Abstract
It’s easy to copy and paste RA Training from year to year or from other institutions, but what does YOUR campus need? This session will bring practitioners together to discuss approaches to planning RA training whether you are starting from scratch or looking to improve upon the foundations you have in place. With reflective prompts and examples of how to center learning and engagement with the competing priorities and business that fall preparation brings.
Outcomes
- (Re)Define your priorities for Fall training.
- Reflect on current practices to inform next steps for your organization’s training needs.
- Identify 2-3 tangible steps you can take to improve your training processes.
Presenters
- Hannah Elliott (she/hers), Assistant Director of Residential Engagement & Staff Training, California State University Long Beach
Date Of Recording: 6/3/26
Watch the Video:
Links and References:
This blog series features different writers responding to the prompt, “How can we re-envision ResLife staff training?”
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:
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’ll be your host for today’s session.
Before we get started, just a few quick reminders and announcements. Could you click it to the next slide for just a second? Just a reminder that the program proposal deadline for R2, the Roompact and Residence Life Conference is at the end of this month. Accepting programs will receive one free registration to the conference. Find details on the Roompact website.
Just a few housekeeping items before we get started. Today’s session is being recorded and the recording will be available on the Roompact website within just the next few days. All participants are currently muted to help minimize background noise. If you experience any technical difficulties, please use the chat feature to let us know and we’ll do our best to assist in that moment.
Throughout the session, please feel free to submit your questions or comments in the chat. I’ll be actively monitoring the chat to make sure our presenter has time to address all of your questions during or after the presentation. And now I’m excited to introduce today’s featured speaker, Hannah Elliott, the Assistant Director for Residential Engagement and Staff Training at CSULB Student Housing. She’ll be leading today’s session, Re(Building) RA Training: Practical Approaches and Prompts for Reflection.
It’s easy to paste, copy and paste RA training from year to year or from other institutions, but what does your campus actually need? This session will bring practitioners together to discuss approaches to planning RA training, whether you’re starting from scratch or looking to improve upon the foundations you already have in place with reflected prompts and examples of how to center learning and engagement with the competing priorities and business that fall preparation brains. Hannah, thank you so much for joining us today with your expertise with the Roompact community. The floor is all yours.
Hannah Elliott:
Hello, everyone. So great to meet you all. My name is Hannah Elliott, as Amanda shared. I use she/hers pronouns and I’m one of the assistant directors of residential life here in student housing at Cal State, Long Beach.
So good afternoon, I’m sure to most of you. I know some of you are wrapping up your business day, some of us coming from lunch, and just appreciate you taking the time to be here.
A little bit about me. I graduated with my master’s from Colorado State University in 2020, great year to graduate. In one of my graduate assistantships, there was actually our grad training and development for our RA team in housing. And then prior to that, was an RA. We lead about 80 RAs here at Cal State Long Beach. We’re increasing up to 104 this next academic year, so a growing team, and have been able to pivot with that growth, new buildings popping up and what that means for training, different shifts and priorities, our sociopolitical climate, all of those different things, which has really recentered to our team, how do we get back to what our team needs and not just go through the motions when it comes to training.
Just to get a vibe check for who’s all in the room, I’m going to have Amanda pull up some polls with three quick questions. Okay. Is there anything I need to do here, Amanda?
Amanda Knerr:
They should be live. Are you able to see them?
Hannah Elliott:
Yeah.
Amanda Knerr:
Okay.
Hannah Elliott:
So how many RAs are you training? I gave four little ranges, so one to 40, 41 through 90, 91 to 150, or if you’re a big school with over 150 student staff. Which of the following best describes you? So if you’re a training chair or assistant director, training committee member, if you’re interested in training or if you fall into another category, and then which of the following best describes your entry point for the conversation today? So if you’re building training from square one, as I know many schools are, rebuilding training, so maybe you have some pieces in place, but they’re a little scattered or disjointed. And then if you have solid foundations for training, but just brushing up and getting new ideas.
Amanda Knerr:
It looks like most folks have responded. I’m going to give it another minute or two and then end the poll.
All right. For results, can you see them or should I read them?
Hannah Elliott:
I cannot see them. If you can read-
Amanda Knerr:
Okay. So we have about 29% have 40 or fewer RAs. 43% have 41 to 90 RAs. 29% over 91, and none have more than 150. With the best describes you, we have about 71% of you are training chairs or assistant directors. 14% are interested in training and about 14% are other. And then for the third one, we have no one building their training from square one, and we have about 29% rebuilding and 71% with a solid foundation that are just brushing things up.
Hannah Elliott:
Wonderful. Thank you all for sharing. That’ll help guide some of this conversation today. Oh, now the results pop up for me.
Amanda Knerr:
There we go. Yeah.
Hannah Elliott:
Perfect. Thank you, Amanda.
