Abstract
High engagement, low stakes, and improvisation are at the core of this new game-based learning approach to staff training. Originally designed for Graduate and Full-Time Incident Response training, Duty & Dragons uses game mechanics from Role-Playing Table-Top Games (RPTTG) to provide an innovative and effective approach to practicing real-world scenarios, conflict navigation, and other common incidents needing staff intervention in a safe, supportive, and semi-structured environment. This session aims to review the context, materials, and outcomes of D&D Training Sessions with Residential Life staff and ends with practice and resource sharing for colleagues to adapt to their own team of adventurers!
Outcomes
- Participants will gain insights for improvisation, gamification, and resource-driven techniques in design of staff training.
- Participants will have hands-on practice and tools to adapt materials to their own staff training design.
Presenters
- Caroline Mosteller, M.Ed. (she/her), Residence Director, UMass Amherst
- Olivia Radcliffe, MA/MPH, CHES (she/her), Residence Director, UMass Amherst
Date Of Recording: 4/10/26
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:
Now, I’m super excited to introduce today’s featured speakers, Caroline Mosteller and Olivia Radcliffe, both residence directors at UMass Amherst. They will be leading today’s session entitled Duty & Dragons: A Game-Based Learning Approach to Student Staff Training, where they will be introducing us to the idea of using the game mechanics from role-playing tabletop games to provide an innovative and effective approach to practicing real-world scenarios and conflict navigation in a safe, supportive, and semi-structured environment. Caroline and Olivia, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your expertise with the Roompact community. The floor is all yours.
Caroline Mosteller:
Thank you so much.
Olivia Radcliffe:
Thank you.
Caroline Mosteller:
All righty. So welcome to Duty & Dragons. We will get started. All right.
Olivia Radcliffe:
All right. So before we begin, here at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, we like to acknowledge through our land acknowledgment that this university was founded and built on the unceded homelands of the Pocumtuc Nation on the land of the Norrwutuck community. We’ll begin with gratitude for nearby waters and lands, including the Kwinitekw, the southern portion of what’s now the Connecticut River.
We recognize the lands and waters as important relations with which we’re all interconnected and depend on to sustain life and well-being. We also acknowledge that the University of Massachusetts Amherst is a land-grant university. And as part of the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862, Tribal lands from 82 Native Nations west of the Mississippi were sold to provide the resources to found and build this university. It’s just important that we start with that acknowledgment, because that’s how we build and support where we live, breathe, work, and play.
Caroline Mosteller:
Awesome. Thank you, Liv. So welcome. We will be your Dungeon Masters today. So I’m Caroline Mosteller. I am a residence director here at UMass Amherst. I currently work in John Adams, which is a tower, and I will be your cleric of conflict resolution today.
Olivia Radcliffe:
And I am Olivia Radcliffe. I’m also a residence director at UMass Amherst. I work in a low-rise building in our southwest part of campus called Patterson and MacKimmie, and I am your rogue of role-playing.
Caroline Mosteller:
And then we have you. We hope that by the end of today, you can be a DM for your staff training, whether that’s as a cleric of conflict resolution, a bard of behavioral protocols. You get it.
Olivia Radcliffe:
You get it. All right.
Caroline Mosteller:
So we are going to start with a little bit of how we got here, talk about some of our current practices and why we switched to something new, kind of talk about how we got into the planning of it all and then into practice. We will do a brief demonstration, which hopefully will be fun and will work over Zoom, and then we will talk about how to apply this to your own domain. So how do you make this work for your staff?
Olivia Radcliffe:
Right. And to add a little bit more context for the content we’re going to go over, this does come from a UMass Amherst lens. So we did design this around the campus and the resources on our campus that we work. It also utilizes a Residential Life perspective. So when we broaden this to our student affairs pals, we just wanted to acknowledge that the way we design this comes from Residential Life, and then we also tested this with professional staff who serve on call, as well as graduate staff who do not serve on call, and with student staff, like resident assistants and peer mentors, who serve on duty.
Caroline Mosteller:
All right. So some language updates for today. If we use the term IR, it could mean one of two things. That would be incident response, which is the committee we were on when beginning this work, also the literal action of responding to incidents, or it could be incident reports, which is our submitted reports mostly by our resident assistants that is about any incident or concern on campus.
We have Care Reports, which is our mostly residence director-level submitted reports for resource referrals and connection building, and then DM or GM, which would be Dungeon Master or gamemaster, which is just lingo from the D&D world to signify the person who’s leading the table. We will refer to them either as the DM or the facilitator throughout this presentation.
Olivia Radcliffe:
Awesome. Thank you, Caroline. So let’s just talk a little bit of how we got here. So why are we even considering using D&D in our incident response training? Well, we want to focus on inclusion. Right? And so, when we add in inclusionary practice through our tabletop gaming like D&D, we’re creating higher engagement levels, because we have better accessibility, and we’re paying attention to neurodiversity. Right? How people participate, process, and take in information.
