ResEdChat Ep 188: Assessment Candy – Simple Actions You Can Take

In this episode of Roompact’s ResEdChat, host Paul sits down with Roompact Fellow Natasha Monteith to discuss simple actions departments, supervisors, and administrators can take to get better at operationalizing the use of assessment data. This includes collecting the “correct” data, while balancing staff time and effort, and integrating it in to daily practice.

Guest: Natasha Monteith (she/her/hers) is currently a Leadership Development Program Evaluator and an Educational Research Methodology Ph.D. student. Before that, she spent multiple years in residence life in undergraduate, graduate, and professional settings. Natasha believes in creating more engaging and thought-provoking learning experiences for students through meaningful assessment practices. To do this, she believes that using collaborative, culturally responsive assessment practices and building a culture where assessment reports do not live on a shelf are crucial. That is also why her research area of interest is data literacy for student affairs professionals. When she has time without a to-do list, you can find her curled up with her cats, a mystery book, and a latte from a local coffee shop.

Host: Paul Brown

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Paul Brown:
All right, welcome back to Roompact’s ResEdChat Podcast, the podcast for housing and residence life folks. I am your host today, Paul Brown. I’m excited to have a guest here today who I consider to be one of the most important people I rely on when I’m trying to make sense of assessments and data and how do we do it well and what do we do with that? So I’m excited to welcome Natasha Monteith with us today. For those of you that have followed our podcast before and also our blog, you’ll notice that Natasha was a blogger for us for a year and she has also moved into the role of Roompact Fellow this year. So as you may know, we’ve already had a few episodes with our Roompact fellows. They act as our scholars and residents this year to help our Roompact schools get the most out of the software, but they’re also going to be presenting some webinars and other content and be available at our R2 Roompact and Residence Life Conference coming up in the fall.
As a reminder, if you want to register for that, propose a program for that, all of that information is available online. The deadline comes to this summer, so make sure you check that out. So welcome, Natasha. So excited to have you. I gave you my introduction of you, but do you want to tell folks what you’re doing, how you came into your expertise with assessment, and what you’re doing up to now?

Natasha Monteith:
For sure. Thanks, Paul, and thank you for inviting me back. I’m very excited to be here. Hello everybody. And so yes, my name’s Natasha Monteith. I use she/her pronouns, and I am a past housing human. And so I started out as a resident assistant at Central Michigan University back in my undergrad, absolutely fell in love with it, went, “How can I do this for the rest of my life?” Went on to a master’s degree at Boston College where I was a graduate resident director, continued to love it, but also had my first exposure to student affairs assessment through a course there and realized, “Wow, we can do the math stuff,” to which my dad was very happy because my dad always wanted me to go off and be a nuclear physicist because he was like, “You’re really good at numbers.” And I was like, “Yeah, but I really like people, so I don’t want to go work in a nuclear reactor.” So got to fall in love with it there, started to understand the impact data could have on programming.
So actually worked on some assessment projects that got us some additional grant funding to keep some late night alcohol-free alternative programming going even after my graduation. And then landed down at Georgia Southern where I continued to get to touch on student affairs assessment, and then landed up at UNC Greensboro where that was my last housing position. But while I was there, I met with, at that time, just George Still, but now Dr. George Still, who oversaw student affairs assessment. And I was like, “I want your job someday. What do I do? I think I need a PhD in higher ed.” And I point to him as the guy who is the reason I have the life I have now. And he was like, “Do not do a PhD in higher ed if you want my job. If you want my job, go over to our educational research methods program, get an evaluation doctorate, and you’ll be set up much better to be able to do the work I’m doing.”
So I am still technically a PhD student in educational research methodology with a concentration in program evaluation. And have since learned that I can take this love and passion for data outside of a college context and work as a leadership development program evaluation manager for a national nonprofit, focused in on making sure we have good leaders in our school food system.

Paul Brown:
That’s great.

Natasha Monteith:
That’s a lot of words to you, Paul. Lots.

Paul Brown:
Well, I mean, it’s an interesting path. I mean, that’s a whole other episode in and of itself.

