Abstract
Oftentimes, RAs will resist a new process or complain about how a problem is solved, but asking for their input does not always lead to a positive solution. This session will show supervisors how to use design thinking with their RAs to solve problems and create processes.
Outcomes
- Participants will be able to define design thinking.
- Participants will be able to describe 3 design thinking strategies.
- Participants will be able to utilize design thinking to work through problems with their RAs.
Presenters
- Erin Long, Ph.D. (she/her), Roompact Fellow
Date Of Recording: 6/17/26
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:
All right, good afternoon everyone and welcome to today’s Roompact webinar. We’re so glad you could join us this afternoon. My name is Amanda Knerr and I will be your host for today’s session. Before we get started, I have just a couple of quick announcements and reminders for us. First of all, just a reminder, Erin, if you will advance to the R2 conference. Just a reminder that the program proposal for R2, the Roompact and Residence Life Conference is at the end of this month. Accepted programs do receive one free registration to the conference and you can find details on the website. Please check it out, submit some proposals today. Just a couple of housekeeping items as we get started. Today’s session is being recorded and the recording will be available on Roompact’s website within the next few days. All participants are currently muted to help minimize background noise during the session. You will need to unmute if you have a question or to participate in any breakout rooms.
If you experience any technical difficulties, please use the chat feature to let us know. I will be actively monitoring the chat and we’ll work to help you resolve that issue as quickly as possible. Finally, throughout this session, please feel free to submit your questions or comments in the chat. I’ll be monitoring it and we’ll also make sure that Erin can see those and answer those questions as we go through the session or at the end of the presentation today. So with that being said, I am so excited to introduce today’s feature speaker, Erin Long. Erin is a Roompact fellow with us this year and she’s going to be leading the session today, Design Thinking With RAs. This session is going to show supervisors how to use design thinking with RAs to solve problems and develop and create processes for your unit. Erin, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your expertise. The floor is yours to talk with the Roompact community. Thanks.
Erin Long:
Well, thank you, Amanda. I am so glad to be here today. And so we will get started. I’m going to do a little introduction about me. Then we’ll do some learning goals because it wouldn’t be a presentation without learning goals. We’ll talk a little bit about what design thinking is. We’ll talk through the different steps of design thinking and then we’ll try and do some application and think through how you might be able to use this with your RAs. And then we’re going to try a couple techniques, so it’ll hopefully be a fun thing. And then at the end we’ll have time for questions, but if you do have questions throughout, I do have the chat up. I’m more than happy to answer as we go, or if you want to raise your hand, more than happy, please feel free to interrupt me and we can answer those questions.
So about me, first off, for those of you who may have noticed, I am wearing the same shirt as in this picture. I also have that shirt on in the caricature on the main slide. Apparently, I only have one professional shirt that I really, really like and it’s this one. And so it was actually not on purpose today that I did that, but here we are. And what can you say? It’s a great shirt. But I will say I was in housing for several years. I started out in a small private school in South Carolina, was at University of South Carolina for a while, which is where I started to getting involved in the curricular approach. And then was at Radford for a few years and then worked at University of Texas where I am now, but I was in housing for about six years here and now have transitioned into volunteerism and service learning.
And so I’ve lived in, I have done a lot with a curricular approach at several different institutions and now I’m in volunteerism and service learning. I also just recently, I’m very excited about this, finished my PhD. And so it was just in the fall, so I’m still pretty excited and like to brag about it. But anyways. And so then with design thinking, I got interested in design thinking shortly after I came here to UT and have done a couple of different certificate courses. So I think when they send out the recording, there’s going to be some additional resources for you. One of them is where I got my certificates through. It was the LUMA Institute. They do a practitioner certificate, they do a facilitator certificate and I think they have a third one. I don’t have the third one, but I have the first two.
You can also look at Stanford School Design for another one, but we’ll talk through that later in there. But I do have a couple of certificates in this and have used these techniques in [inaudible 00:04:41] to help us come up with processes, think through how a strategic planning, think through how we’re structuring positions, those kinds of things. So it is a really useful technique and some of this might seem like, oh yeah, that just totally makes sense because it does and some of it may seem new and really interesting. And so hopefully this will be helpful for you and these are some practical things that you can do with your RAs.