So getting some content here as to what the session is and what it is not. What it is, is sharing approaches, so sharing a little bit more about my experience, how I lead our team, how we have planned, changed and built upon training. Reflections to think through and discuss with your team. I won’t have just a list of questions, but there’s prompts spread throughout and just some things to think about. And then walking through major beats to an intentional RA training. With a lot of you having that solid foundation, some of these things, you may be listening through and checking that box saying, “Cool, we’ve done that already.” And I hope that there’s different questions or approaches or things that you can pick up from those chapters.
What this session is not is a one size fits all resource per the description of this session. I think a lot of time, we’ll try to copy and paste things in, right, because of capacity or time or just from resource sharing and there’s definitely value in us sharing. And I’ve seen folks where they are trying to fit something that was not built for their institution. And so how do you take inspiration and guidance from other folks and fit it into your own culture and priorities?
It’s also not a complete guide on how to plan RA training. Obviously there’s a lot of nuance for your campus, whether that’s culture or just processes, logistics, and it won’t be a direct answer to your institution’s unique questions. So obviously, we will have questions in the chat and I will get to questions, but if it’s a very unique sort of thing, I’m happy to chat offline. I love brainstorming. My team knows I love to ideate and I love to think through problem solving and so happy to connect at a later time.
The flow of the session today will be where to begin. So going back to square one. It sounds like folks have foundations, but even if you have those foundations set, it’s good to go back through and review, which we do every year here at the beach. Leading with learning, so making sure that we have that learning centered. Scheduling mindset, some things to keep in mind as you’re hammering out your schedule. Bringing in the team, getting your team on board and prepared for training, and then assessment and next steps, as well as just a general wrap up.
So where to begin? I always like to think where is the starting point? This is going to look different for every institution per the question I asked at the beginning, but for some folks it is you’ve inherited maybe a shared drive of some sort that just has a bunch of training resources and it says, “Hey, let’s build training.” When I first got here to Long Beach, we were part one of a big restructure for our department. And so there was a lot of stuff in the drive that we were pulling from previous years pre COVID and then having to make sure that we were adjusting and matching things with the times.
Another thing to think about with your starting point is who’s in the room, which we’ll get to on a later slide as well. So is it you solo putting things together for a group of people? Do you have a committee? Is it all hands on deck? Which will definitely pivot your approach. Thinking through what’s been done before and sometimes that is like, “Hey, this was not good or we did this and we tried and we’re failing forward.” To quote one of my grad school faculty members, Dr. Darren Stewart, “If we’re going to burn it all down, what do we save from the fire?” We have to learn lessons from everything that we do. And so if there’s something that you did that’s not worth repeating, what is the lessons that you’re learning from that?
Pardon me. And that could be like, why did it fail? It could be like, “Hey, you know what? We tried this training series with a campus partner and just realized a campus partner is not a good energy match for our student audience. So how do we bring in that campus partner, maybe to do a tabling series or to come for a different type of session rather than coming in to lead a two-hour seminar with the RAs.
What do you save from the fire also again centers that idea that you don’t have to just scrap everything every year. I am a big advocate for creating new documents, like a new blank document and copying and pasting things over, pulling things to a new fresh document, but completely starting from scratch is not always necessary, though sometimes it feels like it is because we just need a clean slate. So if you feel like you’re in that mindset, it may be good just to pull up a clean document, your reference materials, and then start kind of pulling things in for what makes sense for now.
And then this is where you’re going to identify the following. So your foundations, what do we need to train on? If you’re looking for a list of these things, there’s plenty on the different Facebook groups and whatnot, but for your institution, I always recommend going back to your paperwork and your evaluations. If you’re going to evaluate your RA on something, you need to train them on that topic. And then the paperwork, do they understand what they’re agreeing to? Obviously your protocols. And then look for your assessment data. So whether you do direct survey assessment with your RAs, if you do any sort of weekly logs, that’s a great source to say, what are the questions that come up during the year? Trends in your IRs, right? I think most schools see those early semester IRs maybe not always meeting the mark and then they se them improve. But if that isn’t the case, maybe there’s some more training that can happen there.
This is where you will also identify your mandatory sessions and learning. So that may be mandatory sessions set at the federal, state system level, if you’re part of a educational university system, your institution, your division, or your just housing leadership team. So for our campus, what this can look like is we obviously have to do the big ones, Title IX training, making sure we’re hitting Clery Act training. There’s also some system-related things. So there’s been a big push for us to train on Narcan here in California. So all of our RAs do carry Narcan so we have to do training for that, as well as system-wide and divisionally institutionally, a big focus on time-place manner in our different TPM policies. And so we’re making sure we’re including that in training as well.
From there, we’ve had shifts in leadership. So we have a new executive director, we have a new campus president that started last month, and so there could be other priorities that get assigned to us at any point in time if they see that there’s a need for more leadership training or more consent education, depending on statistics going on across campus with different reporting. And so these are things to keep in mind as well.
