ResEdChat Ep 46: Designing Effective Behind Closed Doors (BCDs)

Paul Brown:
All right. Welcome back to Roompact’s ResEdChat where we provide a platform to talk about interesting topics in the field of residence life and college student housing. And I am pleased today to actually have a guest that comes from my undergraduate alma mater, which is SUNY Geneseo in upstate New York. So I’m both nerding out about what we’re going to be talking about today, but also because I have an all-star guest from obviously the best institution in the country joining me today.
Today we’re going to dig into Behind Closed Doors and training RAs for crisis and emergency response situations. So to give you a little bit of background before I introduce my guests here about where we got to this place, one of our bloggers, Natasha, wrote a post on Behind Closed Doors. Should we even still be doing it? What is the point of it? Why are we doing it? How can we do this in a constructive way? And she believes that we can do it in a constructive way, but oftentimes the way that we design it and the way that we put it into our training might not really hit the outcomes that we wish and potentially even do harm. So how can we do it well?
And so, I happened to be in the Residence Life Facebook group posted that article. Rose came in and said, “Hey, I’ve actually done some research on this as part of my dissertation and have done some things on this to great effect.” And that kind of clued me into, “Hey, maybe we need to get this person on the podcast to talk about these things because I think it’s a hot topic and something that almost all institutions do, but I don’t know that all institutions necessarily do well.” So that’s kind of where we enter into today. But Rose, do you want to introduce yourself and tell us about yourself?

Rose Waples:
Absolutely. Hi everyone. I’m super excited to be on the show today. My name is Dr. Rose Waples. As Paul said, I work at the State University of New York at Geneseo. I had worked at the University of Rochester, which is where I was also completing my doctorate program pre COVID and did a lot of research. My dissertation topic is actually crisis and conflict management and RA training, which involved all parts of those aspects of training up to and including Behind Closed Doors. So that’s why I’m really excited to talk about that with everybody today because there’s a lot of research not necessarily on Behind Closed Doors specifically, but that kind of leads us in that direction and can help us when it comes to new adults and training them on crisis and conflict management.

Paul Brown:
Yeah, that’s great. I noticed when actually I was reading your dissertation ahead of this episode, I was like, “When did she do this?” And I was like, “Oh, 2019. She got it in right before COVID.” So, great timing because gone through a lot of dissertations that happened in that timeframe, and of course it threw everything a little bit out of whack, like how are you going to take a look at RA training that’s happening in a weird virtual COVID year? That would’ve been a mess. So I’m glad you got that in before the world was turned upside down.

Rose Waples:
Me as well. And I got a great opportunity to actually implement some changes also before everything got shut down too. So certainly students are different, things are different, but I think a lot of the underlying research is still going to show through that it’s the best thing.

Paul Brown:
Yeah, yeah. Even better that you got to actually then turn around and use that before everything went a little haywire. But let’s talk about this dissertation a little bit. Can you just give folks maybe a little bit of an overview of like, “Here’s my questions. Here’s what I was trying to research. Here’s what I was trying to understand, what motivated me and going in this direction”?

Rose Waples:
Absolutely. So I’m definitely a practitioner at heart. I went the EDD route. I went the accelerated EDD route I wanted to practice, and that was a lot of how my program was designed, was program evaluation or decision-making analyses. I went the program evaluation route obviously and was really looking for how this is going to show up in practice. How is this going to work? I want to do it. And rarely do we do this level of in-depth evaluation on a program, certainly a program like this.
So I was looking for, number one, something that was going to hold my attention for that long because I’ve always been someone, and I’m sure there’s a lot of people out there that are like, “What am I going to spend a year plus writing that I’m not going to just hate by the end of it?” I think either way you’re done at the end even if you love it.

Paul Brown:
Sure.

Rose Waples:
Before we start, I was talking to Paul about, yeah, I probably didn’t really love talking about it for a year, year and a half after, and now I’m back. Now I’m like, Yeah, this is great” after I had time to settle. But that-

Paul Brown:
I’m smiling because I know how true that can be having gone through it myself.