So our goals for the day, I would like for us to be able to define what design thinking is. And so really just being able to say, this is what it is and explaining it to other people. I think if we could be able to describe three different design thinking strategies, I will say everything we’re going to talk about today, you can really Google and find how to do it. So if you forget specifically how do we do the steps for one, it’s totally fine. Just Google it and you’ll be able to find out how to do it. But if we could at least describe them and think about how they can be used. And then that gets us to our third goal, which is that we’ll be able to utilize design thinking to work through problems with your RAs. Excellent. Okay. So first question, what is design thinking?
I keep saying this word and you’re like, “That’s cool, Erin, but what is it?” This is not an official definition. This is just how I have interpreted the definition. And so it’s really an approach to solving problems that is human-centered. So it’s really focused on how is the user experience being defined by the way that we’re trying to solve this problem. It’s collaborative. This is not something you can just do on your own. This needs to be done in a team and bringing different perspectives to it. It is iterative, which by the way, guys, I just have a problem pronouncing that word. And so every time if there’s a little pause ahead of time, that’s why. But it’s really meant to be something that you don’t just go with your first idea, you continue to improve on the process and you continue to think through it and come up with as many ideas as possible and refine as you’re going.
And so it is also an approach. So there is not necessarily on way to do it. There’s not one design thinking technique that solves all problems. It’s really thinking through, okay, how are we going to do it based on what our problem particularly is? Any questions so far? Excellent. I don’t see any in the chat. Again, feel free to interrupt as we go. Okay. So the uses, this can be used in a lot of different ways. I’ve talked a little bit about some of the ways I’ve done it with strategic planning.
We’ve done it with trying to rethink live in staff roles. We’ve done it or I’ve done it with just figuring out how to connect an office to the learning goals in a curricular approach. There’s lots of ways to use it. But specifically for RAs, some of the case usage that I came up with was I think it would be a great way to think through how could you increase attendance at programs, like what could they do differently that gets the students to come to the programs more? It can be about how to do policy enforcement a little bit better and be maybe proactive within that policy enforcement.
One thing that I was thinking is sometimes RAs don’t quite understand why the administration makes the decisions that it makes and what that means they have to do for whatever the situation is. And so trying to understand why that decision is the way that it is can sometimes be a really useful way to use this and then just to create a new process like, oh, all of a sudden we have to, I don’t know, create a new building round or rounds for the building process. And so how can we do that to help us make it make most sense?
Okay, the steps. Now we see here there are two different versions of the steps. Design thinking was originally created out of the Stanford School of Design and it was meant for products. So it was meant for your new cell phone or to create a better machine at the gym or whatever that might be. It was about products. And so they had a way of thinking through it and a set of language that they used. Then people came along and were like, “Hey, wait, this could be cool for some other things. Maybe we should use it for those things as well, but the language is a little not quite fit in. Let’s change the language.”
And so on here, I have both the Stanford original steps that they created and then I have the education. So within the realm of education, how have they changed those steps, the language for those steps to make it fit what we’re doing a little bit better? And so as we go through this, I’ll use both languages, but I did want to explain what the difference with that particularly is. And so first steps, we have empathize and discover. And in this step, it’s really about how are you understanding the problem from the point of view of the user? And for us, that’s mainly going to end up being residents or students. They’re the ones using the laundry room. They’re the ones going to the programs. They’re the ones who are experiencing what comes out of these problem solving techniques, so they’re the user in this situation.
And so to help us understand them, there’s several ways we can do this. A couple of the techniques that I find interesting or like to use is the first one is experiential mapping. And this is really taking a period of time, whether that be a day, a week, or a process, and mapping out how someone goes through it. So if we are mapping out the day and the life of Erin Long, we would start with, I get up in the morning, I take 15 minutes to get ready, accidentally pick the same shirt that is in all the pictures that you guys are seeing of me. And then I drive to work. Once I drive to work, I sit down in my office, get my computer out. All of those things, mapping out what that looks like.
And then once you’ve done that, if you have several people mapping out several students or whatever, you can compare it and see where are things that they have in common or where are their themes? Next, we just have observation. I think this one is one we all probably just naturally do. Just walking around campus, you’re just listening to what the students are talking about and getting a sense of what they find important or sitting in your lobby, watching them interact with your desk staff, whatever that might be, just watching and taking note of how they’re experiencing whatever is happening in those moments. We have walk a mile, which is just to do the thing.