And then trends and patterns is another part of your foundational knowledge. And so for trends and patterns, I would say this isn’t just those kind of weekly log things I mentioned before. One pattern that we saw in our student population was residents getting uncomfy with each other really quick or trying to maybe flirt with one another and think they’re going about it in a cool way and it really rubbing a person a wrong way. And it’s not quite meeting our threshold for the CSU Title IX threshold, but it’s bothering folks and it’s making folks feel uncomfortable. And so how are we training our RAs to navigate those entry conversations, knowing that those are handled by professional staff? So we’ve done more about boundary setting and healthy relationships. We’ve seen more that is not quite meeting that threshold again for domestic violence Title IX, but how are we noticing red flags in those relationships and not trying to teeter into the TikTokification of mental health and healthy relationships where people get the ick and that’s why they are calling something a red flag.
And so we’ve done more with that. That also leads into our curriculum work and making sure our RAs are able to properly address and educate through our curricular model. And so these are all things that build into those foundations.
As far as next steps about where to begin… Oh, I forgot I put this in here. This was when we were kind of rebuilding training two years ago now. We started doing this and we did it again last year. We have five learning goals as part of our Beach Journey residential curriculum and we went through and listed out every single presentation and topic that we were training on and clicked through what learning goals that they fell into. That way, we can make those connections for the RAs so that they could see how the curriculum could look like in action. And so even something that’s like job expectations, some folks were like, “Well, this doesn’t really fit in one of these.” But I think an essential life skill is also learning to understand paperwork you’re signing and understanding clear expectations and how to deliver on that as well as how to communicate when things are maybe not going to plan.
We also, back to the not just copying and pasting. So if you go on Res Life Professionals or other pages and you type in BCDs or behind closed doors, you’re going to get a lot of hot topics and opinions about whether or not we should even do behind closed doors, if it’s hazing, if it’s worth it, is it too much work? Folks that have completely just stripped away from that and have gone to just doing scenarios, you have really creative ways that people have pivoted. So I know one of the previous webinars recently was about Dungeons and Dragons’ approach to behind closed doors and that kind of hands-on tangible job training. What we did here was ended up being in line with another, I believe it was one of the podcast episodes Roompact put out where someone did their dissertation research on behind closed doors as a job training practice, which was super helpful for us because we had already pivoted to this model and it was in alignment with that research. So it was cool to see those things line up.
What I provide for our team, I have the table of contents here on the screen. It’s about a 25-page document that is a facilitation guide. Folks are welcome to print it out or just print out key pages that they would like in hand for the day of. We have everything from our logistics overview as you see here on the screen with our scenario placements, general schedule and group rotations, as well as the full facilitation guide for each room. So what the prompt is that the students are receiving, the prompts that the RA returner actors receive, things that we ask them to do, boundaries around what they’re not allowed to do. So making sure that we’re keeping it intentional of hitting certain beats and it’s not all of a sudden the most wild party that anyone’s ever walked into, but being an alcohol related incident that you would actually see here on our campus. We’re not a large party school. Oftentimes you have people standing around with them solo cups in the room listening to music, and so that’s where we kind of gauge that at.
All of our facilitation guides also then build out in nuance. And so while the scenario is pretty contained, because the biggest takeaway we’ve seen in our assessment data is they really just like practicing knocking on the door and addressing the situation, whether they do it well or they get a lot of notes. And so getting that piece done. We do a lot of the reminder education in the debrief. So if the scenario is only lasting for maybe five to 10 minutes, there should be another 10 or so minutes for you to sit down, what went well, areas of improvement, and then talking through nuance. So our alcohol incident, you’ll see on here we don’t have an alcohol transport, but what we do talk about after the scenario wraps up is what would happen if the student was throwing up? Who would you need to call? Do you need to call up to a supervisor at that point or do you just call emergency services? And so really making time to make it an educational space, but still getting that tangible experience in small groups has been super beneficial for our team.
From there, after the whole activity is finished, there’s kind of a larger group debrief about all of the sessions. Our new RAs are asked to fill out an IR as is pretty standard practice across institutions. They can practice writing that IR for the first time. And we actually have our returner RAs who are actors do a brief reflection as well using a Roompact form. And so we have them fill out what scenario they were in and then just give a little bit more about how did you feel going into behind closed doors as a new RA? What does it feel like being on the other side of it now? And then we connect into some of the training content we go over with our returning RAs to talk through, we’ve talked about role modeling and being a coach for your peers. What did that look like in this space and how will you continue that learning? Knowing those first few weeks, we do try to pair our returning RAs with our new RAs for on call.
And so this is just an example of how you can know what works for your university. I completely understand why BCDs may not work at other schools, whether you don’t have the staffing to do smaller groups that are intentional, whether it year after year still kind of feels like we’re teetering on that inappropriate line where returners are taking it too far. We also do a preparation session with our returning RAs that are actors and each group also has a line leader is kind of what we call it. And so they have a returner with them that is just kind of walking them through it, having those hallway debrief conversations. They can step out with someone if needed. And we also have mental health support on site.
And so we have a care coordinator in our department who is around and when possible, our counselor and residents as well, knowing that those are privileged resources that we have, but see where you can maybe tap in campus partners or even just hire leadership team members. We have them work out of one of the lounge spaces down the hallway and then they can step into a private study room if needed.
