff do escalated outreach and refer to behavioral intervention teams, academic support teams, things that are appropriate. So the student staff are really our frontline in developing that individualized relationship with the student to know about them, know what they’re doing well with, know what they’re struggling with, being able to intervene. The professional staff are the ones that are checking in on that to say, “Okay, this one needs to be escalated.” Or, “Oh, okay, this is something we’ll just monitor.” Or, “This student seems to be doing fine from everywhere we’re talking about, don’t think there needs to be anything in particular going on here.” That’s where that individualized support happens.
You’ll notice that I gave the intentional mentorship/conversations element here under care. For those of you who’ve done curricular approaches, you’d usually see that as a feature of curriculum. I didn’t put it under the curriculum C I put it under the care C. This is an example where some of these strategies cross over everything. So an intentional conversation is a great way to get to know an individual context about a student and help them connect with teams that they need to. But it’s also a learning opportunity. It’s also a relationship building opportunity. I placed it here only because this is such a uniquely positioned strategy to help people do that. It made most sense in my idea to kind of place this one here. And so let’s just kind of review that a little bit. I’m going to show it to you in a different way. This is that community C. so the why, helping them feel connected, belonging. You’ll notice funds also in there. The what, what are we hoping for them to do? Establish relationships, connect with campus and community, feeling a sense of inclusion and belonging.
And then the how, how are student staff helping to promote that by the things that they do in their communities and professional staff checking in on that in one-on-ones or other venues, staff meetings to make sure that that’s occurring or help advise the staff member how to do it better or differently if need be. The second C is the curriculum that’s helping students learn at its basic core what I gave you three examples of learning goals that I find that are pretty common across all Residence Life departments, regardless of context and culture, which is helping people learn about themselves, helping them live with others and then also gaining life skills. And the how of that are things that student staff help us execute and that professional staff members help us design.
And then the final C is that care, helping to create individual interventions for students, but also attending to their individual circumstances, backgrounds and needs to help them be successful at the institution. This has a strong retention angle to it. What giving those students individualized support, but also making sure that they’re connecting with offices and other services on campus. So it’s not something that Residents Life necessarily needs to provide, but we’re there to make sure that they’re connecting with the offices that can provide that the best. And then how we do that, that’s the student staff members knowing each of their residents individually, either through an intentional mentorship or conversation type setup and the professional staff members really checking in on a regular basis, not just saying, “How are your residents doing?” “Oh, they’re fine.” That’s not going to cut it with this care area. It has to be, “Well, let’s talk through some of your residents. How about Johnny? How’s Johnny doing?” And really making sure that that student’s getting that detailed care and connection that they need.
And so that’s what forms the framework here. I mention on page 11, that’s where you’ll find that chart in the book that I shared earlier, but that kind of breaks it all down in kind of a one-pager, kind of helps you understand. So I’m going to pause again so I can take a little bit of water here. But also if you have questions, feel free to throw those into the chat.
All right, so now you can understand here’s what the framework is. How do you put this into practice? And so this is where mapping as an exercise I find really helpful in figuring out what do we want this to look like when it goes through. So don’t worry about trying to decipher all the texts in this chart. We’re going to do a zoomed-in part here in a moment, but this can also be found in the book. One of the things that I find helpful is to think about something linearly through time. And so in the book there’s this example you can see week zero, pre-opening, week 1, 2, 3 roughly follows a school that would be on a fall semester type basis starting in about August, ending in somewhere around December. And then you see the three columns there. What are we doing as relation of community, curriculum and care?
And so one way I approach this is I’m going to go in and mark all of the things that are quote-unquote unmovable. So you’ll see under week one it says, “This is welcome weeks.” Resident Life usually doesn’t do the welcome week. They participate in it, but it’s not organized by them. That’s when the welcome weeks will be. Obviously you could massage that later, but it’s not something that you just say, “Oh, we’re going to move welcome week to the third week.” And you could do that. You don’t really have too much of a choice in that. You’d have to collaborate and talk about that. Same thing, you’ll notice homecoming, week four is when homecoming happens. Homecoming is going to happen when it’s going to happen. So I go through and I put through here are kind of my quote-unquote unmovables or things that are just going to impact how this semester plays out.
I don’t get to move Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is going to fall when Thanksgiving is going to fall. I don’t get to move the finals weeks. We already know when those are. So I go through and I place those into the weeks to get a sense as to what’s going on. How are our students going to be busy? How are our staff going to be busy? Let’s put those things in there so that when we create some kind of sense of here’s how the semester will flow, remember I want to right size it workloads, it’s also taking into account workloads of the staff but also the bandwidth of the students to participate in these things. So I do that first. Then I would go in and say, here’s the things that we know we’re going to do. So we do roommate agreements. It’s a great strategy to get people talking with their roommates.