We are all unique individuals. And so, we wanted to make sure we established a design that met people where they were at. So we made sure that we wanted to have equitable participation. So using D&D, we are having roles, ba dum tish, at every level. We also utilize a brave space framework. I appreciate the laughs. I see. We utilize a brave space framework, whereas a safe space is one that aims to limit judgment and harm.
We can’t always promise that in the fields that we’re in, especially when dealing with ongoing crisis and incident response. So we utilize what is known as a brave space where we’re inviting folks to say those hard things and have those complicated discussions in a way where they can fail without causing any real-life damage or feelings of shame or adding to any problems or concerns.
We also prioritize learners’ needs, abilities, and comfort. We’ll get into a little bit more about how we do that. This game is also physically accessible. So unlike standing on a stage, in BCDs, or walking the clusters every single time, we have physical accessibility considered for this tabletop design, where we have facilitators moving in the space, allowing participants to get comfortable where they’re at. And then lastly, we utilize a mix of game-based and gamification learning to increase engagement and impact.
Caroline Mosteller:
All right. So now, we’re going to briefly compare some of the common practices. If you’ve been in Res Life, you’ve definitely seen all of these before. But first, we have behind closed doors. So this is acting out pre-written scenarios. Generally, it’s used to test their staff on real-time responses as well as practice conversations and interactions.
It’s usually very acting-based, and some of the limitations for behind closed doors can be that it’s high-anxiety acting. The scenarios can be kind of surface-level, but it also has parallels to hazing practices, just based on putting those returning staff in a room, having them heighten situations with brand-new staff. It can be pretty intimidating and can just kind of parallel that practice. And the scenarios generally do not change. They are fully pre-written, predetermined. Your returning RA staff is determined on what they have to do.
Then we have case studies. So this would be your guided review of written scenarios or documentation. This could be previously reported incident reports that you’re just working through as a staff. This generally allows for slower and less rushed reviews of protocols. It allows the time to check resources and is generally discussion-based.
However, some limitations that we noted with this were low engagement, and it doesn’t prepare folks for real-world interactions, as in they’re not practicing the physical statements that they would make when responding to an incident, and then all information is generally provided up front at once. And then we have trivia and quizzes, which we use a lot in things like staff meetings just to remind folks of policy.
These could be Kahoots or Jeopardy! And these are usually just strictly on policies, procedures by the book, which definitely helps with the memorization of policy. However, it can tend to be low engagement. It focuses on recall rather than a use of the resources that we want our student staff to remember to use when they’re on duty or when they’re responding to things, and it doesn’t generally provide any practice of a real response. It is just that memorization piece.
Olivia Radcliffe:
Right. And so, to add onto that further, we wanted to take on a new approach that utilizes a little bit of a mix between a game-based framework and a gamified learning framework. So, “Liv, Caroline, this seems like the same term.” You’d be right for the most part, but there are subtle differences. So we highlighted here the ways in which we’ve used each one.
So we utilize gamified learning, which uses game elements that enhance learning experiences, versus using the game as the primary method. We’re not playing a full round of D&D. We’re not meeting for weeks and weeks on end. We’re simply just using elements and mechanics of D&D to enhance the RD training experience. The focus, we did combine both. So we do want to learn through the gameplay by emphasizing things like the mechanics of D&D while also incorporating elements into nongame contexts, like incident response.
Next up, our engagement. We want to make sure that we’re engaging them because the gameplay is immersive, not necessarily because there’s rewards, point keeping, scorekeeping, or competition. Everyone wins, because everyone gets to play D&D. Then we have feedback. So in D&D, your participation guides the flow of the scene. Right? So you can change things with mechanics like your dice rolling, but for the most part, you are responding in real time.
So we’re getting immediate feedback directly through the game mechanics rather than tracking through things like point keeping or rewards. And then lastly, content is delivered through game scenarios and challenges rather than through the traditional formats with added game elements. So we did make sure that we combined a bit… Sorry, we combined a bit of these two. So there are some traditional formats like reviewing the scene in its original context. We have a tiny little blurb that almost mirrors a BCD. We just give that first sentence to set the scene. Everything else though is delivered through the mechanics of the game.
Caroline Mosteller:
So why games? There’s a lot of research that shows that gamified learning or game-based learning maximizes learning for the participants involved. So the first model that we have here is the dynamical model for gamification of learning, and these four points are there for key components, which are curiosity, fantasy, challenge, and control.
All four of these are remarkably important for D&D, Duty & Dragons, that is. But I would say that we really focus on challenge and control a bit during our scenarios, and then foundations of game-based learning. Again, the four key components are motivation, player engagement, adaptivity, and graceful failure. And we, I believe, include all four of these, but mostly, the last two, again, being adaptivity and graceful failure, allowing folks the space to mess up, use their resources, remember how to get back into the scene, and then start again and try again. So we will continue from here.