Natasha Monteith:
Right. Whole other podcast.

Paul Brown:
Whole other episode. I obviously became familiar with you when you were blogging for the Roompact blog, but you also worked with one of our schools, Northern Illinois and helping them. Do you want to tell folks a little bit about what you did there? Because I think especially some of the people that use our software are like, “Oh, maybe this is something we can replicate,” not necessarily with you, but with their own internal folk or other opportunities like that.

Natasha Monteith:
Yeah. So I was in a [inaudible 00:04:32] I grad for NIU back in, oh gosh, what was that? Summer 2022, 2023 something that ends.

Paul Brown:
Ish.

Natasha Monteith:
In the 20s. And I actually was currently in my doctoral program, but wanted to supplement the GA work I was doing because I still, obviously I’m doing this fellowship. I still have a deep passion for student affairs and the work that’s happening here. And so got the great opportunity to work with the phenomenal folks up there and came in and pretty much they were like, “You can do whatever you want to help make…”

Paul Brown:
That’s the best.

Natasha Monteith:
This better, right? I was like, “Oh my gosh, how beautiful.” But pretty much my focus when I came up there is they were updating their residential curriculum. They were switching over to being more of a campus-wide lens. And so lots of external voices involved. Things had already been pretty set by the time I got there in terms of learning outcomes. But the question became, what do we do for programming to help get to these outcomes? How do we create some semblance of consistency regardless of which residence hall you’re in? And then on the back end, how do we know that those activities actually led to the learning we’re expecting to have happened? So I helped build out the actual programming model that they were doing, which honestly, I looked into a lot of what Roompact had in terms of blog offerings.
We were thinking about intentional conversations. We were thinking about how do you do things on a building level versus floor level? What’s the purpose of a floor meeting? But then where I think a majority of my expertise got to shine there was then building out Roompact forms to help make the data useful on the backend. So it’s been a few years, but I remember sitting with Kelly who at that time was an assistant director. I don’t know what her role is anymore, but, “Hey, Kelly, you’re great. I miss you. Let’s grab coffee,” because I feel confident she’ll be watching this if I know Kelly.

Paul Brown:
Probably.

Natasha Monteith:
And so I remembered sitting with her and going through the questions that were happening for each intentional conversation and asking ourselves, what information is useful to an RA to know? What information is useful to a hall director to have? And then who are other people that might also one day need this for different things? So we thought about behavioral assessment teams. We thought about crisis intervention teams within housing themselves. The folks who on other sections of the campus might be like, “Okay, is there a roommate conflict happening here that came up and can we start tracking that?” And so thinking about those different audiences and then getting, because they used to have an intentional conversation log that had 20 questions in it. It was huge.

Paul Brown:
Yeah.

Natasha Monteith:
And the information they were getting wasn’t helping anybody make a decision or helping them get students connected to resources. So one of the big changes I remember us doing is they’d had an open-ended question that was like, “What resources did you recommend to this student?” Which in theory sounds great. You can write down anything that comes up. On the backend, if you have your VP of student affairs coming to you and asking you, “Hey, how many students have you referred to the career center?” Going through thousands of open-ended questions is not a fun time. So what we did instead is turn that into a checkbox question. And it actually did two things at once. One, made it so they didn’t have to go through and clean all that data whenever somebody was asking them how many referrals were made to different org sections of the university.
But two, it also served as a reminder to RAs as they were filling out the form of like, “Oh, they were telling me about their worries about summer internships in this conversation. I didn’t remember to mention that they should probably go to the career center. And now that I’m filling out this form, I’m not going to check it right now, but I’m going to send them a quick message on GroupMe, let them know, “Hey, you should go do this.” And now I’m going to check that box, say I made the referral, and it goes forward. So it ended up being weirdly a programmatic piece along with a data collection piece. But that’s the one that I remember specifically being like, “Kelly, this is the hill I will die on. We are not going to leave this question open-ended. I will not let it happen.” But there’s a lot of… Yeah.