Rose Waples:
So you’re just like, “Yeah, I’m done. I’d like to not talk about it for a while.” And now I’m all about it again. It really was such a demanding time. Again, it was an accelerated program. I wrote for three semesters, including a summer and was done. It was hard to do that. And I had a lot of different data points, which everyone else around me was like, “What are you doing? How are you going to do that?” But I needed all of those data points. And the institution that I was working at was really receptive to me using that in our program. So that was something that I was really excited about. Not only can I research it, but I can do it. I can get data points from what we’re doing now, do some research, and then next August you’re going to hand it to me, that’s really exciting. I can actually see if what I did makes sense in the real world and that’s going to come out the other end.
So that was everything I could have wanted. There was a lot of different things that I was interested in, but actually having that kind of turnaround really appealed to me of like, “Okay, I’m going to take this August. I’m in my program already. I’m researching. I’m going to ask them to do a couple extra data collection points for me, and then next August I get to do it again,” that sounds great.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. Well, so what was that research question? What did you hone in on? What’d you want to find out?

Rose Waples:
Absolutely. So originally I went in and I really did just want to focus on Behind Closed Doors. My advisors not super familiar with Res Life, but had also indicated, “Hey, that’s maybe a little too narrow. Let’s broaden it up a little bit.” So as we all know, Behind Closed Doors is an amalgamation of a lot of trainings. “This is the endpoint, this is the capstone, or it should be, of everything that you’ve learned, go ahead and try it.” So I did kind of broaden my scope to all of the crisis and conflict management that exists in RA training. So we’re talking about incident report writing, we’re talking about Title IX, we’re talking about suicidal ideation, we’re talking about those care conversations, mediations even, all of these things. Anything that has any relevance, how does that go? What is the point of those things? Do they match up with the research? Are we training them well enough to be able to handle what we’re asking them to do? And that was kind of the underlying basis for the questions that I had come up with, and there was a lot that goes into that.
I think that we all kind of know that those are some of the things that we hope don’t happen as frequently, but we spend a lot of time training. And there are folks that we spend 3, 4, 5 hours doing a fire safety training or an active shooter training or a suicidal ideation training. Again, you’re hoping that that doesn’t come up, but in the event that it does, you feel like you need to spend a lot of your training component on that. And then we do practice. So that’s kind of the basis for what I went in there with. So when I’m talking about crisis and conflict management, we’re talking about everything from roommate mediations to suicidal ideation and everything in between.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. Yeah. I guess as you were talking, I was like, “Well, we never actually said what Behind Closed Doors is,” right? Because I assume that if you work in residence life, you know what that means, right? It is so universally used that you would always have been exposed to it in some kind of way. But I also don’t know that I’ve ever read research as true, “This is how it should be. This is how it should be done well.” Or even not at the research level, any just documentation of it. I think it’s almost like lore that is passed down like, “Oh, well, this is always done. Or I did it in this is my institution. This is how it looks and this is how it goes.” And it always involves returners playing actors for new RAs who are engaging in these scenarios and kind of figuring things out as they go.
One of the things that showed up in your dissertation that kind of struck me, which I saw as particularly too true was I think your student participants pointed this out. It showed up in a few different places that sometimes Behind Closed Doors is actually where people learn how to do the crisis response, not the place where they practiced what they previously learned in training. In other words, that, “We’re going to throw you into this Behind Closed Doors,” having never talked about how to counsel a student through suicidal ideation. And the training is happening in the BCD space itself, not, “We’re going to train you how to do that. Now you get to practice it later in the BCD space.” And that seemed to be a big disconnect and one that resonated with me that I’ve seen a lot. Can you talk about some of the ways that maybe Behind Closed Doors as structured in some ways kind of misses the mark on what it should be or could be or ideally would be?

Rose Waples:
Absolutely. It’s like a test that you weren’t able to prepare for. It’s almost like you’re going back to the interview for some of these folks and it’s just a test and you already have the job. It’s funny how that happens. I think, Paul, how it happens is that people sit there and you’re right, “This is how we’ve always done it.” We have these scenarios. They’re the basics, they’re the common ones, whatever people are saying, and then folks maybe work backwards. So they’re like, “Oh, we’re seeing this new thing. It’s happening a lot. Let’s see how our RAs can handle it. We’ll throw it into BCDs.” Okay, well where’s the training session that taught you how to handle that first?
And it doesn’t have to be another three hours on X topic because as we all know, who has that? Who has that time? The time is shrinking, the budgets are shrinking. And that’s something that people are constantly fighting over, and I think that that’s why the conversation happens as well is “Is BCDs the best way to do things?” And I think it depends on your goal. If the goal is practice of what they’ve learned, then absolutely. If the goal is to teach it to them, then no. My answer would be no, they shouldn’t be…

Paul Brown:
It’s almost like a-

Rose Waples:
[inaudible 00:11:39] thought.

