An Email to my Staff

I was feeling rather inspirational today and sent one of my RA staffs the following email:


Hello, Village Team –

I’m super excited to welcome you all back to campus in a little over two weeks. Summer has quickly escaped us, whether we like it or not. I’m anticipating the start of another year because of the excitement of new beginnings. I hope you all feel the same way.

New beginnings provide us all for the opportunity to do great things this coming school year. I hope you will all think about what great things you hope to accomplish this coming school year. 

I’m very excited for our staff, because I think this Village staff is very dynamic. For the three returners on staff, I know what each of you is capable of, and I can’t wait to see what sort of leadership you’ll bring to the table. For the three new RAs on staff, I look forward to your energy, enthusiasm, and ideas. History has shown me that new RAs can provide a great deal of energy and enthusiasm.

I want to issue you a few challenges as we count down the days to the start of the school year. Please take some time and think about each of these challenges:

• I challenge you to reach out to your residents BEFORE the start of the school year, whether it’s using Facebook, email, or even Postcard or snail mail. Your first-year students will especially appreciate it.
• I challenge you to think about the word “community”… What does this word mean to you, and how will you create a positive, engaging community in your building?
• I challenge you to come up with new ideas. If you are to know anything about me, it is that I love new ideas, and I love when people think outside the box. (“Because that’s how we’ve always done it…” is not a phrase in my vocabulary.)
• I challenge you to have fun over these next two weeks. I promise you’ll enjoy RA training, but there’s going to be a lot of work involved with it.

Any questions, concerns, or thoughts? Be sure to contact me.

-Brian

Bridging the Out-of-Class Gaps between Faculty & Students

Continuing my reflection and recap on various workshops I attended at the ACUHO-I conference, today I’m writing about Anna Schmidt and Tom Ellett’s presentation, “Faculty Perspectives on Residential Community Development”. Anna and Tom are from New York University.

My interest in this workshop stems from the fact that I think we could be doing a better job of connecting faculty with students in the residence halls at my own institution. I was quite impressed to see what NYU is doing to help faculty make connections with students outside the classroom.

At NYU, there is a large presence of faculty in the residence halls. Faculty Fellows-in-Residence are faculty who live in the residence halls, are provided with meal plans, and get a small stipend. In exchange, they are asked to have a presence in the hall and work with the residence life staff in the building. Faculty Affiliates are faculty who do not live in the halls, but are asked to do 1 to 2 programs a month in the residence hall. In exchange, they are provided with a stipend.

Both of these positions, as NYU describes on their own website, are “an ongoing University effort to create intimate ‘learning communities’ for our students within the residence halls as a way to integrate students’ academic experiences with their residential lives’”.

I am impressed at the level of commitment NYU has made to the Faculty Fellow and Affiliate positions. Not only have they made it a priority, but they have provided the resources to make this a success. In response, the faculty have bought into it. According to Tom and Anna, faculty are lining up to be Faculty Fellows and Affiliates.

Faculty Fellows and Affiliates at NYU have found it easier to interact with students in lounge areas and share in common, everyday experiences. The simple presence of faculty in the residence halls has helped break down a lot of barriers that exist between faculty and students. Students have begun to see faculty as human beings... It's really important for our students to see faculty as human beings.

At NYU, it appears that several exciting things have occurred as a result of the faculty fellow/affiliate program:

1. Residence Life staff members are now working hand-in-hand with faculty members to implement educational programming in the halls. (Faculty tend to rely on RAs to promote and advertise their programming efforts.)
2. Students have become more engaged as a result of the faculty-student dialogue that occurs out of class. 
3. Faculty have characterized the community within their classrooms as stronger than that which exists within students’ residence halls. (Part of this may be because the syllabus assures that all students in the class are going through the same experience at the same time.
4. Many faculty have stated that their teaching has improved as a result of their interactions with students outside the classroom.
5. The RA has continued to be the primary contributor to developing community within the residence hall.

The fact of the matter is this – many of us working in residence life don’t believe we have solid faculty involvement programs such as this on our campuses. Count me as one of them. 

Although all of our campuses might not have the resources to provide housing for faculty to live on campus or significant programming funds and stipends; we can still do something. The smallest steps can help us bridge the gaps that might exist on our campuses between students and faculty.

My short term plan is to reach out to the faculty on our campus and extend an invitation to them – an invitation to come into the residence halls; to engage with our students; and to break down some of the barriers that might exist between faculty and student. As NYU’s efforts have shown, the results can be mind-boggling.

Anna and Tom’s presentation has challenged me to think about how we are providing the bridges for faculty to interact with students in the residence hall.

How are you bridging the gaps that exist between faculty and students?

Going Beyond Retention and GPA in Learning Communities

Last week, I had the privilege of attending the annual ACUHO-I conference in New Orleans. This was my first time attending the conference, and I walked away with so much valuable information.  Plus, the networking opportunities were plentiful. I had the opportunity to meet some great colleagues and finally put faces to the names I see every day on Twitter.
 

I was very impressed with the content of the workshops I attended at the conference. And for this reason, over the next week, I want to spotlight each of the workshops I attended at the conference. It is my hope that this will help me reflect on the workshops and also share what I learned.

“Going beyond Retention and GPA in Learning Communities – How to Use a Matrix to Take Your Program to the Next Level” was a workshop presented by Kathleen Campbell and Jessica Flake of James Madison University. The program was well-delivered and helped me think about assessment in a new light.

I enjoyed hearing all about James Madison’s learning communities, primarily because it is a topic of discussion here at my own institution.

JMU has 8 different learning communities, six of which are major-related and two of which are interest-related. These communities are largely faculty-driven. Kathleen and Jessica explained that their residence life office doesn’t pull a learning community together unless the faculty in that area expresses an interest in doing so. JMU’s residence life office provides $500 in financial support to each of these learning communities. Faculty members will often use this money to take students on trips or to fund other programming.