Paul Brown:
Well, it’s so interesting you bring that up because we released a care book which delves into a lot of the stuff that actually we talked about amongst some other things related to it. And one of the things in working with schools in our software is I see a lot of different variations of forms and I see those some kinds of things of well-intentioned people, “Oh, we need to ask this and we need to ask that.” And I’ve tried to get better at giving guidance of things like the longer the form that you create, the less likely that your student staff are going to complete it well and thoroughly because it becomes a real chore. So you have to learn to be like, “What are the key things that we need to know and what are the things? Yeah, that’d be nice, but we need to let that go because we can’t have our staff spending all of their hours filling out a form. What types of questions do we ask?”
An open-ended text box is a little bit more intimidating than check boxes. So what’s appropriate for a checkbox because that might be a better tool for that. And where is it appropriate to ask something that’s open-ended or what? How specific do we get versus give flexibility for the person to answer? What are we doing with? I mean, there’s such a tight nexus of those kinds of conversations in there of like, “Are we clear on what our goals are? And does this reflect what our goals are? And what does this look like in practice?” I find a lot of schools struggle with that piece right there. They know they should do assessment. They know the general types of things that they would want in that, but how do you hone it down to really the important things and that it’s practical and workable and suitable for the staff that are enacting it and things like that?

Natasha Monteith:
Yeah. I’ll tell you what I do right now. Before we ever even think about creating any collection tool at all, I force every staff member I work with to tell me exactly how they’re going to use it. What decisions are going to be impacted based on this tool? How are you going to use it on the backend? Because if we don’t have a plan for how we are going to use this, we aren’t going to collect it. That’s my stance. And I think in housing, I think the problem becomes that sometimes we think of all of the different ways we could use something that we get a little bit of decision fatigue and also a bit of analysis paralysis that, “I could think of a thousand ways we could do this so I can’t figure out the best way to do it, therefore I might not even make a choice.”
And I’m of the opinion that doing something okay and learning from it and being able to iterate on it is better than not doing it at all. So I always say, “Do it messy and then we can fix it the next time around.” Because at least then we have some information about what’s working, what’s not working to be able to make a good choice. So I think back to when I was at UNC Greensboro, what we did up at NIU mirrored a lot of what we did at UNC Greensboro, right? We do what we’ve learned, we recreate what we’ve figured out has worked well. And in particular, I remember RAs coming to us because I was on the curriculum team. What were those? Committees. There we go. I was like, it wasn’t a team. It wasn’t a part of my formal job title. But they had come to us and asked, “Hey, could we please have an extension on this round of intentional conversations?”
And we went, “Okay, let’s go back.” At that point, we had been doing this process for over a year. We were like, “Let’s go back and look at the year’s worth of data and see if extending out this deadline has an impact.” And we were able to go back and be like, actually, because in our connections forms, that’s what we called them because it was huge connections. We had like, “Hey, what day did your conversation happen on?” And then in the metadata that was included from the impact form, we knew what day it was submitted on. So we were tracking that too of like, “How long since the conversation did we get the information?” And what we learned is that RAs didn’t need more time to do the conversations. They needed more time to put their forms together.

Paul Brown:
That was going to be my guess.

Natasha Monteith:
Yes. Right.

Paul Brown:
That was going to be my guess.

Natasha Monteith:
Exactly. And so we were like, “Hey, we’re not going to extend out this deadline,” because these deadlines were also shared at the beginning of the year. We were like, “Y’all don’t need more time for the conversation, but what we can do is we can ask that your hall directors save time in your staff meeting that week and turn it into a working time.” And that was an aha moment for me as a supervisor because I was like, “Okay, cool. We can start setting it where 15 minutes for every staff call, we’re going to have that just be time for you to put in your connections.” Putting and saving that time instead of expecting these students who are also managing so many other responsibilities, I was like, “How can we build in a system for you to the things we’re already expecting you to be at to help you complete your tasks instead of just continuing to send you out into the ether because we’re seeing it doesn’t work?”