Most years, we haven’t had to do it, which is also nice. And when it has happened where students need that resource, it’s usually been pressure they’re putting on themselves rather than the content, even though we do hit those higher level content pieces around bias-related incident, suicide ideation, sexual assault, et cetera.
So moving on from those foundations, so brainstorming, whether you list them out or you mind map it, whatever that looks like for you, it’s also important to understand the container of your training. So how long is your training? Our training is a 10-day block schedule, which I know is historically pretty standard. I know many schools for various reasons have moved away from that model. And again, pros and cons to all of it. It just matters what works for your school and what you have to work with. I know a lot of those dates are set out about a year or so in advance, at least for us. And so you might be working with more or less days than you would want to ideally, but knowing what that container is is important.
I would also say don’t just count the days, right? I said 10-day block schedule, but we actually count the hours of in person training that we have available, which is helpful when you get into those planning phases. As we count out the hours, a part of our container for training is also knowing that we start training at 9:00 AM and we end at 5:00 most days. Some days, we might start at 8:00 AM. We also take a 90-minute lunch most days as well. Sometimes that’s cut down to an hour for time. We rarely or if ever go past 5:00 PM. That is for the health and wellness of our professional staff as well as our student staff. That 90-minute lunch comes in handy for folks who need to run back to their office and answer a few emails. We do an all hands on deck approach, so all of our pro staff are physically at training for most of training unless they have prior approval from a supervisor. But figuring out those hours is helpful to then map out your training when you get to that scheduling step.
Oh, I was going to say something else about time here. It’ll come back to me or it won’t, and you will never know what I had to say.
Where does your training take place? So I think most schools usually have a set place that they go to. We have a conference space we use year after year, but also think about what spaces are available to you. There was one year where for our technology-related trainings, we walked students over to one of the computer labs on campus. We ended up not revisiting that because it was more of a headache to get everyone to a new location for that specific training. But the conference space we use on campus sometimes is also booked by folks that are paying money where it is free for our department to use because we run the space. And so we will gladly take that income and step over to one of our academic lecture hall spaces, which works really well for certain training sessions.
One of our campus spaces, we are able to book a large lecture hall and several smaller classrooms and so things that are rotation-based work really well in that space. We also have a low ropes, high ropes course on campus, and so we’re able to use that space for team building with a facilitator to be able to lead some team building on day two or three of training.
Think about who’s involved. This is on many different levels. So who is involved with planning, with facilitating, with leading, with assessment? This may be a training committee through and through. This may be one or two people involved with planning, but then the whole team is facilitating. And so knowing who is responsible for these different steps is important as well as having an idea of who’s kind of taking the lead throughout training. That doesn’t mean the person up at the microphone every single day, but I know myself and my training chair are the folks that we know the schedule, we know what’s expected of one another, we know what’s expected of the team and she and I both have that authority to pivot things when needed.
So if we get an email from a campus partner who is supposed to come train saying, “Hey, my car broke down and I can’t make it today,” we’re able to pull a session from another day, go talk with those facilitators and get things pivoted around and just touch base with each other really quick. This makes it easy to know again who owns the process, having the full team have buy-in but knowing that we’re not making six or seven different decisions elsewhere.
Some things to keep in mind here as well is the content expert is not always the training expert. And so this can be a hard pill to swallow for some folks. There are folks that really, really know their content when it comes to whatever the topic may be and they might not always be the training expert. Politics also matter here, so there may be people who are not the training expert, but you have to invite in any way.
What we have done in certain situations is in the past, our facilities leadership have been so great energetically. They love connecting with our team, but when it comes to doing the what RAs need to know about facilities training, there was usually a gap there. So what we opted for is we did a breakfast with facilities to kind of set the tone for the day. Folks got to meet the custodian of their building and talk with some of our trades folks. Our facilities leadership introduced themselves and kind of gave some big highlights of, don’t be afraid to submit a work order. We’d rather have three work orders for the same thing than no work order at all, those types of points. And then our Res Life team facilitates a session the following day or later that afternoon as far as what the RAs need to know for on call and reporting purposes when it comes to facilities.
Politics will also matter here for key campus partners where there may be a divisional priority to bring them in or a big push for certain trainings. It won’t fit into our August training, but I know one of the really cool things we’re doing on our campus is financial wellness ambassador training, which is one of our essential life skills we want our students to learn. And so looking at what that looks like to get our RAs trained on that. Parameters can also be set. So if you do need to bring someone in and you’re super excited for it, or maybe year after year it’s not exactly meeting the mark, try to give specifics. So obviously time specifics, but then also learning objectives and desired activities.
So we have had campus partners that offer a three-hour training and I set up a time to chat with them and was like, “Hey, so we cover about half of this content in other sessions that we lead. It was about our wellness resources on campus. So is there a way for us to get a 90-minute alternate version of this for our RAs?” And that really worked out for us. We were very excited to bring them in and it went well. They had preset learning objectives, so we just made sure that those aligned with what we were wanting from that time.