If we’re worried about students are complaining about the laundry room, the process in the laundry room is just really awful, go experience it, go do laundry, go through the steps that they are taking to experience these things so you can understand what they’re talking about and how they’re talking about it. And then one of my personal favorites is rose, bud, thorn. And this is really thinking about a program, a problem, a process, and coming up with three different categories of things. So all of the things that are roses, which are things that are just going awesomely. It’s the thing that you’re bragging to your supervisor about. This is the thing that is just doing wonderfully.
Then you have your bud, which is the one that tends to be the hardest to understand what we’re asking for, but it’s the things that have potential. So the thing that is almost good that, if you had more money, more resources, more time, could be amazing. You can see this just doing awesomely, but just at this moment, it is not doing awesomely. And then thorns, which are the problems, they’re the sticking points where you’re getting caught up on things, those types of things. And so all of those are certain techniques to really understand this from the view of the user. And so the way you might use this is, and I just already used this example, but if your residents are complaining about the laundry room, like, “It’s so awful to use, we hate the laundry room,” to solve whatever issue is there, you need to understand why they are having such an issue in the laundry room. And so you can use any of these techniques to figure that out.
Next, the next step is define or interpretation. And this is taking it one step further and describing the problem from all points of views. It’s looking holistically at what is going on with whatever the issue is. And so some really great techniques for this is first is affinity clustering. And affinity clustering cannot be done on its own. It’s meant to be paired with any of the techniques that we talked about in empathize and discover. It is a theming technique. I don’t know why they just can’t call it theming, but whatever. Affinity clustering is a way to just sit there and be like, okay, we see that a lot of people in the laundry room are having an issue with cleanliness. That’s a theme that we experience. So what can we do about that? So that’s on technique.
The next one takes a lot of steps but is really fun to do, and it’s called stakeholder mapping. And in this one, what you do is you sit me, make a list of all the stakeholders, all the people that you interact with. So for a laundry room, it might be the cleaning staff, it might be the parents, it might be the residents, it might be your supervisors, it might be all of those people who, some way, have a stake in what is going on. So you make a list of all of them and then you list their roles and where they are in the stakeholder mapping. And then the next step is to define their mindset. So I, as the parent, my mindset would be, my student’s complaining about this, we got to fix this. They can’t just not do their laundry. This is horrible. We need to fix this. On your supervisor’s mindset might be something along the lines of, “Oh, it’s fine. We don’t see an issue here.”
And so you define all of those different mindsets and then you make connections. So who is connecting where? So maybe it’s the parent and your supervisor are connecting because the parent is calling the supervisor, complaining about whatever the issue is. And so then you can group things and see, again, patterns of how people are interacting and where there is a connection … With what you’re doing. Yeah, I think, I’m so glad you’ve experienced it, Brianna. I think it’s a lot of fun, personally, but it does help you think about things from different angles.
The last one can be really cool too, and it’s a very visual one. And so it’s called problem tree analysis. And so what you do is you draw a tree and the trunk of the tree is the problem. So the trunk of the tree might be laundry. Sorry, I keep harping on laundry, but that’s where the example of my mind landed on. And then you have the roots and the roots are all the causes of the problem. It’s the things that feed into the problem. And then you have your branches and the branches are the implications of the problem, like what are the consequences of the problem? How is that affecting people? How is that influencing what’s going on around you?
And so that way you can get a sense of both causes and effects and can really help you with that defining or interpreting the problem. So in my example, I’ve been saying laundry room a lot, but I think another way that you can use this is really to help your RAs understand a decision the administration has made about how they need to do something. I think one of the things that might have been helpful for me, honestly, when I was doing curricular work is we did intentional conversations and our RAs hated them. And so trying to think, helping them understand why we were asking them to do what they did, you could use one of these techniques to help them understand why we are doing this and what the bigger picture of this is. We’re not just trying to make work for you. There is a bigger picture here and let’s look at that and define that.
Next we have ideate or ideation and this is the brainstorming phase and we all know how to brainstorm. You sit in a room, you think about something and you’re like, okay, let’s bring up all of the different ideas and solutions that we can think of. And so in design thinking, a lot of times the brainstorming is a little bit more structured, in a way, to help think of things either quickly or in a different way. And so some of the techniques that I really like for this is, and again, one of my personal favorites, I feel like I’ve said that for every single technique, but this one I really do enjoy, is called a statement starter.