Olivia Radcliffe:
Perfect.
Caroline Mosteller:
So accessibility in our practice and why adaptivity matters. This was key for us as we worked on creating this, but it ultimately maximizes learning. We wanted to make sure we provided multiple ways to interact based on folks’ learning styles, which you will see in a little bit. We wanted to mitigate harm by lowering the stakes, allowing that acceptance of failure, and then allowing that practice to continue, which, in turn, we hoped would reduce stress and anxiety of the folks involved. And then just a reminder that it’s not performance-based, and it’s not a test to reduce those barriers to learning.
So you can see here some photos. And Liz, I hope it’s okay that these are in here. So first, you can see Liv circling the home page there. That side of the screen is highlighting our facilitator guide that is a clickable PowerPoint. So each of those colored buttons allows you to go into your scene and allows you to progress through the scene as the dice are rolled by the participants at your table.
This is really good for folks who need it broken down for them, but want to click back and forth based on what’s happening rather than just looking at a sheet of all the options of written-out piece of paper. On the right side, at the top, you’ll see our how-to. This is important, because these are the instructions. Everyone gets access to these. They remain up in the space for the entire time we’re practicing. Everyone can remember what the dice do, how the roles work, what the scene looks like, et cetera.
And then below that, you have our participant handout. Every participant at every table gets access to this. Most importantly, the person who is the responder in that table gets access to this. So it has that first little blurb about what your scene is going to begin with. It has additional actions you can roll. So you don’t have to have any D&D knowledge. We provide some potential options here if you need more information, for example.
And then we also have some questions to consider as you work through your scene, and a space for notes. We wanted to make sure that folks felt like they could jot things down or utilize their resources in whatever way made sense for them. And so then, here in the middle, we have a few photos from the first time we really went through this with our staff.
And so, you can see Liz in the bottom there with her folder. Liz really made this work for her. She broke her scenario down. She was a table facilitator, and she broke her scenario down in the way that made sense for her and her brain. And at the table, you can see her group is working in many different ways. So Joey in the striped shirt is using the computer, has the policies and procedures pulled up in our staff’s OneDrive.
Corona is listening intently. Ali is using his phone. We really encouraged folks to use the method they would use when they were on call. And so, pulling up the procedures on your phone is a really common thing when we’re responding in the middle of the night, and then our team member, Valencia, is, I believe, actually the lead in this scenario. And so, she’s taking notes. She’s got her paper there. So that’s just some of the ways that we have different things set up for people.
Olivia Radcliffe:
All right. Thank you, Caroline. So now, let’s talk about the basics of Dungeons & Dragons. So these are the mechanics or the background knowledge you might need to know to understand the game that we’re playing with Duty & Dragons. So D&D is a tabletop role-playing game with fantasy elements. There is a lot of improvisation. There’s some pretend. There’s envisioning. It’s really awesome.
It’s facilitated by a Dungeon Master or a gamemaster. So like Caroline mentioned before, a DM is how we’ll refer to it. There are pre-written rules and processes that are available to the players. So we provide them in that printout. There’s dice rolling that randomizes the variables, and the numbers of the dice correlate to the outcome. I’ll show you a little cheat sheet that we made for our facilitators to know exactly how to utilize them. And then lastly, like I mentioned before, we have a lot of improvisation. So this is what allows for the flexibility in the response to those random, changing variables of our scenarios.
Caroline Mosteller:
So the core principles of our training. We wanted to make sure that we had randomized variables. Again, we did not want to get into that space of behind closed doors where returning staff can haze or can get into that space. And so, the dice rolling determined the factors such as the severity, the condition of spaces. That was not left up to our facilitators, and that was really important for us.
And then whimsy was key. We wanted to make sure that we included whimsy, because there are some studies that show that whimsy being incorporated encourages deeper learning, longer-term remembering of things, and, in general, just keeps folks engaged, and it can contribute to comfortability and trust, which is something we obviously want to encourage on our staff teams.
And we also do provide a disclaimer prior to more serious scenarios, such as suicidal ideation or Title IX disclosures, where we make sure that the facilitators explain to their table that we will not be role-playing this scenario. We will not be starting with any sort of trauma. But rather, we will be responding at the moment of, “We have been notified. What do we do now?”
And so, we do provide those disclaimers, and those tables are a little less whimsical, but it’s very intentionally done. And then we had varied scenarios. So you’ll see on our upcoming slides why we picked this list of scenarios, but these are our most common incident reports and Care Report categories. So it was important for us to make sure we fit those into the training.
So our characteristics of training. We wanted it to be practical. We needed our staff to build and practice their confidence in using the protocol language in real time. It is intended to be inclusive. The participants set the pace and the tone. They can pause their table at any moment. They can utilize any of their available resources in whatever method makes sense for them, and they can ask for help.
