Talking Stick - September/October 2011 - 45

a tremendous amount of time, though. Connecting these efforts to class projects sometimes helps out. How are you dealing with the challenge of engaging the RAs actively during training? Hard to compete with those smart phones!

Jacque Bollinger: Behind Closed
Doors remains our highest rated training session for community advisors (and has every year since I have been in my position). So, it may be an oldie, but it certainly is a goodie in terms of what it teaches our staff members. We now have adapted Behind Closed Doors to another full afternoon of role plays just on mental health issues. Our counseling center staff joins us for the afternoon and rotates with the staffs. It seems we cannot spend enough time on the topic of mental health as our staff deal more and more with these issues. I also agree with Joe in that it is very tough to address all topics necessary during training, given the added complexity of issues that our staff encounter these days. We always have to ask ourselves the question “What do they absolutely need to know to open the hall?” If they don’t need it to open the halls, we add it to the curriculum of our ETC class (Extra Training Course). Community advisors are required to take ETC in their ﬁrst semester on the job. I do not believe our campus has tapped into technology as much as we could in terms of staff training. We have ideas and hear of wonderful examples from other institutions (Ithaca College, UW-LaCrosse), but we tend to run out of time or don’t have the computer/technology support to always make it happen. I do think it is going to become necessary for us to create a position within their department that will work alongside our residence hall directors when planning student staff training to design online curriculums and

other technology resources for the educational content we need to provide to the staff of this generation. This is not a skill we presently require our area directors and residence hall directors (RHDs) to have. While we have a very competent technology staff within our department, the majority of the staff are programmers and technicians, not educational curriculum program designers. Competing with smart phones? That’s tough. We do have one RHD who has a cell phone day care. Her staff put their cell phones in a basket before going into a training session, and the RHD keeps the basket with her. When they have a break and head to lunch, they can come and get their phone out of day care. This is an extreme example, but her staff totally bought into it. I am not sure other RHDs would get the same response. I do think the perceived need to entertain has required us to be creative. Over the years, I think we have adapted just about every game show to a training session of some kind. One year, instead of “Win Ben Stein’s Monday” they could “Win Jacque Bollinger’s Cookies.” For the most part, these sessions have been educational and fun; however, you can’t put that much work into every training session. I have found that while residence life staff understand the concepts of adult learning theory and how to engage staff in learning, our nonresidence life presenters often struggle and are much more comfortable with their PowerPoint and a clicker. It requires a lot of work on our part to get them to think and present differently.

training will be limited unless we ﬁgure out a way to develop that skill in other staff or are prepared to contract out. I agree with the ever-expanding list of “must cover” topics, some of which are helpful while others are political cover. Everyone wants a piece of our training time, and that makes it hard to craft an experience that has a natural ﬂow and logical progression. Throw in time for facility inspections, early arrival check-ins, and other housingrelated (but non-residence life) tasks – and the training time is gone. We have a class for ﬁrst-semester staff. It is currently under review to help it dovetail better with our fall training program. Do any of you measure training outcomes against a benchmark or set of learning objectives? We have done this but fell away from it; now we just ask “how did you like” and “what did you learn” questions. I’m feeling the need to get back to a more deﬁned assessment model in order to look at more than just satisfaction. As far as training engagement, as part of my welcome/kickoff each year, I remind them (pretty bluntly) about our expectations during training: no cell phones, stay awake, etc. Works for some, not as effective with others, but it provides a set of shared expectations if we need to have follow-up conversations later. We have really tried to ﬁnd engaging ways to teach, but it is a challenge. We bought “Turning Point” clickers this year to add to a number of sessions; we hope that will help, but it is old school to them as many of our faculty have used them for years.

Blattner: Interesting to consider
that housing and residential life departments are going to need IT staff that have some expertise in educational curriculum program design – a very expensive skill set. Without that resource, I think our ability to make major technological innovations in

D’aun Green: Yep, I agree. The
greatest challenge we face with training our student staff is to reach them in an understandable medium. The days of standing up in front of the group and lecturing are over. Doesn’t work in the classroom either. Our students don’t
SEPTEMBER + OCTOBER 2011

Talking Stick - September/October 2011

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