Paul Brown:
Yeah, it’s almost like experimenting with your staff. “Okay, we’re just going to throw you in here as an experiment to see how you go through this.”

Rose Waples:
In front of what’s probably a double size residence hall room with 15 to 20 people standing in it with you. That doesn’t sound stressful at all.

Paul Brown:
No. No. Not at all. Of course not. Yeah, I mean, that to me is probably the biggest issue other than overacting by your returners or not creating realistic scenarios. But can you talk about that? What are some of the things where Behind Closed Doors goes wrong? Or what are some of the practices that we’ve maybe commonly done and not done well? What kind of showed up for you in your research on that?

Rose Waples:
Absolutely. I think that what you see a lot is, number one, what we talked about, you just kind of using that as the training. A new scenario, no information, no policy procedure on it. Or maybe you could say, “Well, it was in the RA manual.” But again, almost through training, but have you given them time to sit down and read that? Was that an expectation? How long is it? Is that reasonable? Are they retaining that? What else have you thrown at them in the last 5, 6, 7 days that they’re also not retaining because that’s just information overload? So that can be a lot of it.
I think a lot of people focus… Behind Closed Doors is a logistical nightmare. Let’s just say that. It’s a lot. “How am I going to have all my staff in one place? Do I have enough to have the right group size to have a group leader with each of them? Where are the professional staff? I don’t have enough professional staff to do.” It’s a lot. So I think people tend to focus on that, and that causes to make the logistics work, to make it so that everyone has those things. Maybe you’re missing out on some of the things that need to happen. Is there someone stationed in the room? How long did you spend on actor training? Whose expectation was it to let the actors know what was and was not appropriate? Is it their AC or RD? Was it the director who was pushing that that what’s appropriate? Do you have safeguards for students who may be triggered in those situations? Have you even talked to the students about how to self-care in a situation that’s going to be triggering?
I think people go a lot of different ways on that in our field still. It’s like, “Well, you’re going to have to do this, so figure it out” or, “We’re just going to pull you out of the situation because it’s a trigger for you.” And then when it actually happens to them, they’re doing it for real and they’re unable to get out of that situation because you never taught them how to get out of that situation safely while still passing off the student safely. There’s a lot of things that we’re not thinking a lot about, and I think because we spend so much time thinking about how the logistics are going to work. And it is a challenge for sure.

Paul Brown:
Yeah, I mean that’s a reality, right? Training at least at most institutions, the way it’s currently designed is a crunch. And coordinating Behind Closed Doors is usually done as a big monolithic, “We’re going to do the morning” or a big chunk takes time. And if you’re focused on all that, you can lose the intentionality really fast because the logistics suddenly become the main focus and not the, “What is the learning? What are we actually trying to do here?” It can get lost pretty easily, which is I think reasonable. I understand why that happens there.

Rose Waples:
And I think just Behind Closed Doors is a culmination of a lot of things in training, it should also be a culmination of a lot of how you’ve set up your crisis and conflict management. Like we just talked about, training in general can be overloaded. This is usually at the end. They’re getting session after session after session just information packed into their brain. Who can retain a lot of that, right? You can do the same thing. So I’m sitting here saying, “Well, you have to train your students on how to handle incidents.” If you’re going to stand up there in front of them for two hours and just say, “If this happens, this is what you do. If this happens, this is what you do,” is that also going to be retained enough for them to be able to practice it? So trying to scaffold things out for them, trying to introduce those things slowly, that’s kind of what you have to do.
And again, when you’re just trying to throw different chunks of time at people, “Here’s a chunk of time for Title IX. Here’s a chunk of time for counseling services. Here’s my chunk of time where I’m going to teach them how to handle the more Res Life guest policy type stuff. Here’s a chunk of time for conduct,” you’re kind of thinking that way, you’re chunking it out and assuming everything’s getting hit, are those things scaffolded? Do they lead into each other? Do they tie in? Do they build on skills? That can be a longer part of training. I think a lot of people also get to the point where they’re planning training, “Okay, maybe we’re starting in April. Maybe we’re starting in June planning training. Maybe we’re starting now, starting planning training.” And it’s because you’re like, “Well, the campus partners aren’t going to talk to me yet, so I can’t start.” But there’s a lot of things that you’re doing internally that you could kind of plan out and scaffold.
And yes, there are real challenges of, “Well, fire safety can only do this time because of these restrictions, or you have to have backup plans for these things.” But if you can start and kind of scaffold those things intentionally instead of just putting people in blocks of time, that can also help your students build on instead of, “Oh, you’re spending all of your Title IX talking about how to do incident reports, but actually you haven’t even talked about incident reports yet because conduct’s tomorrow.” Those can be very confusing, especially for new staff members.