We intentionally set it up so that every table has multiple people involved. And so, they can pause and ask for that secondary person on call or that secondary person on duty to come in and help as they navigate. And it’s semi-structured. So we do have preset learning outcomes at the center of each scenario. However, of course, they flow with the roles.
And then engaging. Even the nonacting members at the table have roles. So for us, we set, one person would be writing the IR or incident report. One person would be taking notes, et cetera. It is resourceful. So our staff are encouraged to use the resources available to them, whether that’s the online duty manual or on-call manual, or it’s the printed version that you have in the on-call bag. We made sure that staff remembered that they could use the one that made sense to them.
And then it’s dynamic. We wanted participants and facilitators to be able to choose stepping in or out of world-building versus narration. That’s something that Liv and I do very different as facilitators. Liv is a world-builder. She is going to act the heck out of her scenes. I’m going to be a little bit more narrative. I’m going to build you a story, but I’m not going to act. And so, it’s really cool to see the tables be different with the different facilitators.
And now, some of our methods. And I’m so sorry, this is the section where I talk for a hot minute, but this is the pathway that we took for getting to training. So before we even had a training, we wanted to gather some information to determine what our staff’s experience had been with incident response trainings in the past, and we wanted to increase our awareness of our staff’s preferences for training and learning, and we did this through assessments, and then our facilitator training.
So we trained the facilitators, which was a really cool experience where we got to work with our supervisors, and just really sit down, break it all down, get some feedback, and really build out, I think, the best version of this training. And then after that, we played with our staff. We did D&D, and then we did a post-assessment as well where we hoped to do a comparison to understand how Duty & Dragons training compared to their previous experiences, as well as to document their feelings on increased knowledge and competency for incident response training as a whole.
So you can see on the screen, and I’m sorry, it’s probably a little small to read, but the highlighted red, these are the sections where we had folks feeling the least confident. So that included Care Report writing, care actions and follow-up, responding to mental health crises, responding to Title IX disclosures, and then the awareness and use of our department protocols.
We also used our institutional data, so what type of calls do we get the most, and what incident report, on-call report, and Care Report categories are the most utilized in our system, to help us build out the specific scenarios that we would practice with our staff. Yeah.
Olivia Radcliffe:
And before we move on, something that’s important to note that we’ll come back to in our post-assessment, you can see we’re already starting pretty strong, and UMass only has the best. However, it’s important to note we already started with a pretty good amount of confidence. So let’s see how it comes back in the post.
Caroline Mosteller:
Yeah. So this pre-adventure assessment, this question is, what are some areas of improvement or challenges related to incident response and student care? And these are just a few of the answers we got, but staff wanted to be able to locate the correct resources. They wanted to know how to approach student follow-up. They wanted to take the time to pause and pose questions for staff to create a plan of action. So this specific response was a full-time staff talking about pausing with student staff.
They wanted to learn new responses. They wanted to gain confidence, improve their response in the overnight hours and early morning, and then how to respond to bias-related incidents. And this second question is what they hope to gain from this type of training, which was critical thinking skills, building confidence, being a better staff member, assertiveness and confidence, new approaches to responding, more confidence. Confidence, right? People just want to practice. They want to get more confident in this type of response.
So like I mentioned before, we did a facilitator training. We called it Teach the Teacher, where we got a chance to connect with our table facilitators. So we predetermined some of our supervisory staff, so our area assistant directors, there we go, to be our table facilitators. This way, our residence directors and residence hall coordinators could be the participants.
What we did with them was made sure that everyone understood the training, how D&D functions, the general mechanics, but then we also got feedback from them, which allowed us to make a lot of edits, make sure that our protocols were fully being hit, and to make sure that we had true learning goals or learning outcomes for each scenario.
And then we practiced. So we assigned a specific scenario to each specific facilitator, and we made sure that they were the subject matter expert on their scenario. We wanted them to know every roll that could possibly happen, to know what would happen if folks weren’t getting there, or how to navigate if folks only rolled the really, really hard ones or really, really easy ones. We wanted them to be the expert at their specific scenario, and then we encouraged them to prepare. So like you saw several slides back, Liz made a big folder for her scenario, and that just really, I think, helped her feel prepared. And then we played or trained with our staff.
Olivia Radcliffe:
Right. So now, we jump into the post-adventure finding. So we set the stage. We figured out the scenes that folks needed to build confidence with. We played it out, and then we asked them again to talk about any potential changes in confidence since we started. So knowing that we started pretty high on the confidence scales, we still saw folks reporting that they feel even more confident after playing.