We might do it differently, but they’re going to occur around this timeframe. We need to have an all-hall community meeting as soon as the students move in, so let’s put that in there. Now putting these in, that doesn’t mean that you don’t question them. Is the community meeting the best way to do this? Could it be virtual? Could it be things like that? You can still have those questions, but getting these pieces in here loosely, sketching them in, penciling them in and tweaking them and changing them and moving them around kind of gets you a good starting place. From there, I start to fill in different things. So I know we want them to do an intentional conversations because it’s really great for getting to know a student. So let’s put those into our calendar here. It looks like there’s other things going on in these columns.
We might need to shift it so that not everything’s happening in the same week and you can adjust. So this is very much like a living document moving exercise, which is hard to show you on a static slide like this, but throwing those in there allows me to kind of see where things fall out. So this mapping, what it really kind of does for you is help you figure out one, what’s best for our staff? We can’t have everything happening all at once. Can we spread it out? Can we spread it out intelligently? But two, we can’t just have everything happen with a resident in week two and then nothing for four weeks. We need to want to make sure that it’s nice evenly spread out. The other thing that it does is you probably want it to be developmental or sequential. Meaning if a student’s coming in and they’re meeting their roommate for the first time, we need to have something where they get to know their roommate, then we need to have to have them have a conversation about what it means to live together.
Then we need to make sure that if things are happening, if there’s conflict occurring, we’re progressing that. So there’s a developmental sequence to this as well. So it’s not just one-offs and kind of no sense of time. You’re also looking at it, what does this look like as a student journey through our Residence Life environment. That’s why you’ll notice in my example, it says first year, first semester, because this is ideally what \\that student would get and if this was second year, first semester, there might be things in here that we wouldn’t do with our rising sophomores that we would do with our first year students. So this is done to be kind of a map. Now, some campuses have nicely neatly contained all our first year students live in one building and all our second one, which makes doing something like this very easy.
Some of you have mixed buildings where the first years are mixed in with the sophomores who might be mixed in with juniors. That makes this a little bit more difficult, but you need to think of your map differently. Let’s look at all of our students and what’s the common denominator and what things are we targeting for first year students and which one’s not. And that doesn’t need to be location based. It can be, oh, not all our first-year students live together. So rather than doing this convocation-style event in a building, we’re going to do it as a department and invite the first-year students from the different buildings to come. You just need to think about how do you organize that differently. I think our brains though are naturally attuned to be like, oh, well if all the first-year students live in one building, it makes it much simpler, which I think it probably does, but you can do it both ways.
It can be done both ways. So that’s what that mapping is. And so this is what allows you to take the framework and say these things are more important than these, and so we’ll put heavier emphasis on that. You’ll notice under the community one for week four it says spontaneous planned or take two. That’s kind of like, Hey, student-staff member, you should be doing something for your community. I’m not going to prescribe what that is. It should just be something that’s happening. That’s totally your choice versus roommate agreements we’ve put in there. That’s something we’ve all universally agreed to do. It’s not like you have a choice to do roommate agreements or not. And so it’s that way of organizing it so that you can see how things fall through. Now also in the book, it does give you some strategies and it’s written about it from a student-staff member point of view.
I’m not going to spend too much time on this today. You might want to look at it. You’ll notice that there’s certain ways I phrase things that were probably intentional. We’ll look at the social activities. One, there’s an expectation that students have staff have some type of social activity for the residents each week. This does not need to be a complicated program, meaning we don’t need to go on a ski trip every week that involves requesting money and doing all these things. Meeting to go to dinner together in the dining hall counts, baking cookies and sharing them door-to-door counts. Watching a movie together counts. Of course you can do more complicated ones if you wish, but that’s not really the expectation. The idea is that you’re just connecting with your community. And you know what? We’re not going to make you fill out a complicated program proposal form just to go to dinner with your floor in the dining hall because that’s way over designing it and that’s not a good use of your time.
We just want to know what happened, when did it happen, how many people showed up? That’s it. So fill out this simple little form when you’re done just so that we know what’s going on so we can get a feel for connection points and things like that. So this example, it gives you some of what I’m trying to do in some of these. And I’m not saying you should necessarily copy exactly this, make it your own, but there are ways I’m thinking of this is important but not you need to spend three hours organizing it. Important, so I’m going to reduce this. But then there are other ones where I’m like, no, you need to spend time on this. So this again goes back to that idea of mapping and right sizing things to your staff capacity as well as your student journey and what their bandwidth on things, the strategies play into that as well. All right, so I’m going to pause again, take a little bit of water and then I just want to kind of talk a little bit about the learning aspects before we wrap it up here.