And then desired activities, I have also asked certain facilitators of like, “Hey, we would love for you to come in and do a workshop with our RAs on healthy relationships. We were thinking an activity could be X, Y, and Z.” I’m sure many of us have received that kind of cold call email from a campus partner or a colleague that’s like, “Hey, can you come do a training on this?” And so sometimes it’s nice to have those parameters and you might have folks that are thankful for it.
Also thinking here, what are your priorities before students move in? So it’s easy to shove a lot into August training, especially for us with 10 days. It feels like unlimited time at times, but you really need to get to what are the priorities before training. And some of those priorities include making sure your RAs and your pro staff can get rest, can set up their building, can walk their rooms, put up decorations and door decks and those sort of things. Have some after hours team building where they’re having a door deck party and watching a movie. And other priorities would obviously be, I need you to know how to answer a duty phone. I need you to know how to do a lockout, submit a program proposal, whatever that looks like.
Also thinking here, we don’t want to be in a limited mindset of like, we only have this much time, so where can learning continue afterwards? For us, this looks like our small staff meetings as well as our in services with all 88 of our RAs present. And so there is content we do during August training that’s like, this is kind of your entry point to this conversation that we then build upon in those all staff or in service trainings.
What I will say here is I would not jump from this. So your foundations and your container, I would not jump from this right to scheduling. I think this is where a lot of folks miss a crucial step and for those on a curricular approach, there will be no surprise here.
Leading with learning. And so I think once you know the containers and those logistics, rather than going into, oh, “I guess we’ll do an hour for on call and 30 minutes for this session,” really thinking through what do you want them to learn first.
And so this is something I do with my training committee each year where we go through and we list out the different learning outcomes. Luckily, most years we’re able to just revisit learning outcomes, which is where we’re at now in our process and see, does this still align with what we want to do? Does this mirror our vision for training or notes that we have from last year? And so if you’re starting from square one, this is where you would list out all of those topics. So you did your brainstorming, you know what you have to do, you know what you want to do, list all those things out. This is where you get specific, break things apart where you’re able to, which we’ll talk about a little bit in scheduling. But if you think you need two or three hours for on call, why? And so maybe it’s you do an hour of the basics of on call and then an hour for protocols and proceed.
We’re actually moving our protocols and procedures training to an online learning module this year. So they’ll get that after they do the basics of on call training and then learn more about those policies and procedures.
Creating those learning outcomes. A tip, a reminder, a well-written learning outcome becomes your assessment strategy. So if you want folks to be able to identify three academic resources on campus, your assessment then becomes identify three academic resources on campus. And so if you have more vague learning outcomes, that can be harder. Understand is not a good measurable verb. Measuring understanding is really broad. Measuring their ability to summarize is different. And so thinking through those Bloom’s Taxonomy or other models you may use for writing learning outcomes and how that can make your life easier on the backend for assessment.
Your learning outcomes will also help you brainstorm your learning activities and modality. So one thing I’ll share on the next slide is this year, after a few years where it seems like we swing in one direction where we had a lot of cahoot one year and then a lot of scenario work one year, we as a training committee decided all of the activities and have those mapped out and are currently building out the ones that are new based on the learning outcomes provided.
And so again, if the goal is for them to identify three academic resources, the activity should be directly related to their ability to identify. It shouldn’t be deep investment into content because that would be more like choosing an appropriate academic resource based on a scenario. And so thinking through where are we setting that bar?
What I like to remember here as well as far as learning outcomes goes is affirm student capacity. I think sometimes, especially with the impact of AI and social media and just our general landscape nowadays, there is a lot of some valid criticisms across generations, but I think sometimes we can also want to set the bar low because we think that’s where our students can meet. And I’d rather hold our students accountable to the bar that we set than have the bar on the floor. And if all they can do is identify free academic resources, how are they actually supposed to have a conversation about those resources? So figure out where the bar is set for August or September, whenever your training occurs, and then figure out how you raise the bar from there.
And then thinking through what you want to accomplish to determine your scheduling. And so what you want to accomplish in these learning outcomes will determine what you do with your schedule. This may need to ebb and flow. So like I mentioned, if you’re three hours for on call, that sounds like there’s a lot of learning happening there. Can we split that up into different sessions or at least schedule in breaks? This is a good reminder too, where can learning continue after? Can also happen in a resource. Providing some sort of job aid or reference document can also be very beneficial. But if you have a list of 10 learning outcomes for one session, that session is probably going to be a few hours long compared to two or three, which could probably be a 30 to 90-minute session.
So this is screenshots from documents I had referenced before. We have an Excel-shared spreadsheet where we have the topic, the time, the module precursor. So we’ve introduced learning modules through our… We use Canvas here on campus, but folks may use Blackboard or Titanium as their LMS. We’re working with our technology services to develop those courses right now. And so there will be pre-work for some of our sessions.