So I want you to picture this for your staff members. If you have a veteran RA who’s been here three years, or you have a staff member on their fourth, fifth, 10th, 20th year of being a staff member, there’s still room to grow, and using this dynamic process really helped reach those more veteran, more seasoned staff members. So we’re seeing that this has been incredibly helpful overall, just based on the confidence change after playing a few rounds.
Something that we also added was open responses. So, “Tell us what you feel you gained from this or what you believe doing D&D or tabletop-style games could do for your training.” So a full-time staff member, this is someone who does on call. They wrote, “I believe that Duty & Dragons was helpful in preparing me for incident response, care, and other on-call requirements. The interactive, scenario-based format allowed me to apply policies and protocols in a simulated environment.”
Then we asked our grads. We did the same thing with our grads. They don’t go on call or on duty, but they supervise folks who do. They also live and work in a residence hall. So they may encounter them themselves. So this graduate student wrote, “The scenarios just kept getting more and more complex, and the scenes where resources could not come to help were important to practice for real-life application.” Caroline, you had a good example of what this means. Do you want to share?
Caroline Mosteller:
Yeah. So some of our scenes have a built-in situation where maybe you need to call UMPD, our police department, or maybe you need to call our on-call clinicians. Sometimes those are very busy offices, specifically in the hours where we often need them. And so, some of the rolls, if you get the worst roll, they say, “Hey, we’ll be there when we can, but we’re all tied up right now. We can’t come right now, and it’s probably going to be at least 15 minutes, if not more.”
And so, when you get that, what do you do? What do you actually do when that’s all the protocol says, is to call them for this situation? And so, we really wanted to build these things in, because, unfortunately, that’s the reality of being on call or being in these situations, is sometimes those resources aren’t perfectly available, or they don’t give you the perfect response like you would hope. And so, we wanted to prepare folks for that.
Olivia Radcliffe:
So speaking of preparing folks, I hope you all are in a comfortable chair, because we are going to play a little bit of D&D. Now, the way that this is going to work is that I’m going to actually show you the behind the scenes. So you are going to view this as facilitators or DMs yourself. So what I’m going to challenge Caroline to do is, Caroline is not going to be looking at her screen. We are going to view our facilitator guide, and give me a moment for this to load, because we sure do love when things take their time.
So I’m pulling up a template. This template will be available for everybody here and anyone who’s watching later as well to download and utilize with their staff. So just to begin, the very first two slides just have resources that are set, again, to the UMass lens. So when you download this for your own staff, you’ll just change these links.
So that little cheat sheet I was telling folks about, it is on this third page of our facilitator digital guide. So Caroline alluded to earlier that this is both a digital and we have a printout copy of this guide. Imagine if you simply printed out a PowerPoint. It’s a cleaner version of that, the printout guide, and that will also be linked for folks to download.
So I personally like to use the digital guide. So I’m going to show you how it’s done. So say you’re in a scene. We have some really good modifiers that are pre-written, but maybe your participant goes a little off-topic, or maybe the scene needs a little something extra to get them on the right track. You, as the DM, can always click this button. It’s going to be on every slide moving forward. It’ll bring you here.
Here is just an example of how a facilitator can improvise utilizing either the d20. So that is the dodecahedron, giant, cool-looking D&D dice, or you can use the d4, and these are just ways in which you can use them for your own needs, your own preferences, or if you just want to continue the story along using something that isn’t pre-written.
So I’ll move forward. Here’s our home page. So we’ll assign a facilitator to each scene. They’ll know their scene. But for the sake of us doing this together, we’re going to practice a little bit of roommate conflict. So Caroline will be our… She just turned the other way. Caroline will be our participant. So, again, if we are the facilitators, Caroline cannot see our screen. She only is going to have in front of her the participation copy that gives her this context, and then a list of questions or types of moves she can ask or make.
So, Caroline, you’re sitting in your room at 7:00 PM on a Wednesday night when a resident comes to you very upset. They say, “Hey, do you have time to chat? I got something going on with my roommate, and I could really use someone to talk to.” In this moment, you’re free. Maybe you’re an RA, and this is your open RA hours. So you invite them in. They’re going to come in and sit down. Caroline, what would you like to know about this scene?
Caroline Mosteller:
I think I would like to gather some more information to start.
Olivia Radcliffe:
Great. So I can get from here that Caroline wants to know more details. So I’ll click this. I’m going to ask Caroline to roll a d4. So on Caroline’s end, she will roll a dice. And if you have participants that don’t have dice or maybe your participants want to use a fully… Oh, gosh, I was trying to see if I can pull up my Google dice at the same time. You can go on Google. If you simply just type the word in dice, you can get dice like this to come up. Yeah. It’s really cool. For those who play D&D, you can put your D&D Beyond on. You can use the dice from there. So, Caroline, just for the sake of us practicing, I will roll that d4 for you.
Caroline Mosteller:
Perfect. Thank you.