And so this is a round-robin situation, where maybe you have four people together and you give them each a piece of paper. At the top of the paper, you write a how might we question? How might we fix the laundry? How might we understand why the administration is doing what it’s doing? And the first person writes a solution to it. So how might we fix the laundry? And then the answer, the solution might be, well, we don’t charge quarters anymore or we don’t ask for quarters anymore. That’s part of the problem, whatever. So then it gets passed to the next person and the next person doesn’t give another solution. They say what the problem with the first solution was. So we won’t accept quarters anymore. And maybe the problem to that is, well, then how might we get paid? How might we get paid for these laundry? And then it goes to the next person and they give another solution.
And so it keeps going on that solution, problem, solution, problem. So you’ve worked out this whole series of steps and really thought through how are we going to do these things. And maybe that’s not the solution. Maybe it’s something completely different, but you’re thinking through what all the problems and the solutions for those problems are. And it’s best if you do this in a round-robin where there’s several pieces of paper with either the same question and different solutions going around or different questions that everyone’s answering. Excuse me. Clearly I’m talking a lot. We will get to some interactive things and give my voice a rest.
But yeah, the next one that I really like is creative matrix. And this is basically you make a big grid. And I’ve used this in the past to come up with ideas for curricular approach, creating lessons for students on whatever our learning goals is. And so you make a big grid and at the top, you write your learning goals. So you have learning goal one, two, three, whatever might have. And on the side, you put categories. And so it might be something like you have a category of events or programs, maybe you have a category of digital media, maybe you have a category of passive programs and then maybe you have my favorite category, random. And then you spend time in each block. So you take goal one events and take two minutes and just brainstorm that specific thing and then you move on to the next until you finish the whole grid.
And that can be a really targeted way to think through things, but can be pretty fun. And some of them are going to be very bad ideas. Some are going to be absolutely not able to use, but you definitely coach people just all the ideas, just put all the ideas down because you never know where and it might spark an iteration from someone else who comes up with a different way of doing that idea. And so it can be really fun. The last technique I have here is alternative worlds and this is taking a problem out of the context that it currently is in. And so for example, maybe you’re having a hard time with people coming to programs, like your residents aren’t coming to programs and you’re trying to think of why.
And so instead of thinking about why do our residents not come to programs in this residence hall, maybe think about it if you were in a hotel. If you were a hotel owner and you wanted people to come to things, how would you get them to come to things? Or maybe you think of it in you are a, I don’t know, speed racer, whatever it might be, but you’re taking it in a completely different context and that might give you new ideas for solving the problems. And the example I used here for practice is your RAs are discouraged by poor attendance at programs. Who among us has not experienced that and had that conversation with an RA. So how might they create more attractive programming or how might they get more people to their programs is a way to solve that. Okay.
Next we have prototype and experiment. And this is really just choosing a solution to try and just doing it so that you can fail quickly. You don’t want to spend a year on a solution just to find out it was never going to work. And had you really thought through that really quickly in the beginning, you could have picked a different solution. And so some techniques for this is just, I mean write a lesson plan, write a facilitator guide, write out what you’re going to do and then have your RA’s read it or have your whole government read it, whatever that might be. And that can be a really quick way to figure out how your prototype is working or not working.
Next, a storyboard. Draw it out. A lot of us are visual creatures and can maybe see things when it’s drawn out in a little bit different of a way. So maybe if you go back to the laundry room, draw out how does a student walk through the laundry room in your ideal way? And then the last one is just rough and ready. And this is really just making the most low-key, crazy version of what you’re doing. And I put this in the case usage. So if your RAs are struggling to design their bulletin board, don’t have them start with printing off all the things that they’re going to put. Have them draw it out first just on a piece of paper.
Where are things going to go? How do they need to interact? How do the elements need to interact? Does this need to be bigger? Does this need to be smaller? And you can do this for a lot of different things. So our last one, last step, promise, is we have the test and the evolution, and this is really about gaining perspective on what works and what maybe needs to be improved. And this is something that I think is very natural to us in a lot of ways. So the first technique is just assessment, just do assessment.
A lot of us already do program assessment or have our RAs do something, but that’s baseline what you’re doing is learning about what worked and what didn’t. You can do a debrief session. I used to do this all the time with my RAs. They would write an incident report and the next morning, by the second month of school, the next morning they would come into my office and say, “Hey, Erin, did you see my incident report?” And we’d walk through what they did, how they did it, what they want to do better next time, where they felt good about it and just really debrief it. And you can do that in a one-on-one setting. You can do that with all your RAs and really talking through what that might look like.