Paul Brown:
What a great little strategy because, I mean, I see it when I’m meeting with schools and we do a proactive annual check-in. I do notice in the statistics that, and it’s true to my experience when I worked in Residence Life of, “Here’s the deadline, when do all the forms come in that night before the deadline,” even though they occurred for things earlier, which is of course not what we would hope that they would do, right? Because now you’re reflecting on something that happened a week ago and your data might not be as good or we missed a window or things like that. But building in that time also probably for coaching of, “Hey, here’s the types of stuff that’s useful in this. Here’s what we’re looking for. He’s what we’re not looking for. You don’t have to do it all.” And helping staff train through that. I don’t know that a lot of schools I’ve ever heard of actually dedicate a time of like, “Let’s do that in this space beyond the initial training or maybe a one shot follow-up training.”

Natasha Monteith:
Yeah. And I will say something we also did in our fall training that I point to as being like, “Oh my gosh, any university who’s doing intentional connections should add this into their intentional connections training,” is we had a dummy form in Roompact that mirrored what the first round of intentional connections were going to be. And so part of your training was filling out that dummy form because you had a practice session where you were doing it with a coworker, but then they had to go in and track the intentional conversation in our dummy form. And then it was my job as their supervisor by the end of the first week of classes to provide written feedback to them of like, “Here, before you go off and do this for your 35 residents, let me share the changes you need to make so that way you don’t have to go back and change 35 responses later on.”
And we did the same… I think a lot of people do that with… Oh my gosh, what in the world are they called? Where you’re behind closed doors. There we go. I was like, “Where you’re pretending that there’s a flood and you have to go write an incident report.” I know a lot of universities did that, but we just took that model and applied it to intentional conversations because we knew how important that data was to us. So why in the world wouldn’t we give them the opportunity to practice in a low stakes environment so that way I didn’t have to chase them down for better information later on? And I noticed we didn’t do that my first year, but my second year we did at UNCG. And the way we got information that second year just was so much more concrete to the point where I was able to start setting aside an hour before every RA’s one-on-one to go through all of their intentional connections.
And I was like, “I know everything I need to know about your residents right now to feel good and comfortable coming into this conversation.” But I think it’s difficult sometimes to want to prioritize and be able to prioritize that kind of work. And so it becomes a balancing act at points too of being able-

Paul Brown:
I’ve seen a lot of schools struggle with that in terms of supervisors who are busy or who are not completely brought along on the journey of this is why it’s important, this is how we’re going to use it. And it becomes compliance, tracking compliance, not the meaning.

Natasha Monteith:
Yeah.

Paul Brown:
And that’s where I think it starts to break down. And then people are like, “Oh, intentional conversations don’t work.” And it’s like, “Well, they can. Maybe it’s the way that you’re approaching it or the way that the staff embraces it or doesn’t embrace it or things like that that are actually having an impact.”

Natasha Monteith:
Yeah. And I think it also has a level too of like, “How flexible is your curriculum? There’s some universities I’ve heard of that are staunched at we set our curriculum in exactly what we’re doing by the beginning before the school year starts and we’re not changing. We’re going to run the curriculum the way it’s written. And in those cases, I’m like, “Intentional conversations feel really almost pointless because part of what they’re able to do is help you figure out where are we missing marks and how can we adjust an approach that’s coming up in a month or two to better meet our students where they’re at and what they actually need.”
So I think about how we’d had a conversation scheduled with the academic support office on campus to come in and talk about studying strategies, going into midterms. And we found out that’s actually not the problem. We have so many students. So I had a lot of athletes in my section of the hall and we found out their big problem was actually trying to figure out like, “How do I use this one hour that I have in a day to actually get ahead? I’ve got one hour, what can I do in one hour to get me moving instead of telling me to break things down?” And they’re like, “I get that, but I only have so many hours in a day. How do I make the most of short periods of time?” And so we were able to learn that, figure it out and completely reframe that conversation we were going to have with this academic office. But if we had been told, “Hey, you can’t make any adjustments, this is a curriculum as it stands,” we couldn’t use the information we were getting.