Olivia Radcliffe:
Uh-oh. So we have a one. All right. So, Caroline, on a one, the resident who is in your room says, “Yeah. My roommate is really struggling with their mental health. And honestly, I really think that they’re struggling being homesick. They’re not showering, doing their laundry, taking out trash. The room just kind of stinks, and my roommate smells so bad. They lay in bed all day. They never go to class. But if I say anything to them, they just storm out. So I don’t know what to do.” So while Caroline is going to form her answer, I’m going to go back and prepare myself for what she says next.
Caroline Mosteller:
So that sounds really difficult. Have you been able to have any sort of conversation with your roommate about this, or is this the first time you’re bringing this up to anyone?
Olivia Radcliffe:
Okay. So if we were in person and you weren’t all muted, I would say, “Which button should we press next?” I imagine that folks will say and agree with me that we should check on the previous actions. So Caroline had just said that, “What conversations have you had with your roommate before this?” So if Caroline rolls that d4 again, Caroline, would you mind rolling a d4 either theoretically in your mind or on your computer?
Caroline Mosteller:
It’s a two.
Olivia Radcliffe:
A two. Okay. “Yeah. I mean, I sort of mention it every now and then, but I was just like, ‘Hey, ha ha, girl, you should take a shower.’ But I really don’t think they got it as a conversation.”
Caroline Mosteller:
Gotcha. Okay. Yeah. That sounds like a really challenging situation to navigate, and it sounds like your roommate might be having some mental health concerns going on. Maybe they need some help. Is this something you would be comfortable with me reaching out to schedule a meeting maybe about your roommate agreement to hopefully approach it from a different angle rather than it seeming like you’re super upset?
Olivia Radcliffe:
So what Caroline just did, she is talking about offering a mediation. So as a facilitator, she might not have said those words exactly, but I, from understanding my materials, know that that’s the direction she’s going in. So, again, you’ll tailor this to the direction or protocols that your staff would typically take. And just for the sake of having one last example, roll that d20 for me, Caroline.
Caroline Mosteller:
All right. I got a 12.
Olivia Radcliffe:
All right. So if I wanted to switch away from direct improvising, I can break that fourth wall and narrate this as well. So you’re offering this mediation, and while we’re chatting, “Oh my goodness, who’s walking by?” But the roommate, and they’ve just been listening the whole time. They’re so upset. Oh, no, this roommate, the one who’s been just entering, they feel like they weren’t given a fair voice. They say, “They’re the one who’s the problem. Why are you even talking about me?”
So this is just another way in which the scene is going to continue extending. Now, if you wanted to change this to be a bit more simple for your staff, you could do a simple d4 roll where one and two is a, “Yes, I agree to a mediation,” or sorry, one and two are bad. One and two, they’d say, “No, I don’t want a mediation,” or a three or four would be a yes.
So you can simplify or you can make more complex these scenes. Say if Caroline were to add in some very left-field type of addition. So maybe while you’re having this conversation, they decide to FaceTime their mom. They want their mom to be a part of this convo. I don’t necessarily have a button for this. So I can always go back and try to either add in for a quick or less complicated response or do some more information sharing with the d20.
So after we go through, and we have our scene, say you have 10 minutes, 15 minutes per round. When that time is hit, if I believe that Caroline has met our learning goals, which are we want to make sure that we’re addressing the conflict, potentially offer a mediation, and then just sort of identify those concerns. Once I feel that Caroline’s met there, I’ll go into our questions, and here’s just the debrief.
So if we were sitting at a table of four or five people, I’m going to ask Caroline the first three questions. How did this feel? What were your thoughts after the student would leave the room? How would you follow up with the student? Because part of incident response is not just handling the incident up front, but it’s also following up afterwards.
When tensions are maybe less high or stress is a little lessened, what are the resources, either institutionally or personally? What are some resources you would give the student? What about for yourself? I would also ask someone else at the table, “What type of report should Caroline write? An incident report? A Care Report?” Depending on your school system, you might utilize different forms or different softwares.
Should I report this to another campus partner? Do I want to bring in our counseling center? Do I need to bring in our police department? We’re going to ask other folks at the table who are listening and observing. And then finally, we’ll ask everyone else what went well, and what would you have done different if you were in the driver’s seat? So these are just ways that we’re increasing engagement without necessarily having to keep the spotlight on one person the entire game.
So I’m going to exit out of our facilitator guide. Okay. So now that you’ve seen just a little taste, a little snippet of what this guide could look like, now you’re going to prepare it for yourself. So what you need when you start making your own version of Duty & Dragons, know what your learning aims and outcomes are. What is it that you need your staff members to know, to feel confident in, to have down pat before you begin? Because that’ll be the foundation of the scenarios you build.
Next up, think about what realistic variables or modifiers that could apply to scenarios. If you find that you just have the luckiest staff members and they’re rolling those d20s, and they’re rolling the best possible scenarios, maybe that learning isn’t there. So you can remove that entirely. So that way, a 20, which is the best outcome, still has a challenge in it. You are able to make those modifiers apply to your staff.