And then the last one is actually one that I learned from Paul here at Roompact is just a keep it, tweak it, scrap it. And it’s just a really easy way to see how people feel about it. Do they want to keep it? Do they want to tweak it and make some changes to it? Are they just like, “This is a lost cause. We just need to get rid of it.” And so all of those are different techniques to really gain perspective on how that’s working. So I already did my usage case on practice on how to do that particular one.
So we’re at the end of the steps, that was five steps and that was a very quick version of all of them that hopefully you guys got a sense of what each of those steps are like. Now with these, you don’t have to do every step in every situation. Some of them, you’re going to want to start with the empathize and go all the way through. Some of them, you might just want to start with the ideation of the issue. Some you might already have a solution and you’re just doing the testing and evolution of it. So don’t feel like you have to do all the steps in every time that you use these techniques, but they are, I did want to go through them als so you had an understanding of how they interact. But now that we’re at the end of those steps, what questions do we have?
How do you handle situations where everything is a scrap it? Thank you, Brianna. I think making them explain it. The advantage to the keep it, tweak it, scrap it, is that it’s a quick way to see how they feel about it. But if they’re saying scrap it, they need to explain why. A lot of times you do have to do that second step with this is like, why do you want to scrap it? And not just like, yes, your RAs are a really great source of information and a great evaluator of everything that is happening in your hall. And they are one really great perspective, but they’re not the only perspective. And so even if all your RAs are like, scrap it, there might be other reasons to keep a thing.
And that’s something that I think RAs sometimes struggle with understanding is they are not the only perspective in this and other perspectives are just as valuable as theirs and might be drastically different. And so I think really setting that up too before you start that of like, “Hey guys, we’re going to ask this question. It doesn’t mean that that’s going to be how we handled the situation when we’re done based on your answer, but we do want to talk through it and ask the question.” So hopefully that is helpful. Based on the heart, I’m going to say yes, it was. What other questions do we have? And y’all, just heads up, I was doing presentations on Zoom during COVID, so I’ve got the whole wait it out down. If we could just maybe get one more question. I think we can move on to the next part. Yes, Brianna.
Brianna Kratz:
Whereas I, in contrast, am such a soft touch and I will be the one to ask. You mentioned using problem tree analysis and you used intentional interactions and students hating doing it as an example for something that you could use problem tree analysis for.
Erin Long:
Yes.
Brianna Kratz:
Would you position intentional interactions in that scenario as the trunk or as a branch?
Erin Long:
Yes. This is an excellent question. Thank Thank you so much because what you’re bringing up is how do we define the problem? Because you’re right, one of the problems might’ve been that they just hated the interaction and having to write out all of those things. But yeah, that’s not the problem. The problem is probably more of how are we connecting to our residents? Or how are we having those one-on-one conversations with them? And so that is an excellent cautionary tale. I would be very careful about how you frame the problem. And sometimes you can frame the problem in the way that the RAs like, “You guys hate these things. Okay, I know you hate these things. Let’s talk about both why you hate them.” But in that case, you might also want to go with what are the good things that we get from this?
Yes, it might entail that you have to record all of these intentional conversations and that’s very administrative heavy and I know that’s why you don’t like that. And what else are we getting from this? And so really being, in the facilitation, being clear about how can this be a positive thing? Even if, for you, it is a negative thing, it can still be a positive thing for all of these other parts. And I don’t know that that would be the particular technique I would use specifically for that interaction. I think it is a technique you could use.
I think I would go more for stakeholders mapping and really seeing about how is this influencing the big picture? Because they can, in that case, say, “Okay, the RAs, we don’t like to write out all of these interactions.” Whereas then they would have the hall directors being like, “Well, we don’t maybe love reading them, but we love finding out all the information that we gained from these and this is helping us change in these ways.” And so that’s where, when in the beginning I said it’s an approach and you really have to think through, is thinking through what is going to best frame this conversation. And we do want conversations mostly to stay positive, to acknowledge the negative, but to try and stay positive.