Paul Brown:
Right. Right. That flexibility I think… I mean, there are benefits to being standardized and saying this is important. And it’s an art, right? I feel like sometimes I might work with someone and be like, “Where’s the line?” And I’m like, “Well, I don’t want to tell you I don’t know where the line is or you need to figure that out because that feels like a non-answer.” But there definitely is a, let’s not go that far because then we’re losing too much of these other things. It does matter on a case-by-case basis.

Natasha Monteith:
Yeah, definitely. And I think that’s where it gets into what are the core aspects of your program that you want to guarantee somebody leaves with? And that can’t be 12 different things.

Paul Brown:
Yeah.

Natasha Monteith:
You cannot have everything be a top tier priority because then nothing is. So you got to pick those two or three that are non-negotiables for your program, and then the rest you can flex, that’s where your teams get to bring in their expertise and their knowledge. But that’s my opinion on flexibility and the necessity of it.

Paul Brown:
Well, one of the things I wanted to ask you, because this kind of flows with the stuff we’ve been talking about. Sometimes I work with schools that are very good information collectors, but then that information sits. So oftentimes when I meet with a school, it’s hard for me to get insights into, how are you using this data since I’m not on the campus? So I rely on usage data. How many forms did you fill out? How many times did you run these reports? Things like that, which give me clues to that kind of thing. So sometimes I can tell I’m like, “Oh, it looks like they’re collecting a lot of data, but the actions that I’m seeing are not the actions of someone that’s then using that data.”
How do you think it is schools start to bridge that gap of just being really good data collectors to collecting that data for a useful purpose, integrating into practice, making real time improvements as opposed to waiting until the end of a year for an annual report, dumping it in, and then moving on? How can that become part of that routine? Because I think that’s where a lot of schools I see struggle is they’re leaving that on the table either because they’re too busy, they don’t know how, there’s no one taking leadership into making that happen.

Natasha Monteith:
Yeah. What will say is that’s not unique to university campuses. It is a problem plaguing anybody working with data in just about any space that we always joke about like, “How do we make sure these reports aren’t just something that live on a shelf somewhere that are collecting dust,” and we pat ourselves on the back and say, “Good job, we did it upward and onward.” I can speak to the practices I’ve put into place that I think have been game changers. One is having a plan for analysis because that was something I always caught myself being like, “Okay, I’m being inundated with all of this information. How do I even move that from information into a finding?” And once you do that, what I will say is it feels like a jerk of a project because I would recommend blocking out two to three hours. We’re only on a Friday afternoon, take yourself to your campus, Starbucks or Dunkin or whatever it is on your campus.
Put on some headphones and sit down with a document and just list out all the information you already have. And then how can you start pulling pieces of that information together? So I’ll give the example that right now I do a lot for our training teams. So we have all of these questions that are broken down by, did people leave our trainings with a new skill or technique? Did people find that they had enough time to process and reflect during the calls? All of these great quant points, which oftentimes a lot of our data comes in quant points, but then you also have these qualitative points. We’ll get to that in a second. But these quant points, they’re really helpful on their own, but they become more helpful when we put them in context. So I have this very intensive document that tells me, “I get this data point, but what do I do with it to make it useful for me?” So the first things I do with I learned one new skill.
I go through and I look at, what job does that person have? Do I see a difference depending on the job they have? So I think back to when I was at Central Michigan, we had resident advisors, but we also had multicultural advisors. That would be something really useful is I’ve got this question point. Is there a difference for these two different roles? Is there a difference between returning in first-year staff? Is there a difference between my staff who are in… When I was at UNCG, I had I think eight different buildings that fell into my residence hall. Is there a difference happening in those different halls? All of those are a way to analyze our data to have us start understanding, is there a pattern here that I’m not even seeing when I look at that big number? After that, I start to also look at change over time. So we’ll stay with this intentional conversation example.
I get response rates. I get to know how many people are getting completed. Am I seeing that number consistently staying the same? Are we seeing the same people every single time we’re doing intentional conversations? Or am I seeing that my RAs are getting different human beings? If we’re noticing that there’s 10 students who we have never talked to this entire year, that’s something my analysis plan should be cropping up for me so that way I know. And I know from all the cool things you’ve shown me on the back end of Roompact, there’s some really special things that you can do, if I’m remembering correctly, with the AI functions even to be like, “Hey, are there students who we haven’t met with? Who haven’t been completed?”
So all this to say, you can have this great analysis plan and you can play around with the AI functions that exist in Roompact where you don’t have to be able to do all the cool Excel functions I do to make things happen. You can use the tools in the platform. But I would create a plan of how do I move from something raw to something I can use? Part of what I keep in mind while I’m doing that is I ask myself, what’s the core aspects of my job? So if I’m a hall director, my core aspects are making sure my RAs are doing well as people and students, but they’re also completing the functions of their job and then to make sure our students are safe and taken care of. If those are my two things, what’s always going to go through my head is, I need to make sure first and foremost, we’re getting ahold of everybody, but also what do they need to be taken care of?
And that usually comes from a qualitative response. Qualitative analysis, again, could be its whole other call, Paul.

