Residence life and education, residential curriculum and curricular approaches, student housing, and technology.
This post is part of a three-part series on starting a supervisory relationship in residence life. Following a chronological timeline, this series is broken up into three parts:The Beginning: Staff Performance Begins with YouThe Middle: A ResLife Supervisor's Guide: Managing Performance Through InquiryThe End: Preparing for Performance Evaluations The end of the year has arrived... Continue Reading →
The "Pro-D in a Bag" series provides all the details you'll need to create a professional development opportunity for your staff around a given topic. Each facilitation guide outlines free and open source videos to watch, articles to read, quizzes and inventories to complete, and suggested questions for discussion and activities. You can facilitate this... Continue Reading →
This post is part of a three-part series on starting a supervisory relationship in residence life. Following a chronological timeline, this series is broken up into three parts:The Beginning: Staff Performance Begins with YouThe Middle: A ResLife Supervisor's Guide: Managing Performance Through InquiryThe End: Preparing for Performance Evaluations In the previous segment, we explored how... Continue Reading →
The "Pro-D in a Bag" series provides all the details you'll need to create a professional development opportunity for your staff around a given topic. Each facilitation guide outlines free and open source videos to watch, articles to read, quizzes and inventories to complete, and suggested questions for discussion and activities. You can facilitate this... Continue Reading →
This post is part of a three-part series on starting a supervisory relationship in residence life. Following a chronological timeline, this series is broken up into three parts:The Beginning: Staff Performance Begins with YouThe Middle: A ResLife Supervisor's Guide: Managing Performance Through InquiryThe End: Preparing for Performance Evaluations They say beauty is in the eye... Continue Reading →
The "Pro-D in a Bag" series provides all the details you'll need to create a professional development opportunity for your staff around a given topic. Each facilitation guide outlines free and open source videos to watch, articles to read, quizzes and inventories to complete, and suggested questions for discussion and activities. You can facilitate this... Continue Reading →
In this episode of Roompact's ResEdChat, Paul returns to the hosting chair and chats with Delton Gordon and Luke Hams of Arkansas Tech University about changes they made this year to re-imagine their student staff positions. This included rethinking RA and student staff roles, how they compensated the student employees, and how to make the positions more flexible to meet the needs of a modern student lifestyle.
It's job search season! For those of us with graduate assistants, and perhaps those with undergrads interested in the field (see my previous blog post!) these staff are beginning to plan out their job searches. The professional job search and the graduate school search have some significant differences and individuals going through these processes need... Continue Reading →
In this episode of Roompact's ResEdChat, we talk with Kate about her dissertation research that examines the causes and impacts of Residence Life staff attrition. She also shares strategies to help better retain staff members on your team. If you have a topic idea or want to engage in the community discussion, use the hashtag #ResEdChat.
You can’t scroll through LinkedIn or even TikTok nowadays without seeing articles or discussions about "quiet quitting" and "acting your wage." By now, most people know what these terms mean and how they differ slightly, but ultimately both mean: “Do the job you were hired for and only during the hours, you’re being paid to... Continue Reading →
As the new academic year begins for almost all of us in housing and residence life, we are wrapping up the training and onboarding of new staff members. It seems that summers continue to feel shorter, leaving our batteries half charged as we embark on a new academic year. Our residents are arriving not knowing the... Continue Reading →
Congrats on the new position! Along with starting a new job - even if it’s at your same institution - comes with all those “adulting” things like retirement, health benefits, registering a vehicle, etc. and it can be an IYKYK situation sometimes. As a long-time recruiter and onboarder, here are some things I make sure... Continue Reading →
This is a five part series based on best practices for supervisors. Each of these principles on their own can achieve great leadership, but all five will ensure it.We have all had that one boss that we’ve loved. The one that seemed to truly care about you, the person, as much as they cared about... Continue Reading →
We’ve heard the attributions of another year covered in the cloak of COVID-19’s shadow–arresting the development of our residents, limiting academic engagement and success, and continuing to exhaust the efforts of our residential life staff members. Though there have been many types of efforts at recognizing these vital staff within a university, I offer an... Continue Reading →
Like clockwork, every spring brings about Resident Assistant hiring season! It can be a hectic, but also a fun time to be in residence life. Seeing the optimism and hope of new RA candidates can be energizing, but the grind of interviewing can also be exhausting. If you get overwhelmed, take a minute to regroup... Continue Reading →
Student Affairs offices, particularly those within residence life and education, typically see a steady turn over of professionals year-to-year. When building and maintaining a curriculum, it can sometimes be a challenge to onboard new staff members who (1) may not be familiar with the model at all or (2) are not familiar with your institution's... Continue Reading →
Roompact is more than just software, we also providing training and consulting services. In the course of developing materials for these services, we've identified a number of high quality videos that address topics related to higher education and student learning. The following are some of our favorites that make excellent conversation starters for any professional... Continue Reading →
Transitioning to a residential curriculum is as much about educational plan development as it is about organizational change. The reason for this is that curricular approaches are often paradigmatic change--change predicated on an entirely new set of premises. In other words, rather than just rearranging the furniture in the room, you're changing the entire room... Continue Reading →