Then you’re going to edit that facilitation guide, have that facilitator training. Caroline and I have done this with folks who are above us in leadership. We’ve done this with folks at our level of leadership, our direct supervisees and assistant residential directors, like our graduates, and I’ve actually had my RAs, my resident assistants, facilitate this among their peers. So this can really be done at any level of learning. I’ve had first-year RAs so confident that they were able to be DMs of our makeshift training.
And then lastly, make sure that you have folks engaged using things like documentation, taking notes, practicing and putting into test or mock systems, and then making sure that those mock reports get sent to their direct supervisors for continued follow-up and continued review. So to summarize, as we near the end of our presentation here, gamifying or game-based learning can increase participation, engagement, and fun in the work environment.
Role-playing games like D&D allow for nuance, real-time response, and a dynamic flow that resembles true-to-life action. You never know what you’re going to step foot in front of. Even if you think you do, anything could change at any time, and being prepared for that is what we’re aiming. Lastly, tailoring Duty & Dragons for your staff is as easy as scanning this QR code.
Caroline Mosteller:
Yeah. So that QR code is the folder for all of the templates for everything we went over today, plus a few other things. And I think this is the space where if folks have questions, we are ready to take them.
Jenn Riccardi:
Hi. Thank you all for doing this. This is awesome. Question for you, when you are facilitating this, are you doing this within subteams, so different complexes or things like that, or is it a mix of folks that maybe are with first-year students versus upper-division students? What has that looked like for you all in that experience?
Caroline Mosteller:
Yeah. I would say that, so when we trained with our residence director level, we were all in one space together, and what we did is we had six tables for five scenarios. Groups were broken down, not necessarily by specific campus area or even supervision team, but broken down… We made sure that there was one long-term returner, one new person at each table. And then when I say we had six tables, five scenarios, it’s because following the table that was the suicidal ideation scenario, we had a follow-up resource debrief with someone on our care team who was also in Residential Life.
And so, they were able to have a full 20-, 25-minute debrief after the suicidal ideation table to get more into those resources, more into what that care and follow-up looks like. And then when we talk about with our student staff, UMass Amherst is ginormous. And so, my staff alone is 18 people. And so, generally, that would be something that’s more per-staff basis or a partnered situation, not all of them together. Yeah.
Jenn Riccardi:
Yeah. That’s what I’m also envisioning for Syracuse, because it’s also a very large institution.
Olivia Radcliffe:
Oh, yeah.
Jenn Riccardi:
Yup.
Olivia Radcliffe:
I will also say, in our templates that we have here, in the lesson plan, there is a structure that you can kind of plug and play in for how you can group people. So for our graduates, we made sure that we had a mix of returners and new, different experiences. We tried to break up friend groups to get folks to talk to new people. Among the full-time staff, we actually toyed between keeping folks in supervisory areas. We also toyed between keeping folks in on-call areas, because for UMass, we break our on call to east and west side of campus as well as northwest, southwest, et cetera.
So there’s so many ways you can do it. It just depends on how you want to engage. So part of our opener for the full-time was simply to just get folks to be comfortable talking with each other across just getting to know each other as peers. So we really shuffled them up the best we could, but you can do this on on-call level or staff divisions, but it does help to get new voices in the mix.
Jenn Riccardi:
Perfect. Thank you so much.
Olivia Radcliffe:
Thank you. Any other questions from folks?
Amanda Knerr:
Question we got from the registration earlier was, “Are there ways to modify this to train or support student leaders on coping mechanics after responding to a high-stress incident?”
Olivia Radcliffe:
Oh, yeah. Big time, and we’ve edited this guide. So in the templates, you’ll notice we have student staff, grad staff, full-time staff, because the complexity and situations really differ. Student staff, I want them to focus on asking for help, asking for resources, asking for those things that’ll help rebuild their trust, their comfort, their confidence after a big incident.
For my full-time staff, we do a mix of that where it is encouraged to ask for support and help. We also want to make sure that following up as supervisors is helpful as well, because these students, they may have gotten themselves in trouble with this incident. They’re going to be our student coming to our programs the next day. So we want to make sure that we’re focusing on rebuilding connection and trust.
And so, that’ll change based on the position you’re in, but you can also co-opt and modify. And instead of doing incident response training, you can use this as a training for things like building connections where the modifiers are different personality or student types, or things that are going on in students’ lives. Maybe it’s midterms week. Maybe it’s closing. So this can really be adapted to anything that gets folks to practice saying the things aloud.
Caroline Mosteller:
Yeah. I think something we focused on, we actually just did this presentation on Wednesday at UMass for a little mini-conference. And so, a question that we had gotten was how we think this could work in other offices. And I think in any way, I think we just have the incident response background, and that’s why we got into this.