Paul Brown:
Yeah.

Natasha Monteith:
What I tell folks who are listening to this is look for patterns. That’s really all you’re going to be looking for as you’re reading through responses right now is find patterns. Those patterns will point you to where you need to go. And obviously they’re not something you’re going to write up in a research article, but those patterns should be enough for you to bring it to your assistant director to have a conversation about where we go next of, “Hey, I’m seeing so many students are mentioning in their intentional conversations that they’re stressing out about summer internships. What do we do about that? What feels like a good choice? Where can we flex programming that’s coming up to fit? Is this something I do? Is this something career services does?” Because all those answers are going to depend on your campus and your culture.
But all of your information should be pointing you to a conversation to be had. And that’s all it is. That is telling us where we can start having deeper conversations because no form will ever give you every piece of information to make the best decision that’s ever happened and that you’ll never have to come back and rethink three, four months from now. It’s supposed to be a snapshot, a snapshot of a moment and we can only expect so much out of a snapshot of a single moment.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. And one thing I also encourage schools to do, and I’m trying to think of ways that we can add to or adjust the software to make this easier for folks, is where do you build in those touch points? If you make it routine, so let’s say it’s been a hot minute since I was last supervising RA level student staff type positions. But am I in every one-on-one touching on, “Hey, let’s pull up what answers you gave to the intentional conversations forum just to look through it, talk through the students,” things like that, use that for coaching with that, but also like, “Hey, this student looks like they’re struggling. Let’s talk about them. Do I need to refer them on to a different team, someone to look out for them?” Things like that.
Building those in at routine points or at the top of our staff meeting agenda, here’s a quick little thermometer about how we’re doing in terms of doing the conversations or the frequencies of the issues that are coming up that puts it top of mind in front of staff so that it closes that assessment loop to use that.

Natasha Monteith:
Yes.

Paul Brown:
And makes people ask other questions that, “Oh, I see it every week, so it’s reinforcing this is important. This is why you do it. Here’s what we know. Can we ask further questions?” I think it’s all about building in those touch points that are reminders, maybe little nags that go, “Hey, don’t forget. I mean, you’re really busy, but remember this is here and you update it every week, so it’s going to keep pushing it into your brain. Pay attention to it a little bit.”

Natasha Monteith:
I mean, I’ll name that back when I was supervising, I had at the top of every agenda was a connections check-in. It was, this is where we’re at. This is the goal based on where we’re at in the quarter or whatever it was. And I also, I loved a little treat of if we’re keeping up with our work accordingly, I had candy I brought and I handed it out to every RA who met the goal. I was like, “Kudos.” And it wasn’t a huge candy bar. It was just a moment of acknowledgement of like, “Hey, I see you doing this work. I see that you’re valuing the thing I value. Let me honor you in this space. And it’s okay too, if you end up waiting until the end of the section to drop all your stuff in, that’s fine. I’m not telling you how to do your job. I just need it by the deadline, but I’m going to incentivize you doing it as we go.”