We have an assigned committee reviewer to review the facilitator guide, make sure it’s good to go. And then we know how many pro staff are going to be facilitating. We have some of our returning RAs tapped in as co-presenters. We know this will happen in all staff space because we also schedule in small staff time during our August training. The modality will be presentations. We have the activities here and then some notes.
Last year, we also added in a column. So we do themes for our training, which I know can be also a hot topic. I think they’re fun. I think what is usually a barrier or a pitfall for folks is when they’re focused on the theming and they’re not focused on the learning. And so we’re more focused about how do we make the best Princess Diaries conflict and mediation session for our TV and movie-related training theme, then focusing on what are they actually learning as far as conflict and mediation skills.
Once we build out all of these resources, this is also where our facilitator guides will be linked, presentation linked. And another sheet in this document has the full schedule, has campus partner information for who’s coming when, and is kind of just our planning guide holistically for our committee that we then also share out with all folks in the department.
So for scheduling language, there’s three terms that I tend to use when planning that you may have heard before. So obviously scheduling, that’s like your date, your time, your location, the length of the training, et cetera. Then there’s sequencing and scaffolding. So sequencing would be your intentional order of sessions within your schedule. And so that would be making sure we’re doing our community living guide and policies before we’re getting to on call so that folks know what our policies are to know what to identify as a policy violation.
Then there’s scaffolding, which would be how sessions build upon one another. So these, they definitely have some overlap. You’ll hear them used interchangeably. This is how I differentiate them. If you have another understanding of them, that is great. I just wanted to make sure we’re on the same page before I continue.
When I think of scaffolding, it’s not just like this comes first and then this comes next. It’s also thinking about building the complexity and the nuance. And so some of our early scenario work with students with our RAs about supporting students may be some of those kind of like softballs about a student comes to your room and is having trouble with their roommate, how do you deal with this? And that might be after conflict and mediation. Then we have a session later on where we talk about identities. And so we have identity-related scenarios there. Then in another practice time, we can layer those two together. So maybe there’s a roommate conflict based on someone’s identities. How would an RA deal with that situation?
This is how you also build learning transfer. So not just the idea of I learned and I can replicate, but I can also transfer that to new situations. So that critical thinking of, okay, if I know how to write an incident report because of an interpersonal conflict, I should also be able to write an incident report for this other type of situation.
For your scheduling mindset, picture of a chicken or an egg here. So remembering those foundational topics is important and I think you can spend a lot of time deciding what comes first. I appreciate our 10-day block training because it really gives us time to scaffold and sequence things and do some more team building and mindsetting on those day one and two. Whereas I know for some folks that may be on a five-day schedule, there may be less time for that. And so thinking through what this means for you.
Is it really going to determine an RA’s success if they learn on call before they learn about community building? Maybe. Who’s to say, right? Your assessment data would say. But I think we can spend too much time thinking through the semantics and the nuance and what is the best idea. What I always say, and I think I have this on a later slide, is oftentimes there’s not a right decision. You just need a decision that is justifiable that you can reflect on and pivot where necessary. And so remembering those foundational topics and what’s important to you.
Day one and two, folks are nervous. They have that jittery like first day of school move in energy, but for RAs. So we like to do a lot of tone setting here. If you have to jump straight into content, obviously whatever works for you and your institution, but thinking about how you’re setting the tone is also important here.
So the first one to two days, we obviously go over like welcome, meeting folks, name games. We then also get into some paperwork reminders, job expectations. And we do two sessions that I really enjoy, which are our culture of gratitude session as well as dimensions of wellness. And so culture of gratitude, this is where we talk about our of the month awards as well as lollipop moments, which are little tokens of gratitude students can write to one another throughout the year to help build that as part of our culture. We say thank you. We give kudos. We notice hard work that’s being done.
And then dimensions of wellness is a part of our curriculum as a framework for understanding the different ways we can practice wellness or recognize signs of being unwell, becomes really important to our RAs and to our residents. And so we start with that during training so they have that language built as they get into supporting their students.
Some other things to remember, if you do operate where you have an all staff and then smaller area teams, making sure you’re including small staff time. It’s great to have your 100 RAs in the room and people need to know the 14 RAs that they’re going to be doing duty swaps with, right? Or maybe it’s vice versa. Maybe you have a lot of small staff time and you do things more disaggregated. It’s important to bring people back together and have that big team spirit and vision.
Obviously your mandatory sessions, key campus partners. If you have LLCs or thematic communities, this may be a point to bring them in. Your team building and building preparation time. We ask RAs to do a lot, especially during August. And so giving them time to do those things and not just waiting for after hours or the weekend is very important to me personally because the next point, learning is tiring. I think if you remember your onboarding to your current position or learning spaces you’ve been in, it can be frustrating, especially if we’re expanding their current world view or perspective on things.
I think we’re also in this time where there’s a push and pull between just tell me what to do and also, again, affirming their capacity to dig in deeper. So yes, I’ll tell you what to do, but we’re also going to have you explain why that’s the way to do things. I want you to see the connection between policy and community building and safety and having time for them to explore those concepts and summarize things in their own words, doing discussion groups and teach-backs with one another is exhausting work and it’s work worth doing.