Paul Brown:
Yeah, yeah. Actually, when I was reading your dissertation, there were a few pieces I kind of copied and pasted it out because I wanted to remember them. I think you’re hitting on, there was another person, Virginia, who I actually know pretty well. She did some stuff related to training and curriculum development of RA training, and you quoted her in your dissertation that said, “Most RA educators develop their training programs as a series of workshops presented by content experts rather than a comprehensive, intentionally designed learning experience.” And to me, what you just described is exactly that, like of slotting in the pieces, but not, “How does this fit together as a whole? How are we bringing these staff members on a journey where we’re going to build pieces before we build on the next and kind of do that scaffolding kind of experience that can sometimes very easily get lost in that training program? and then Behind Closed Doors ends up just being another one of those chunks that’s sometimes disassociated from the things that happen before it.” But that’s the key.
I know that you were able to do this research and then you could make some changes and do some things and put it into practice. Can you tell us a little bit about what you’ve done since doing this research and what you found success with that if I’m at a campus and I’m listening to this, I’m looking for ideas of how do I need to rethink this, what would Rose’s recommendations be of things that seem to work or mindsets that seem to set you up better for success?

Rose Waples:
Absolutely. I think that there’s a lot of pieces to that.

Rose Waples:
Some folks might be overwhelmed by what I’m going to say, but they’re all important. Obviously a lot of it starts in that kind of professional staff training. Or if you have grads, you could start there. Whoever’s going to be that primary core group of the teachers, the instructors in this, and starting with them and saying, “Okay, this is how the day’s going to go. Let’s go over everything. Here’s who’s been assigned each thing.”
One of the things that we did, we were lucky enough to have a good amount of professional area coordinators, a good amount of graduate RD level type folks that each scenario for the two different, we did a level one and a level two, a little bit easier, a little bit more challenging that each of those had a lead who was an area coordinator. So okay, you have the party scene. And the lead was one of our associate directors and the secondary was one of the RDs. There were two rooms happening at each time. So the lead was in one room and the secondary was in another room. That was kind of one of the great ways that that functioned, was there was a lead person who was a little bit higher up, a little bit more invested, had a little bit more in the process.
And even if the RD was new that year and just got this in training, they had someone that they could rely on to make sure that the debrief was going to go well what they were going to do, and maybe they practiced together. They trained their actors together even though they were in different rooms, so there was. That AD was there for that training and could help train the other actors. Trying to, again, even scaffold it for sometimes your new staff members can be helpful in those situations. So that can start as early as staff training when you’re talking about how that’s going to happen.
The second thing that was important for me was to see how is this actually going to work and is it going to work. So we did pre and post-tests. The pre-test was before any training took place, even online training. It was their first module and online training was a pre-test that they had to do. And really what we were asking was two things, like how do you feel your knowledge is around this particular topic already and how do you feel like your confidence is about your ability to handle this particular topic? We asked those questions where, again, before any training took place, and then after.
We did see a good increase even in the returners. So I think that that shows that it does work when you do it this way, is that not just their knowledge. Even if they came in thinking and you’re like, “Yeah, that’s not.” They’re not at a four out of five already. But they’re the ones giving themselves that rating. So even if they move themselves from a four to a five, they’re measuring like, “Oh, I do actually know a lot more now. I am going to give myself a better score.” So that does actually show something.
The confidence indicator I also think was really telling on how well you think you’re going to be able to handle the situation in the real world. How do you feel like you’re going to do because having especially a new staff member come in and be like, “I wasn’t at all before and now I am,” that says a lot about your procedure. So building that in.
I talked a little bit about online training. I’m a big proponent for online training. I think that it’s really important for scaffolding. Again, if you go back to, I may have a week with you. Maybe two weeks if I’m lucky. Usually somewhere in between that period and I’m just going to spend 9:00 to 5:00 jamming you with as much information as I can, no one is retaining anything at that point. Maybe they know where their notes are for that particular section when the time comes, hopefully. But that’s hard. So if you can do any measure of online training. And I actually did a significant amount where we were doing. So, online training, I wrote down a couple of the modules that I had. Intro to Duty: A video of What Rounds Look Like. Is it three minutes? It’s not like a whole set of rounds. It’s you’re going down the hallway, you’re looking for this. This is how general people with lockouts and things like that.
A Behind Closed Doors intro was one of the things that we did. So that was, number one, an opportunity for me to get two more scenarios in. You always want more scenarios. Yes, they’re not acting them, but they’re watching other people act them. I took the summer RAs, we went into an empty double room and they were both the actors and the confronters. I took our RD that was working with the summer staff and she did the debrief and I filmed it. It was the whole thing. This was exactly how it was going to look. We did two scenarios that way and filmed them. It took about as long for them to watch as two scenarios and BCDs were going to be to participate in. So it was a little bit of a longer thing, but they knew exactly what they were getting themselves into and they got an opportunity to watch not only the scenario, but the debrief and how the debrief was going to go so that that wasn’t necessarily scary.
Sometimes folks react to the acting and sometimes our students can react to the answering questions on the debrief as the scary part, right? So it kind of gives them both ends of that.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. I think it demystifies the process, right?