Paul Brown:
Well, I mean, that is now the name of the episode. The end of the episode will be Assessment Candy.

Natasha Monteith:
Honestly, it’s the worst part about now being a remote employee is I can’t just hand out candy when people do the things that I would like for them to do and just give them a little Pavlov’s dog moment.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. No, that’s great. Well, as we’re getting towards the end here, if you were to break it down and say, “Here’s, in my opinion, the lowest hanging fruit with the easiest actions to take for a residence life department to get better about institutionalizing assessment,” what would that be?

Natasha Monteith:
Build it into your meetings. All y’all housing folks have so many meetings so often carve out a 10-minute block to just talk about, how are y’all using data? Because I think that’s something that gets missed, right? We don’t create space for people to even talk in their space about how they’re doing it. I’m saying all this as somebody who’s not on your campus, right? But there’s probably somebody down the hall from you who’s already doing this really, really well and just doesn’t have the space to even let you know. So I think about that as create and carve out time to let people share how they’re doing it, but also to voice like, “Hey, I’m struggling to figure out how to,” because you can’t change a culture if you don’t even know what the problems are.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. Yeah.

Natasha Monteith:
But I’m of the opinion that conversation fixes a lot. I think there’s always just so much expertise already sitting around a table that we just don’t recognize.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. Yeah.

Natasha Monteith:
So look at your people, give them space.

Paul Brown:
Yeah, creating that space. I think that’s a great strategy and space in all its forms. I mean, that could be time space in a meeting, that could be physical space on a meeting agenda or something that you look at every week. I mean, there’s a lot of different ways of creating space and reminders and putting it top of mind.

Natasha Monteith:
What I’ll also name is I am positive there was somebody out there who rolled their eyes when I said that and went, “My team would never speak up. I don’t know why you’re even suggesting that.” Make a schedule, tell people you’re going to have 10 minutes next week and have it be a thing where every week there’s somebody who’s going to be coming in telling you about a way they’re using data to make their program better. Think about your team. If you need to tell them and give them time to prep, do it. If your team’s really driving, don’t do that. But just in case you were somebody who rolled your eyes, you can also take the idea and give it more structure if that’s what your team needs.

Paul Brown:
I went to, it was Texas State I went to, and I did a follow-up training on our software and they had already been using it for a while. So when that’s the case, I’m usually focusing on more advanced level things and stuff like that. And one of the things they did, which is very smart, and I suggest other schools do it too, is I did the training, and then immediately afterwards for an hour, they had a workshop and they said, “Okay, given everything that you’ve just learned about, dig into our data about your area, your building, your whatever it may be, see what you can find. Come together.” We want to give you just a mini presentation to the larger group of like, “Now that I learned these things and the different strategies, what am I finding about my community?” And I thought it was such an easy, simple strategy.
One, to allow people to apply things that they learned, learn from others, “Oh, they did that. I should have done that. That would’ve made sense.” Created space in a busy residence life professionals day where if you’re going from one thing to the next, to have a little dedicated space to like, “Ah, let’s take a step back, look at this. Oh, I did this. Oh, I can integrate it into what I’m doing so that it’s not really more work. It’s just a different way of working or an automatic thing that happens for me.” It was just a really smart strategy that I encourage a lot of campuses to do is take a day, allow staff to dig in there, give them the space to do that, the time to do that.

Natasha Monteith:
100%. Exactly. And if you don’t practice the skills, the skills won’t get better, right? If you keep doing things the exact same way you’re doing them right now, what’s coming isn’t going to change. So if you want to see change, you have to do something different to get there.

Paul Brown:
Yep. Yeah. That’s it. Well, thank you, Natasha. I really appreciate you spending some time with me. I always like talking and nerding out with you.

Natasha Monteith:
Always. Always.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. And we’re excited to have you at the conference in October and folks can look out for… Natasha’s doing a webinar for us as well as some blog posts. There’s some really great content coming forward from her. And so look out for that and we’ll see y’all on the next episode of Roompact’s ResEdChat. Bye everyone.