And then layer in the fun. I’m not anti-training theme or anti-spirit competitions or those different things. I think they just need to be done meaningfully. And so not just doing them because it’s super fun and you did a lip sync when you were an RA and it was one of the most memorable moments of your time in college, that’s great. But if we’re also going to training till 6:00 PM each night and then are now setting aside three hours to do a lip sync battle, I think we can readjust some priorities here or maybe you have time to do that. And again, if it works for your institution, that is beautiful.
We do spirit days, but don’t necessarily do a spirit competition just because it’s another thing to keep track of and organize. And so there have been two or three years now where we’ve thought about organizing a competition aspect of it. I did competitions for spirit when I was in Colorado and those were fun, but it’s also someone has to be in charge of that. Who’s tracking spirit points? Is it fair? Is it balanced? And so remembering the labor for the things that we want to do as well.
Here’s a mini screenshot of part of our schedule and what it looks like in that Excel document. And so we have some planning notes up top under the date. This would be where maybe if there’s a change to breakfast being served or if on this Friday last year, we had our thematic RAs separate for the afternoon. We have different deadlines for the different modules that we do or submissions that they need to turn in as well as our spirit days. When I say meaningful, I also think that intentional comes to mind. And so we did our low ropes course this day at Outback, which is what our low ropes course is called. And so we had them dress in their village colors and that was a really fun visual identifier. It looked great in the team photo. And then the next day was like TV movie character day, which was also just fun because we were sitting around at our conference center.
And then this is where we get into the actual scheduling through. So we start that welcome with high energy, fun, icebreaker. And then we start off with those job expectations, not only from a tone setting perspective, but also from the perspective of if you are a college student sitting in a chair and you just signed up for this job that it thankfully comes with room and board or whatever your compensation package looks like, but you heard it’s a lot of work and you’re going to be on call and that’s scary. And what if I mess up and do I have to stay up all night when I’m on call? And can I take a shower when I’m on call? You’re going to want to know your job expectations first, right? We’re not getting into the true colors of it all right now and leadership theory, I just need to know what is my job and what is expected of me.
And so we do that to curb some nerves there. Last year, we added in a separate session. So job expectations, how to keep your job is kind of what that one is, and then success in the role. So not only the pitfalls of what can happen in your role, but what does a successful RA look like? Talking through how to prepare for a one-on-one, how to be intentionally tapped into your community.
Bringing in the team. So again, this may look different depending on your department structure, but you are handing over a puzzle box with pieces and the picture on the box and your team is supposed to put it all into place in most structures. So I know for us we have a committee, it’s me and three other folks and then we have a department with almost 20 professional staff. And so being able to bring it all together for everyone who weren’t involved in the direct planning process means assigning things with clarity, giving a clear vision.
Some of the pitfalls we’ve had over the past couple of years have usually been a lack of clarity or follow through on our planning part. And so thinking through this year going into this year, we made sure we knew exactly what session activities were.
Now if folks are like, “Hey, I have a good idea for an activity,” they can come chat with us obviously, but we want to make sure it aligns with those learning goals. We know what is happening before their session and after their session. So if they’re wanting to do rotations and going into different spaces, well, we can’t do that because the way the room is set up, it doesn’t allow for that. And so we kind of have that full picture so they can focus on their piece of the puzzle.
And this is where that leadership comes to mind. So having one, two, three tops people who are the folks that people can go to and get the direct answer, someone that can give the stamp of approval, the game time decision, and knows how it all threads together. So I have other amazing leadership team members who are also in this space a lot of the time and obviously they can make a game time decision in their authority and they usually will come back to me if needed to be like, “Hey, so this is what the issue is, this is what we’re thinking, and this is how we’re going to pivot. Does that make sense for you?” And they know it’s because I have the tapestry in my brain of what training looks like and is supposed to be and that way we can pivot in the moment if needed.
This also means giving clear facilitation guides. And so we prepare all of that as a committee. We give all the content to them. They only have to focus on making the fun parts of their presentation and also identifying if they have an RA co-presenter, what parts of the session their RAs would be co-presenting.
And then wrapping it all up. So I think of assessment for training in three different ways. So you have your session level assessment. So this could be last year we did an activity where they had to write one thing they learned and then one thing that was still a little muddy or unclear on the back of a note card. We collected those at the end of the day and we had someone go through them and theme them out. That could be a session level assessment or a quick two question survey, a WordCloud. You can get creative here so that it’s not laborsome. I have had trainings before where we’re doing a daily survey assessment of all of the sessions of that day, which can be burdensome at times. It works for some schools. It worked really well for us in Colorado. I think we did it every two or three days. And when we try to replicate it here, it was just another thing for us to have to track. And my biggest pet peeve is collecting information that we’re not actually doing anything active with.
Your overall training assessment, now this is where you get into that big survey. And then data points beyond training. So yes, we can do a survey question about IR writing. The biggest data point though would be looking at your IRs and seeing how many of them are meeting those expectations or are needing feedback and for how long after training.