Rose Waples:
It does. It does. “What’s it going to look like?” And you’re getting that from your returners who are maybe trying to scare you. “No, you know what it looks like. I’ve shown you.”

Paul Brown:
Yeah. Yeah. And I mean there was even a time, so when I worked at American and I was assistant director there, I was pinch hitting for an empty RD position, which is a common thing right now especially. I knew I was going to walk into a Behind Closed Doors room where it was the party scenario. So I was like, “There’s going to be overacting in this.” And I thought, “I don’t want to put the RAs through this that I’m working with, so I’m going to do the session and they can critique how I approach this because I didn’t want to put them in a situation where I couldn’t control levels of overacting.”
And I think that idea of even just watching one with a returning RA or someone who can do it “more or less correctly” or really well is also just a valuable tool. So I love the fact that you recorded that and used that as a, “Well, let’s give you an idea of what it could look like, what it should look like, what it would look like, and what we’re going for here.” Great way to kind of lower anxiety around it.

Rose Waples:
Absolutely. And we know that our students across the board have higher levels of anxiety now. So the more that you can do for that either before, during, or after, is going to help. And again, this is pre COVID, but I still think that that stuff stands up when it comes to lowering anxiety in particular, giving them as much as you can. We did a lot of our fire safety stuff online. We were really only doing in-person fire safety activities during our training. So a lot of the like, even watching live birds and stuff like that was online, prohibited items, training code of conduct, policy basics. Those were all things that we did online. So that’s definitely a couple hours.
I don’t know that you need to do all of those things, but getting that early helps, especially if you can get some of the basic conduct principles in there will help with the handling of things later when you get to in-person. So that was all done before they stepped foot and moved back in. They were doing it over the summer. A lot of that was drip contented out, so you got something the first week and then a couple weeks later there was more available and those types of things. I know that some folks have challenges around that, but if you can do anything with online training, I do think it helps. Even if you can provide a manual, sometimes before that will help if you give them expectations for things that they should read before. But those are just some easy ways before you even get into in person to start.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. Well, because one thing, there are things that online teaching and training does well and does not do well. And I think the one area where it does well is if it’s knowledge level tasks, I need you to know these things, I think online is very good for that. Experiential things like what we’re talking about with Behind Closed Doors, a lot harder to do that in a control format.

Paul Brown:
Right?

Rose Waples:
Yes.