All right, so about the second C in there, the curriculum C, the learning C, there are a lot more resources going into this aspect of it. So if you want to go really deep, and there’s a lot of schools that will really squarely focus on this aspect of learning that will use some of those resources. There’s the Institute on the Curricular Approach. There’s the Roompact provided books, which you see here. There is the formal book of developing a curricular approach to student affairs that’s out in publication. There’s a lot of pieces on that, but what I wanted to try to help Residence Life do a little bit is make it a little bit simpler by giving you a guide as to here’s the things that might show up for a Residence life department. And so it’s organized as I showed you before, around three goal areas, self-relationships and life.
And in the book, this is broken out in much more detail. Gives you here’s what the goal is, residence will have a sense of identity and purpose, but also breaks it out into outcomes and rubrics. If that means something to you, great. If you’re familiar with that curricular approach, that’s what this would be. If you’re not familiar with that, I would say don’t get too hung up on this unless you want to investigate further. The main takeaway here is you need to figure out what you want your students to learn when they’re living with you. What are those things? The suggested ones I’m giving you are that residents should learn about a sense of identity and purpose. And that means being able to define who they are and what they believe, and being able to act towards the goals and who they want to be. I also have, they should live and work with others and live peaceably and collaborate with them. What does that mean? Students will be able to navigate conflict and pursuit of resolution and students will be able to live and work with people who are different from them.
And then the final one is related to life skills. Developing those practical skills to navigate life challenges. What does that mean? Being able to integrate their own definition of wellness in their lives and what does that mean for what my context is as well as being able to navigate practical life challenges. So what happens when I get a setback? What happens when the Bursar office says they can’t release my transcript because we haven’t paid? Who do I need to talk to? How do I figure that out for myself? How can I become more independent from my parents? Things like that. And so those are also given in the book as guided suggestions that if you’re like, what should our learning goals and outcomes be? Here’s a list of things that pretty much show up on everyone’s, maybe with different language choice, maybe with different areas of emphasis, but those are the ones that I see most often in there.
As I say in the book though too, because you’ll notice it’s three goals. Each goal has two outcomes, so it’s six outcomes in total. You don’t want to add to my list. I would say if you’re going to add to my list, you need to take away from my list. If you come up with your own, do not go over six outcomes in total. Heck, I would accept if you came down to four, I would almost accept if you came down to two smaller numbers are better. And I think one of the traps in sometimes when curricular approaches are taught, and I think I’ve done this in the past myself, is we encourage folks to come up with their own, but they create so many that it’s unwieldy that they can’t possibly track it all, that it’s way too beyond what they could do. And then staff get frustrated and say the curriculum doesn’t work.
And what the real answer is, it’s not that curriculum doesn’t work, it’s that our learning goals and outcomes are too complex and that’s why the curriculum’s not working. And so this is an attempt to kind of give you, here’s a guide, keep it short, don’t go really beyond that, swap things out as necessary, stuff like that, but try to keep that really tight and focused. If it’s a division in the student affairs that doing it’s going to be much broader. But for a residence life department that’s trying to juggle all the things, the residence life department juggles, you want to keep it simple, clean and as possible.
And so that is the framework. There’s a few things that are pitfalls that I’ve noticed with campuses that I want to make sure that people avoid. So the way I term this is we go wrong when we conflate department mission with outcomes. One of the things this framework does is it has some goals that are learning goals. We want our students to learn these things, and there are some goals that are related to what might be program goals, meaning we want our students to do these things, not necessarily learn it, but we want them to be successful. You need to learn some things to be successful, but there’s both program and learning outcomes and some departments sometimes conflate these two. I think they’re both important, but they’re also a little bit different. And so what I mean here is conflating a department mission with outcomes
If you ever look at a residence life department, their mission statement talks about themselves. We are going to create an environment where students can thrive. Do these things, receive great customer service. Great. That’s about you as a department. What do you want for your students? It’s kind of hidden in the mission a little bit. We want students to be successful, so our outcome for our residents is for them to be successful. But make sure that you’re clear about what it is that’s a goal for your department versus what is it a goal is for your resident. The framework is trying to focus on what is it that we want the residents to be able to do, learn, achieve, all of those kinds of things.
We go wrong when we define too many goals and outcomes and make them complex. That was my little soapbox moment and giving you the example of a curriculum of out cascade of goals and outcomes and said, “Here’s an example you can use, you can also create your own, but don’t go too far beyond this or make it complex.” When I wrote those, I was like, “Let’s get the few key highlight areas. Do not go beyond them and let’s write them in a way that’s accessible in non-jargony language.” So if you do go down that path of doing your own, you’re going to want to make sure that you don’t have too many of them and they’re not too complex. You’re going to want to keep that in mind.