Other data points could be the types of program proposals you’re getting. Time management becomes a big one. And so we opted to move our time management training out of fall training because they’re not ready to hear that yet. They need to kind of understand the job and feel the weight of it before we get into time management. And that’s what works for us, though I had great success doing time management as part of fall training in Colorado. So again, pivot to figure out what works best for your team culture.
Some assessment pitfalls. Focusing on the likability. So what sessions were your favorite? What were your least favorite and why? Did you like doing this low ropes course? Sometimes that’s fun, right? We did the low ropes course for the first time this past year and it’s been a highlight the entire year. When photos from it at our banquet came up, people were hooting and hollering and having a great time. But I think what we’re not focused on here then is the learning. It’s fine to have a couple questions about likability. We actually work with our dining hall to do fun little treats sprinkled throughout training. So we do a lemonade bar, iced coffee station, a boba bar. I think they did desserts one day. And so we wanted to know, do you like this? Because it was pricey and a lot of work. So we’d like to know if we should continue this. And we got some good feedback about like, “Hey, this treat wasn’t it, but we love the iced coffee bar. Can we get this type of syrup next time?”
Timing of your training assessment. So is it too close to training? Are they tired and they just want to get through this and they hate training because if they have to show up to that classroom one more time, they’re going to scream. Is it too far from training? They’re not really remembering what sessions they sat through. It’s hard for them to kind of go back and be like, “I actually don’t even know. Everything’s kind of blending together now.” And then like I already said, there’s no purpose of data collection would be another pitfall.
My favorite question that I ask in our training survey is what barriers, if any, were there to your learning? I think this is where you kind of blend that likability into a tangible learning method. And so we’ve had folks say the room gets too cold or my table was over in the corner and the projector was kind of blocked. Having these sessions back to back was a lot. They were the heavy sessions back to back. And then we had other folks who were like, I love that these sessions were back to back because I could rip the bandaid off. And our training committee is able to come together, reflect on that, revisit what we should do because again, no right answer and then move forward.
So this is where we get into the review, revisit and repeat for your assessment. So review the data you’re collecting, revisit what you had planned and made edits and then repeat what went well. There’s no need to re-envision something every single time. We get tired of things sometimes because we’re the ones doing it year after year, but if it works, let’s continue rocking and rolling with it.
And then lastly, to wrap up, like I’ve said a few times now, don’t just copy and paste from other institutions. If you do get resources, sit with them, talk with folks. What do we like about this? What do we maybe have concerns about or what doesn’t fit here? What we’re able to do here in California cannot legally be done in other states. And so what I may send over for our training schedule and have big blocks of time getting into identity work looks different at another school. And so copying and pasting and then trying to Wite-Out the things you can or can’t do would probably be a waste of time versus what are we wanting to get to. Community building, affirmations and people feeling like they belong. How do we build that?
And we can look at this as a resource, right? Maybe there’s good reflection questions in there or an activity that we can use different language for, but if we’re copying and pasting and then using a red pen, that’s where things can get a little tricky.
What I provide for my team may not work for your team. Maybe you sat through all of this, thank you, and were like, “Yeah, girl. We’re doing this already.” Two thumbs up. It works really well and really smoothly for our team and this could be a disaster in another setting. Like I said before, no need to find the right answer, just be able to justify, reflect, and pivot where needed. I always as well, being in that kind of mid-level position, I take our training schedule and make sure our director signs off on it before I present it to our team so that people aren’t getting attached to things before we move forward.
And then save things where people can find them. I know we see year after year on those Facebook groups where folks are like, “Hey, I just got this position for RA training or RA selection or whatever it may be and there’s nothing and I’m building from square one.” And so trying to create resources where people can build off of the good work that you’ve put together, that will last beyond your years is also very important.
And with all of that, are there any questions? I don’t see any in the chat, but I will turn it back over to Amanda, unless there are.
Amanda Knerr:
All right. Just a moment. Is there any other questions while we’re wrapping up? I’ll give you just a second.
All right. Well, Hannah, thank you so much again for being our featured speaker today, helping us rethink and rebuild RA training. Really appreciate your time and your insights today. I want to thank each of you for joining us today. We’re so glad you’re able to be part of the conversation and hope that you’ll continue the conversation beyond today’s session.
You will be receiving a follow-up email in the next few days with access to the webinar recording, if you like to revisit the session or share it with your colleague. Also, before you go, I’d really love it if you take a few minutes to fill out the brief feedback form. The link is in the chat, so feel free to click that and fill that out. It takes just a couple minutes and help us deliver some great resources every month to you as part of our webinar series.
We also, as a last reminder, hope you’ll consider joining us for upcoming webinars on June 17th at 2:00 PM Eastern Standard Time. We’ll be doing design thinking with RAs and then on July 15th at 2:00 PM Eastern Standard Time, we’ll be doing a session on building together participatory practices for residential life supervisors. Again, thank you for your time today. We hope to see you at a future session. Have a wonderful rest of your day. Take care. Bye-bye.