Hopefully that helps. And thank you for the question. That was a really good one. Okay. We will go on to application. And so this is where we’re going to do a group discussion and I just want to hear a little bit about what is currently happening in your buildings? What are the things that are happening and are there any of these techniques that you could use with your RAs to address those? So open it up to the floor on this and we can just start with what is happening in your building. And if you don’t have an answer for what technique we could use, we can talk through that.
Amanda Knerr:
I’m sure there’s got to be lots of pain points that we had over the last year.
Makenzie Joseph:
Sorry about that. Hi. So I actually don’t oversee just one singular building. I oversee multiple and this year, well, many years, we get a lot of vandalism and so that’s something that we get. Let’s see, what else are main things? So a lot of our buildings too don’t have large common space areas, sometimes it’s hard for RAs to hold meetings. Don’t get me wrong, obviously they do, but they’re just a little bit smaller. So I would say those are the main things.
Erin Long:
Okay. So any thoughts on one of these techniques that might be really helpful to addressing the vandalism problem or talking the RAs through how to address it?
Makenzie Joseph:
Yeah, I guess the greater impact on the community. Oh, Brianna, did you have something?
Brianna Kratz:
Yeah, I think that you were getting around to what my suggestion was probably going to be, which is the stakeholder mapping. And maybe I’m just biased because it just is so much fun, but I think the RAs have a pretty good understanding of why vandalism is destructive to the community, but really asking them to articulate it could be helpful. But then again, I also wonder if that’s something that the residents could be brought through.
Erin Long:
Yeah. Makenzie, any other thoughts on techniques that might be helpful?
Makenzie Joseph:
Yeah. So Brianna and I actually work at the same institution, so we’ve had these conversations a lot. So just piggybacking off what she said.
Erin Long:
Okay. I would think another approach with your RAs is to do some of those ideation type ones where either a creative matrix where top of it is how do we prevent vandalism and then what are programs that we could do about it? What are digital media stuff that we could do? And what are all the categories of things we might possibly do in coming up with ideas? That might help them feel a little bit more proactive. And you can be like, how are we proactively stopping it? How are we responding to it afterwards? And all of those kinds of things. So you can do a really concentrated brainstorm there that might come up with some really great ideas. Yeah.
Makenzie Joseph:
Thank you.
Erin Long:
Any other things we want to talk through a little bit?
Speaker 5:
Hello.
Erin Long:
Hi.
Speaker 5:
So one issue that we’ve had is the same thing. So we used to have trash rooms, but we decided to move away from those and our residents have not been the best with that. So they’ve decided to throw their trash into shared spaces, like our lounges and it caused a lot of issues, where we’ve decided at some points to just close down the lounges and lock them because it just got so bad that our cleaning crew were just keep finding really gross things in there. And our RAs, we’re changing a couple things with our RAs about programming and I don’t think they realize how to utilize the lounges as much. So they weren’t really affected by closing down the lounges and how to get them to understand, hey, closing down the lounges actually affects the entire floor really significantly.
Erin Long:
Yeah. So do you have any thoughts on which techniques might be really helpful to use with your RAs?
Speaker 5:
Probably just showing them exactly who gets affected by the lounges being closed down, but also how, when we leave trash in that space, how does it affect our custodial staff, especially some of the things that we found. I think just letting them know, “Hey, this is what’s happening and this is why we can’t use this.” And then just stressing to them, you can be using these spaces more impactfully, but because of how people are treating it, we’re no longer going to be able to use that.
Erin Long:
Yeah. And I think, as you were talking, there was two of the techniques I was thinking of. I think you were getting around to stakeholder mapping with how does this affect everyone? And I think that’s a great way to approach it, but I think a really good problem tree analysis would also be good. And maybe it’s even something that you can have that conversation with your RAs and take notes on all the things and then post it in the hall so that the residents can see it too of like, okay, so you don’t like that the trash rooms are closed, so you’re putting your trash in the lounge, which is causing bugs everywhere or whatever those things may be and really helping them walk through the consequences of their actions in some way.
Yeah, I get it. No one wants to walk down the stairs to go out to the dumpster, no one wants to do it. But if we don’t, here is what’s going to happen. And you see this one consequence, but here are all the other ones. And so really mapping what that looks like might be really helpful, certainly for your RAs, but I think also could be helpful for your residents to see, sorry for the pun here, but the fruits of the labor on that one.
