Picture it, Summertimes. Perhaps you’re overseeing a project that couldn’t get done during the academic year or maybe you’re coordinating summer student housing or working with camps and conferences. There’s something about summer though that feels much more relaxed for many of us working in residence life. That is until July creeps up on us and training season begins. It often can feel as stressful as move-in itself.
If you’ve ever been a part of planning or facilitating professional staff training, you’ve probably asked most, if not all, of these questions: “What do we need to train on?” “Which campus partners do we need to invite?” “How do we fit all of this into our schedule?” “Do we put all of the heavy sessions on the same day or spread them throughout training?” “Who needs to be in each session?” “How do we intentionally build in time for staff to be preparing for the arrival of RAs and students?” “Do we keep training in one location for convenience or do we rotate around campus to break up the monotony?”
The truth of the matter is that you probably won’t have a “Goldilocks Moment” where everything goes just right. There is going to be a guest presenter that needs to reschedule or a session that doesn’t quite achieve the learning outcomes that you had hoped for, or a staff member who felt they didn’t need to be present for a “refresher” on a certain topic, etc. However, you can work to minimize these concerns by placing your focus on a few key steps/principles in your process of building out training for your staff.
This blog series features different writers responding to the prompt, “How can we re-envision ResLife staff training?”
Choosing Impactful and Timely Content
No one wants to hear feedback from a training session along the lines of, “Couldn’t this have been an email?” True, there will be sessions that aren’t as engaging or interactive but that still need to take place. Take time to think about what content will carry the biggest impact on preparing your professional staff for the year ahead. Ensure you aren’t just doing a “copy/paste” either. As your vision and goals for your team as well as your partnerships on-campus and off-campus develop, ensure what you’re training your team on aligns. Make sure you’re also identifying what needs to be a part of your summer training and what may be more appropriate for training during a time throughout the academic year.
Identifying Content Experts and Engaging Presenters
Don’t narrow the scope too far on who can present in your training. If you only have internal presenters, you are more likely to have training burnout and fatigue. If you only have external presenters or just leadership team members presenting, you’re missing a valuable opportunity for other members of your team to gain experience in leading training and in sharing the expertise they have developed as the “boots on the ground”.
Work to identify the true content experts of your different training topics on your campus and start to build connections with them so that you can gain their buy-in for being a part of an impactful training process. But also, ensure that the content experts you are working with are able to engage well with an audience as presenters. You want to ensure that the wealth of knowledge they are sharing is being received and if they’re not able to connect with your team as they present, the knowledge may not be retained.
Mapping it Out
This is a multi-faceted step. Firstly, you want to ensure that when you are choosing what content to cover in your training that you are taking on the responsibility of setting defined learning goals/outcomes for the training. Make sure those goals/outcomes are shared well in advance with all of your presenters to ensure that their training materials and presentations are able to achieve them. Secondly, don’t forget the importance of sequencing. If you’re going to be doing training on Student Conduct or Title IX, you probably want to make sure that your software training (i.e., Maxient) happens beforehand. And lastly, ensure you have set up some “Flex Time” in your training schedule. Inevitably, a session is going to need to be swapped or rescheduled. And if you end up not using a space you’ve reserved for flex time, your team will always be happy to have that time back to prepare for the upcoming weeks of RA training, move-in, etc.
Assessing for the Next Training
Take the time to draft out a post-training assessment and be thorough. Gain insight not just about the overall experience but what staff thought about individual sessions, too. You’re bound to have some split opinions on surface-level decisions (such as switching up training locations or keeping it in one place), but you’ll likely notice some consistent thoughts and feedback when it comes to the actual content your training delivered. And once you’ve received the feedback, put it into practice! If a training session truly missed the mark and your staff left with more questions than answers, be intentional in creating a time for the group to be re-trained so you’re not addressing the same questions or mistakes individually throughout the year.
Training season is a stressful time in the world of Housing and Residence Life. Remember, you’re not alone and lean on your support systems and resources. And don’t forget to give yourself a pat on the back– you’re training staff to be able to achieve the ultimate goal of our work: to provide support and create a positive experience and impact on our students!
D.J. Moore has worked in the field of Residence Life since his undergraduate career in 2015 as a Resident Assistant. Today, D.J. serves as the Assistant Director for Academic Initiatives and Experiential Learning at UNC-Greensboro. D.J. holds a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology from Lander University, a Master’s degree in Higher Education from UNC-Wilmington, and a Master’s degree in Human Resource Development from Clemson University. Outside of work, D.J. enjoys traveling, going on walks with his fur baby Lilo, trying new brunch spots, playing Fortnite and Kingdom Hearts, and most recently, supervising home improvement projects his partner Philip is completing on their new home.