Paul Brown:
But if you can offload the knowledge tasks and use the in-person space for the strengths that in-person space allows, which would be the experience, all the better, right?

Rose Waples:
Yeah. And we certainly tried even some experiential things. We use some branching scenario software to try to do a basic care conversation with a student. It went well. Certainly in person does better. But even if you can give them a little taste of that, “Okay. I have to decide what I’m asking.” Any little taste you can give them is good. But you’re right, it’s the knowledge component. Really when I started to see we have to train them in less time because we have less time and we have less budget to do it in, online training has been a savior for that because we can spend our online training stuff doing knowledge and our in-person time doing experiential.
Some people ask, “Does Behind Closed Doors work? Is it something that we should be doing?” And if anyone wants to read my dissertation, role-play training works for new adults. Adults in general. Adult learning theory says role-play training works for that age group. It’s something that I believe we should be doing more of. It just has to be done sensitively and as well as you can, especially when you’re dealing with those crisis and conflict components. I don’t think anyone would maybe disagree with the fact that we could talk about programming all day long, but sitting down and actually planning programs in training helps get you a little further along. It’s kind of a very similar thing. Doing it helps, helps them learn, helps them understand, helps them work with the content a little bit better, but having the knowledge before is a great start.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, let me throw you a curveball question because you got me thinking about this now, right?

Rose Waples:
Sure.

Paul Brown:
Usually in most places where I’ve ever seen BCDs, I mentioned it’s kind of a monolithic thing, like, “We are now doing the BCD session and it is three hours and we’re going to rotate through and go through all the scenarios.” Do you think that should be split up? Should it be a little bit of training, a BCD scenario? A little bit of training, a B… Is it best to have it happen in a large chunk at typically the end of training? Or should that be broken up and it should be spread throughout? Would that be actually a better pedagogical way to approach it than as kind of this monolithic graduation kind of sort of activity, which I think what it most often is?

Rose Waples:
I think it loosens the anxiety around it, especially when it’s not… Because also think about the physicality and accessibility of standing and walking through residence halls all day long, standing in a group. Sometimes you can sit on the floor. Not everybody can do that. I’ve had RAs even with broken limbs before going through BCDs and a rolling chair that we’re bringing around with them. It can be very physical day as well.
The actors. Think about the actors. It can be challenging for actors to be in an emotional scenario for hours, even if they’re the best actor you have and the best area that you have. That can be really hard for you to have somebody in a suicidal ideation for four hours. That’s exhausting and horrible. So giving them the opportunity.
I think I’ve always liked it somewhat near the end, maybe a morning and then either an afternoon off, an afternoon doing bulletin boards, an afternoon doing something else, and then maybe coming back and doing either another morning or maybe an afternoon on the second day. But if you can kind of incorporate role play training all along, honestly, I think that that’s your best bet. It doesn’t have to be BCDs. It can just be, “Here’s the next role play that we’re doing and it’s crisis and conflict management based. But we’ve already done the fire safety emergency procedure stuff. We already did more like what to do in a program. No one shows up to your program one, we’ve already done those. We’ve already done this tabletop, this thing, and this is just the next one.” I think that lessens the anxiety significantly.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. Yeah, that’s great. I think experiential learning is probably one of the keys to this whole thing, whether it’s in the format of a BCD or something similar with role play or things like that. It’s the way to go.