We go wrong when we provide disparate one-off events and experience without a developmentally organized plan. That is what the mapping is in essence trying to help us do is how can we create a student journey that makes sense as they move through our residence hall spaces as opposed to a, all right, does this on one floor, all right, does that on another floor, all right, does something completely different on another floor that is very scattershot and does not have that developmental sequence and this is something that we could do better at.
And I think something that the framework tries to provide a space to be more intentional about doing that. The next one’s, the community building and student success and success as student learning and success as mutually exclusive. So I mentioned that I was on the faculty of the Institute and the Curricular Approach, Residential Curriculum Institute for a number of years, and one thing that I’ve heard over and over again from some folks is, “Well, we don’t do a curricular approach because our residents just want to have fun, it should be social.” And especially coming out of COVID, developing those relationships are important. In my mind, there is nothing in a curriculum that says you shouldn’t already also do those things. In fact, I can’t imagine you would just do a curriculum and not attend to those social things. Those are the things that even allow student learning to occur in the first place.
So I think sometimes there’s this sense of either you do this or you do that kind of this black and white dualistic sense of either we’re focused on resident engagement or we’re focused on resident learning or we’re focused on social and connection or we’re focused on curricular things for our students. It can and should be. Both are need to be present. That’s why the framework kind of very explicitly says community, curriculum and care. I think if you talk with folks that are curricular experts, they just assume that the community part is happening and they don’t need to go into it, so that’s why they don’t talk about it. But sometimes I think that’s interpreted as it’s not important, which I do not believe those people would say. So you need to do community building and you can also walk and chew gum at the same time and have your students learn something.
We go wrong when we rely solely on the execution of programs as a metric of success. And this framework talks about conversations and bringing people to things. It’s trying to move beyond. You need to do three programs a semester in the following areas. Those are still important. Again, it’s not that you don’t do programs, it’s just there’s so many other ways of connecting with students that we need to think of the broad ways in which we could do that. Our students have changed. When I was in a residence hall back when I was there the first year that wired internet had been installed in the residence halls and there were wired phones in the rooms. There was no Netflix, there was no mobile phones, there were no all these other competitions for student time. And so events and programs were probably a little bit more important and salient for me because that were kind of the only game in town.
Now there’s so many different ways to connect with students and so much competition for student time. We just need to be smarter and not think of a discrete, you go to an event that lasts an hour type of intervention is the only way that we can do these things. Just another tool in your toolkit, but it shouldn’t be the primary one. We go wrong when we burden staff with unimportant or overly complex processes they may not be suited for. So what are unique strengths of our student staff, of our professional staff? How can we double down on those and how can we be more efficient? Not overburdening processes into this. I kind of hinted at this when I talked about, Hey RAs, I need you to bring your community to dinner or go to a paint and sip up on Main Street or things like that, and I’m not going to make you fill out five 50 forms in order to do that.
Think about the data that you collect, think about the processes you have, think about how important the thing is and only collect the things that are key to do that and let the other stuff go. Because staff time is finite, it is not infinite. And so you need to be thinking about that as these are designed because that’s an important piece. The final bit is about collecting data throughout this. So we haven’t really talked about assessment. It’s kind of been an undercurrent in these things, but collecting that data should be very purposeful. How can we collect it and then use it for improvement? So if we’re collecting intentional conversation feedback and we’re noticing which students are struggling, how are we then identifying those students out of that data and moving them forward, not collecting it at the end of the year saying 30 of our students are struggling.
That’s not going to help them. So thinking about data, thinking about those feedback loops, thinking about what things are important, also, what things are not important that would be nice to have, not need to have and let those go is something that needs to be thought of when you’re going through this process. So that is kind of the broad overview. We’re getting towards the end of our time here, so I wanted to say thank you. I don’t know if there’s any questions, you can throw them in the chat here as well. Obviously, all you folks also know me and know how to connect with me, so you can also ask that to me later. We can connect offline, email, whatever’s easiest for you. I’d be happy to do that.
Amanda Knerr:
All right, Paul, thank you so much for being our featured speaker today, helping us explore the possibilities and the potential that we have in the 3C framework. For all of you joining us today, thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to participate. I know I’m going to be walking away with several items to think about, to reflect and to use in my personal practice, and I hope you have too. Just a reminder, you will be getting an email from us in the next couple of days with the recording link so that you can listen to it again or share it with your team or your colleagues for them to use in their practice as well. Finally, we hope that you will join us for our next webinar, which is Wednesday December 17th at three PM Eastern Standard Time for a no survey, no problem, creative tools for Smarter Assessment and Residence Life. Thank you. I hope you have a great day. Take care.
