If you’ve ever looked at a training agenda and thought, “We should probably throw in something interactive here,” you are in very good company. Residence life has long relied on the hope that if we scatter enough icebreakers and small group discussions throughout training– a name game here, a marshmallow tower there, and sharing fun facts about ourselves– something meaningful will emerge. And to be fair, community building during training usually does something. The question is whether we know what we’re asking it to do.
I offer this as a proposal to consider a secondary purpose for your training (pro staff and student staff). Yes, the main purpose of your training should be rooted in clear learning goals and outcomes (hello, curricular approach). That’s truly the bread and butter of a successful training, but I want to encourage you to not stop there.
Priya Parker, in her book The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, outlines the importance of having a purpose, a really specific achievement or accomplishment in mind, before any gathering. And no, it’s not a vague purpose like “team building” or “celebrating,” but rather, it should be something much more clear. Without that clarity, it is easy to fill a schedule and hope the group becomes what you need it to become. With a secondary training purpose, you can design toward something specific: trust that will matter on duty, belonging that helps someone stay, judgment that carries into difficult conversations, or collaboration that lasts beyond training week.
As you attempt to identify your secondary purpose, helpful questions to reflect on might include:
- What should be different about this group because they spent these days together in the same room?
- What would fall through the cracks if training became entirely asynchronous?
- Who needs to know each other before the semester starts, and why?
- When does someone start to feel like they are really part of this team?
- What unwritten department culture have we been unintentionally teaching through how training has run in the past?
- What are we assuming people will pick up naturally? What about our training sends this message?
- If someone observed our training without context, what would they assume about our team? What would they believe mattered most to us?
Still not sure? I came up with a few examples of what a “secondary purpose” might look like, and how you could build your training around it.
To mark a transition. Training often serves as a threshold moment, signaling that a break is ending, a new semester is beginning, and staff are stepping back into responsibility. If this is your secondary purpose, think about what rituals, opening moments, or conversations you can start to make the shift feel momentous.
To help new staff belong. Sometimes the most important thing for a first-year RA or hall director needs in the first few days is evidence that they are supposed to be there. And despite how excited we are to facilitate the perfect version of The Human Knot, that belonging is rarely created by icebreakers alone. A sense of belonging is forged through the stories, norms, and relationships. If belonging is the secondary purpose, ask yourself how your training creates enough moments for authentic connection and integration.
To strengthen trust. Trust usually grows when staff see each other handle discomfort, keep commitments, or speak candidly. If trust is the goal of your training, it may mean fewer presentations and more shared problem-solving, discussion, or experiences where people rely on each other. Ask: when during the academic year will trust matter most, and how have we practiced for that?
To build a collaborative culture. Training can be one of the few windows where staff can actually create something together: community standards, programming approaches, or best practices. If collaboration is your purpose, remember that participants need real influence (not just contributing to a Google Doc abyss that never gets revisited again).
To practice community building before leading it. The reality of most of our student staff roles are creating belonging and community for residents. But have we made sure they themselves have experienced it intentionally first? The same can be true for professional staff facilitating staff meetings and conflict mediations. If this is your secondary purpose, training should let people experience a well-facilitated community before expecting them to reproduce it.
To rehearse judgment calls. Res Life is no stranger to polices and procedures. “It’s in the manual, it’s in the handbook, it’s in the guide!” is familiar to all of us. The beauty of in-person time, though, can be practicing gray-area decision-making: what to do when it’s not written down, when context and precedent matters, and what feels unclear. If this is your secondary purpose for training, you should create opportunities for staff to try, fail, and talk through how they would approach different situations.
To cultivate fun. Our jobs are hard. Maybe the secondary purpose of training is simply to bring joy to a role that often centers crisis response. I want to caution you, though, to not jump to creating activities with whatever is in your storage closet leftover from last year’s programming. Ask instead: what would make you leave work thinking, “That was actually a really fun day?” What kinds of activities do you pay for outside of work: kickball leagues, cooking classes, pottery, time outdoors? Is there space, time and budget to create those memories in the workplace?
In closing, remember your training can’t do it all. Trust, fun, collaboration, or wherever your secondary purpose lies take time, but training is the ultimate time to jump-start it. And if nothing else, I hope you consider that community building with vague hope is a lot of pressure to put on one game of Two Truths and a Lie. Identifying a secondary purpose gives your training something most schedules are missing: a reason for people to leave changed by having done it together.