Rose Waples:
And then we kind of move into the in-person training, right? You have your typical slotted in workshop scenarios. Yes, you’re probably still going to need to do those. Certainly there are some folks who need to have time with your staff, obviously.
But when it came to BCDs, here’s what I was doing. We did a protocol training. So we made… Again, I talked about this before. This is kind of a culmination of your procedures as well. So what we had gotten to the point of was we had a one page, double-sided, these are different scenarios. Level 1 are the pretty easy basic ones, they all have a similar response. Level 2, little bit more all have a similar response. Level 3, similar response. Level 4, similar responses. So whether that response is just writing an incident report or calling the person on duty or calling university police first, those types of responses. And that’s how they were grouped is, “If this is happening, here’s what you do. You just go over and everything in this box has the same response.” Yes, maybe you’re talking differently to people, you’re having different conversations, but your protocol and procedure, who you need to call, who you need to notify, what you need to write is the same for the section.
So that was a scenario where I was handing that out and I was kind of going over those. A lot of the… We’re talking level 1s are general noise violations, lockouts, things like that. And then we’re talking level 4 was like there was a bomb threat or an active shooter or a student death, like something significantly. And then there were levels in between. We would kind go over that. “Okay, do folks kind of know what they would do for each one of these things? Do people understand what I mean when I say incident report or call the person on duty?” And we would go over those.
We also had a little cheat sheet about the do’s and don’ts of incidents. Things like, “Don’t touch anybody. Don’t touch anything. Always ask for ID.” Those types of basic do’s and don’ts, a very easy session. I actually did that one myself that year with all the new Ras. While I was with the new Ras, everybody else was with the returners and they were doing their after training. And we talked about before we had the scaffolded process. So everyone who was in the party session, we had the AD and the RD and they were in two different rooms, they were all together. We also had the director come in at the start of that and lay down expectations and talk about some of those maybe hazing behaviors that were inappropriate. Talk about the fact that there was going to be someone stationed in the room with them for their entire period of time. So that’s how we set it up.
So our AD that I was talking about, he would sit in his party room for that entire time. And if there was something that needed to be tweaked, they had a few minutes in between. “John, you went a little bit too far this time. I need you to pull it back.” Or they would stop a scenario in the moment and redirect if they needed to. The other staff that we had, which we used a lot of our grad staff for but we didn’t have enough, so we did have to pull some third year RAs, some really senior RAs, we picked them very specifically, these were folks that we knew could handle this task, were group leaders. So they led the groups around.
They had an opening script that was written that was supposed to kind of set the tone before they go up. They did introductions. We had all of that kind of laid out for them. “This is how you’re going to get to know your group pretty quick, do a little boundary breaking. You set the scene, and then you’re going to go up and you have to be at your first room by this time. And here’s your schedule.”
They had a rubric for each person that was in their group that they were filling out as they went. And the in-room person also had a rubric that they were doing for each person that handled each situation. So that person only got to see a snapshot, but it was also usually a higher level staff member, an area coordinator, an RD, an AED even in some cases. Sometimes campus partners. We did have some of our care folks, some of our counseling folks, some of our Title IX folks, some of our conduct folks in some of those higher level rooms in our higher level day. They would be giving rubrics as that snapshot, “This is how this person did.” And then the group leader, the nice part about their rubric was while it was the same, they could show over time. “So this person, this was their first situation. They were really nervous, they didn’t do great. Here’s the things they didn’t do great on.”
By their third scenario, “Here’s where we are and I’m super impressed with X, Y, and Z.” They were able to kind of show over time how that person was improving, which ended up being a lot more helpful to the supervisor because you just got a stack of rubrics from the people in the room that we had to all separate before. You don’t necessarily know which ones they handled first, which ones they handled last. Was it just the scenario that they’re struggling with or was it just because it was their first one? Those types of things, or stuff that you didn’t quite know before. So being able to do that, but made it a lot easier for the staff member to give feedback.
And then we of course did… A lot of people do the one room where you actually are writing an incident report from that room and you do that after. So then after Behind Closed Doors, you would have a one-on-one with your supervisor a couple days later, or maybe it was your first one-on-one where you could go over the rubrics, you could go over the incident report. “Here’s the things you need to fix by your incident report. Let’s talk about how Behind Closed Doors went,” all of those things.
The only other thing that we built in was that kind of trigger help because we do know that that’s so common. So we did a few things. A lot of people do the scenarios on the door and they have to read like, “You’re just walking down the hallway and it’s on duty and it’s this time.” And that’s how you get, or sometimes you get a little more. We actually did label triggers on those so that if the group leader could say, “Who’s next?”, part of their intro was getting to know if anyone was particularly concerned about certain things. We also delegated a staff member to be out in the hallways where we were doing stuff so that if someone had to leave, the group leader and the in-person ones weren’t the ones who had to leave. Someone else could leave and still get assistance from a staff member, still be kind of counseled through whatever needed to happen, but the other folks could still continue their work. And we had kind of a safety net for anyone who did have to leave a room and continue on later.
And then part of our overall debrief was, “Hey, everyone has something that they have a struggle dealing with.” Like I talked about before, “How do you get yourself to a safe spot and as gently as possible hand off the person to someone else to be able to get the help that they need so they don’t feel like you’re like, ‘I can’t handle you. I have to go,’ but also you’re taking care of yourself?” And we talked about that very really. That was also a good time for the staff to kind of self-identify to each other if they wanted to, that they might need help with certain things if it came up on their floor.
And then their co-RAs. If they just wanted share it with their co-RAs or they wanted to share it with their whole staff, they had the ability to do that if they wanted to so that they could just come up to someone and say, “It’s one of those things.” Or maybe they have a code word and the other person would just take over and know and they didn’t have to say anything else, and the person could go and do their self-care routine at that point.