But I think with office assistants who are sitting at a front desk or answering the phone or navigating walk-in clients at the counseling center, anything like that, I think any of those situations that happen on a repeat basis, you know what’s coming into your office can be turned into these scenarios. They don’t have to be specifically like crisis response. They can be a facility’s… There’s a leak in your ceiling. What does your office assistant do? And just, what does that look like for your office? I think this can really be modified in any way that makes sense for you and your staff.
Olivia Radcliffe:
And Caroline, just to bring us back to our piece on inclusion, why we even started this in the first place is that to be truly inclusive, we need to make sure that we’re not leaving out those hidden social rules that so many of our departments can seem to have, or just living on campus can seem to have. Right? We have first-gen students. We also have first-gen employees. Right? This is someone’s first real, professional job. Right?
And so, we want to make sure that in practicing the incident response, we’re also getting social skill practice out of this. In the post-COVID world, we are seeing so many of our students struggle with simply starting those conversations, like, “How do I knock on a door and get a student to talk to me about mentorship?” Right? And it’s easy to say, “Just talk to them.” But we actually have to give them a place to practice those things.
So even our best-case scenario where you’re rolling super easy, we’re giving them that space to practice that social engagement that a lot of other trainings don’t really get to reach. So you can utilize this in a way of simply just practicing those social connections that we don’t often give them the chance to practice. We assume they have based on the fact that they’re in this Res Life role.
Caroline Mosteller:
Yeah.
Darek Hollis:
Did you have any participants that struggled with the role-playing aspect of it, just felt uncomfortable, or didn’t want to engage?
Caroline Mosteller:
I think our team tends to be very open to these types of things. But I think, like Liv and I mentioned earlier, we even facilitate this very differently. And so, you get a different scenario every 25 minutes with a different facilitator who does it differently.
And so, I think that helps with the folks who maybe do feel some of that, is, “Okay. You were just at Liv’s table, but you know you’re coming to Caroline’s table next, and I am just going to be pretty narrative-focused. I’m not going to be making you act, but I am going to ask you to literally walk me through how you are going to respond. What is your actual answer to this student?” Because that’s something that really helps me. And so, that’s how I focus my table. And so, I think that’s helpful for folks, is knowing that, “Okay. This is 25 minutes, and the next one is going to be different.”
Olivia Radcliffe:
And we don’t force anyone to-
Caroline Mosteller:
No.
Olivia Radcliffe:
… participate in a specific way.
Caroline Mosteller:
Yeah.
Olivia Radcliffe:
I might choose to improvise and act and be theatrical, because that’s just in my nature, and Caroline is very clear and very building of the scene around you, and we don’t enforce anyone to act the way we do. So you might have me responding saying, “Ugh, my roommate, they’re just such a burden, because they don’t know how to share a fridge.” And you might want to respond saying, “Okay. So what I’ll do is I will pull out my resource, and I will ask the student if they have a roommate agreement.”
That is a very valid and really excellent way of participating. And we let them know, when Caroline was talking about the instruction slides, we give them an opener. Just loosen everyone up in the space, get folks comfortable, and we explicitly provide that you are to participate in the way that’s true to you. You do not have to mirror your facilitator.
Caroline Mosteller:
Yeah.
Darek Hollis:
I love that. Thank you.
Olivia Radcliffe:
Thank you.
Amanda Knerr:
Any other questions? All right. Well, Caroline and Olivia, thank you so much for being our featured speakers today and introducing us to this really exciting and innovative teaching strategy for training our teams to respond to incidents in our communities, or do desk, or do facilities work or anything. Right? We truly appreciate your time and insights.
And for those of you participating with us, thank you so much for joining us today. We are so glad that you could be a part of the conversation. You will be receiving a follow-up email in the next few days with access to the webinar recording, and we’ll make sure these resources are included if you’d like to revisit the session or share it with colleagues.
Before you go, I’d really appreciate it if you take a few minutes to, let me make sure I hit the right button, complete this brief feedback survey, we’ll also include it when we send the email out, to help us provide input on ways that we can improve these sessions for the future and any possible topics that you’re interested in. The link should be in the chat and should be accessible for you.
I also want to announce that there are a few upcoming webinars we hope you’ll consider joining us for. On April 29th at 3:00, we have Operating as a Learning Organization by Steve Herndon at Syracuse. And on May 6th at 3:00 in the afternoon, we have a staffing feature, a Roompact software update by Paul Brown. So thank you again for your time today, and we hope to see you at a future session. Have a wonderful rest of your day. And for those of you getting closer and closer to wrapping up your year, I hope you have a great move out and end of semester. Thank you so much.
Olivia Radcliffe:
Thank you. Find us on LinkedIn.
Caroline Mosteller:
Thank you all.