What was interesting about this presentation was hearing all about their department’s efforts to assess what these learning communities were accomplishing. At JMU, retention rates from the first to second year are already quite high; therefore, other ways to assess the effectiveness of the learning communities were needed.

Kathleen and Jessica explained their use of a matrix to help pull their assessment efforts together. They helped me think of assessment in a new light, a more simplistic light. In their own words, “It’s not rocket science,” even though so many of us are intimidated at the mere mention of the word “assessment”. They spoke briefly about the importance of making sure our assessment efforts are efficient and effective.

The matrix that Kathleen and Jessica are using has effectively helped them set objectives, implement programs to accomplish those objectives, and then assess whether or not they worked. The matrix is pictured below.

This simple matrix has helped JMU develop their learning communities into more positive, intentional communities. And that is the ultimate goal. The simplicity of this matrix allows it to be applied in various capacities. I think we can all use it to make sure we are accomplishing what we intend to accomplish.

I want to thank Kathleen and Jessica for presenting at the ACUHO-I conference and inspiring me to assess the programs I am responsible for.  After all, assessment isn’t so bad, is it?

Video Tours are Important to Incoming Students

As a housing & residence life professional, the summer months provide me with many opportunities to engage with new, incoming students. These students are excited and anxious to live away from home for the very first time. And they come with a plethora of questions.

Many of these questions are about the physical setup of the rooms within the hall. A few years ago, we discovered that many students were coming to our campus having never actually seen the residence hall rooms they had been assigned to. Clearly, this was a problem that we needed to address.

Upon the suggestion of one of our Resident Assistants, we embarked on a journey of creating virtual tours of each of our five residential areas.  This RA (Mr. Sergey Blyakhor) was the director, videographer, and driving force behind the video tours that were produced for our department. Although the videos are pretty amateur, they have been instrumental tools for us.

f your residence life department doesn’t already have video tours of the residence halls, I would highly recommend them. As you will see in our video below, the video tour doesn’t need to be a very polished one and laborious process. It can be a project for some of your student leaders in the residence hall community or students in your media/video department. No matter who is taking the lead on the project, I would recommend working closely with your admissions office in the production of such a video.

Nowadays it appears that everyone is on Facebook and Twitter, including residence life departments from all of our institutions. These are great venues for us to share video tours of our halls.

I spent some time recently on YouTube viewing some pretty high-quality video tours of residence halls from campuses across the country. While there are many, these are two of my favorites. They are much more polished and professional than the video I posted above:

University of Chicago South Campus

University of Denver Nagel Hall

Do you have video tours for your residence halls?  Share links in the comment section.

Bidding Farewell to a Graduate Resident Director

My office at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg is home to two graduate students. These graduate students are resident directors enrolled in the local Student Affairs in Higher Education (SAHE) graduate program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP).

The partnership between our office and IUP is a great one.  We are able to provide practical experience for these two students, and they have their education paid for in exchange. As an alum of the IUP SAHE program, I can attest that the plethora of assistantships offered is one of the great features of the student affairs master’s program at IUP.

Because our two grad assistants are on a rotating schedule, we welcome a new graduate resident director each year; but that means we lose one, too.

Yesterday was Ms. LaNighta Sales’ last day here at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg. She earned her master’s degree earlier this month and has already been offered a job at Miami University of Ohio. She is moving on to “bigger and better” things.

LaNighta (center) with her staff at the end-of-year banquet

Oftentimes we hear about the lessons our supervisors have taught us. However, I am turning the tables today and using this post to talk about a few of the lessons LaNighta has taught me, her supervisor.

LaNighta taught me that professionalism is important. The way you speak, act, and carry yourself does not go unnoticed by those around you. At the end of the day, professionalism will earn you respect.

LaNighta taught me the importance of being genuine. Those around you will appreciate it. Your colleagues, students, and other staff will find it easy to warm up to you if you’re genuine. LaNighta’s staff of RAs and her residents absolutely loved her, and I credit it to the fact that she is one of the most genuine people I’ve ever worked with. Being genuine will also earn you respect.

And, finally, LaNighta taught me the importance of having priorities in life. LaNighta is a woman who knows what she wants out of life. She knows where she wants to be professionally and personally, and I can appreciate that.

Everyone will miss having LaNighta in the office. She’ll go on and prosper, I’m sure of it. She dreams way too big to do otherwise. 

And so this post is dedicated to LaNighta. Thanks for teaching an old dog a few new lessons. Best wishes for a prosperous future.



"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." - Maya Angelou

"There isn’t anyone you couldn’t love once you’ve heard their story." -Mary Lou Kownacki 

"Everyone has a story; you must go seek it out."

And so it is.

Last Thursday, during our professional staff retreat, we established this mantra.  A simple statement that will not only guide our practice over the coming year, but a statement that will help our Resident Assistants understand the importance of getting to know their residents’ stories.

We discussed at length the importance of building positive communities within our halls. After all, we know what kind of impact of a positive community can have on each student living within it.

We acknowledged that it’s hard work getting to know peoples' stories. You can’t just sit back and wait for students to share their stories with you. Oftentimes, you have to “go seek them out” by reaching out to others, even when it's sometimes uncomfortable or difficult for you.  We want to push ourselves and our Resident Assistants to go seek out the stories of the students we struggle to connect with the most.

I’m hoping that this focus by our department on getting to know our students’ stories will help us build better relationships and create stronger, more positive communities.

Imagine the impact this simple question can have… “What’s your story?”

I’m challenging myself to learn the stories of my students this coming year. I will be challenging my Resident Assistants to do the same.

I challenge you to learn your students’ stories, too.