Paul Brown:
Wow. Chock-full of tips.

Rose Waples:
A lot.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. I mean that’s why it’s your dissertation, right?

Rose Waples:
Yeah.

Paul Brown:
As we reach towards the end of our time here, is there any kind of final thought that you wanted to leave people with? Something where you’re like, “This is your guiding light when you go through this,” or “Here’s the one thing I think is most important for you to keep in mind”?

Rose Waples:
Yeah, I think that it’s the intentionality component. So we think about everything. Think about the students who you’re worried about having anxiety. Think about how you’re debriefing. So a lot of people, we’ll go back to the party scenario, a lot of times that is where some of our issues happen. We see some overacting, we see some things. How have you laid out what the actors are supposed to be doing? Have you assigned each actor to a specific thing and then maybe they have the ability to switch with the permission of the in-room professional staff? How are you debriefing that?
The one year that I sat in the party room, I specifically started off my debrief by saying, “I want you to know that you did great. In that scenario, I also want you to know that this is actually three different things put together and there’s a reason for that. And here’s what the reason is. You are rarely going to have all three of these things at once, but we wanted to see how you were going to prioritize because prioritizing is really important when there is a lot going on.” So if you start off by saying that, a lot of them are like, “Okay, great.” They’re not leaving thinking, “Oh my God, every [inaudible 00:41:14] incident’s going to be like this. This is horrible. I can’t do this. What did I get myself into?” That’s not how you want them to leave feeling. And even if the situation did go well and how it was supposed to, sometimes they do leave feeling like that.
So even thinking through how you’re debriefing, are there things that you need to set up in the debrief or say to help someone through that situation? Or even outside. Is there something that the group leader needs to set up or say before choosing who goes into that situation? Are they just choosing? Do they know a little bit about the people? Even how you’re putting folks into groups. Are you putting them based on staff? Are you just putting them randomly? What’s the best way for your organization to do that? Sitting down and thinking through each one of those steps and not just doing it the way that it’s always been done. That’s something that we hear a lot in the field. “Well, it’s always been done that way.”
And BCDs is so overwhelming, I think, professionally for staff who are like, “Okay, here’s training.” And you take a look at all these schedules and all these things and you’re like, “Oh my God, I have so much. I just have to plug and play all these RAs, and that’s already too much. I can’t possibly think about redoing it.” Take a step back and try to figure out like, “What’s going well? What am I seeing?” I think sometimes in our field, the first reaction is, “BCDs isn’t going well, so let’s scrap it and do something else next year.” Is that the answer? Because we do know things like experiential training works for new students. And not necessarily BCDs as a best practice, but are there better practices within BCDs that we can work through and make our process better? There’s no such thing as a best practice, but there are better practices, and we learn more about those as we go.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. Yeah. Iterating that is probably the best way to go because I don’t know that anyone… And students change, right?

Rose Waples:
Yeah.

Paul Brown:
New issues emerge, things like that. It’s something that it’s maybe not the whole enterprise that you need to completely throw out, but you need to constantly be iterating and improving that through time.

Rose Waples:
Absolutely.

Paul Brown:
Well, thank you so much for joining us today. I think there’s just a ton here. I mean, we could go on forever on it probably as well. For those of you who are interested in this topic, we will include some additional resources in the show notes. So if you want to dig into this a little bit deeper and talk about it with your own staffs or your other professionals, then you know that there’s the opportunity to do so. Thank you so much, Rose. I appreciate you spending some time with us. And we will see everyone on the next episode of Roompact’s ResEdChat. Thanks everyone.

Rose Waples:
Thanks.