Yeah. Okay, awesome. Well, are we ready to try one or two of the techniques? We were originally going to do this in breakout rooms, but there’s, I don’t think, enough of us to do a breakout room, we can try it all together. So I think we can start with some statement starters. So we’ll start this way. If everyone can just jot down on their own, how might you question with your building? So it might be how might we help residents understand the consequences of leaving trash in the lobbies, or how might we get our residents to understand the effect of vandalism? So whatever that thing that you’re dealing with, writing to how might we question. So we’ll just start there. I’ll give you a couple minutes or a minute to do that.
Okay. Does anyone want to put their how might we question in the chat? Okay. I can write one real quick. How might we … Okay, excellent. Thank you. Why don’t we start with how might we get RAs to be excited about educational program? And so what we’re going to do, because we’re not in person and we don’t have paper, what we’re going to do is I will say each of your guys’ names and whether you’re supposed to write another solution or a problem. So we have the problem of how might we get RAs to be excited about educational program. Brianna, can you write a solution to that? Whatever solution comes to mind, don’t overthink it. Just real quick, write these, write something.
Brianna Kratz:
In the chat?
Erin Long:
In the chat. Yes, please.
Brianna Kratz:
You got it.
Erin Long:
So we can see it all. Okay, great. So we have, we might get RAs excited about educational programming by modeling a fun educational program. Great. Makenzie, can you reply to her solution with another question, another thing that might be like problem with that particular solution? How might we explain the importance as well? Right, exactly. Okay, so we model it, but how are they going to understand why this is important? Okay. Amanda, can I ask you to participate as well? Do you want to put a solution into Makenzie’s answer of how might we explain the importance of this as well?
Sorry, I called a little bit of an audible there, Amanda. So the answer is we can present a case study that highlights the outcomes students get from participating. Excellent. And so this is a really quick version of this, but this is how you do it, where you have the problem, you create a solution, you give a problem to the solution, then you create another solution and I would say go three or four times. Once it gets past that, it gets a little ridiculous, but you can do multiple ones of these at the same time and you can come up with some pretty great things that way.
And so that is definitely a fun one. I think for now, we are not going to do the experiential mapping, but for this particular, how might we, what I might do is do an experiential mapping of why a resident might need to know this, whatever the learning goal is or the educational program is, how might a resident go through that experience throughout their time in their first year or whatever that might be and map that out and help show the RAs where the knowledge from the events might be really helpful for the student. Okay. Do we have any other questions about anything we’ve talked about today? Yeah. Okay, great. Well, thank you guys so much for participating. I really appreciate you guys coming and listening to me chat for a while. I’m going to turn it back over to Amanda to close us out.
Amanda Knerr:
Thanks, Erin. Thank you so much for joining us today. What a great number of strategies that we can use with our teams, with our student staff, with our professional staff, especially as we plan for and get ready to launch into the fall semester here in just a few short weeks. Everyone, we really appreciate you being with us today. We are so glad you’re part of the conversation. You are going to be receiving a follow-up email in the next few days that’s going to provide access to the webinar recording that you can share with your teams or that you can use for yourself. Before you go, we’d like you to take a few minutes in the chat is the satisfaction or the survey so we can provide additional resources to you moving forward in the future. So if you would have a few minutes to complete that, I would really appreciate it.
I also hope that you’ll consider joining us for some upcoming webinars. July 15th is the next one at 2:00 in the afternoon and it is Building Together: Participatory Practices for residential life supervisors with one of our Roompact fellows. And then on September 24th, we’re skipping August. Everybody’s a little busy in August, and at the end of September we’re going to be hosting a webinar on the Myth of Buy-In: Designing Work People Actually Do with another Roompact Fellow.
Wanted to just remind you, Erin is one of our Roompact fellows this year. It is a new program in which there are a group of experts in a variety of areas that are doing webinars, podcasts, blog posts, and are available for an hour free consultation with you or your team. So if you like what you heard today and you want to dig in a little deeper, or if you have another topic, residential curriculum, assessment, design thinking, action research, any of those sorts of things that you would love to connect with a fellow on for an hour, please reach out to Paul at Roompact.com and he would be happy to set those up for you.
If you are like, where do I find out about these fellows? If you go to the Roompact website and click on about and then scroll down, our fellows for this year are on there and you can learn all about them and how they might best meet you and your team’s needs in the next year. So with that, I will let you go for this afternoon. Thank you again for joining us. I hope to see you in a future session. Have a wonderful afternoon and take care.
