RA Training: Here We Go! [Webinar Recording]

Aisha Lee:
All right, hello everyone, thank you for joining us this Friday morning, very excited to see everyone. My name is Aisha, I use the pronouns she/her, and I’m from Kansas State University. I serve on the UMR Professional Development and Training Committee, with Nicole Wilburn, she/her, maybe give a wave, Nicole. She’ll be directing a lot of the technology functions that we’re doing this morning. And Kylie Rink as well is on our committee. Yeah, and so we’re very excited to bring you this webinar this morning. We are excited to bring back the tradition of webinars, this is coming back pre-COVID is when this was a pretty popular tradition of UMR, so we’re really excited to bring that back here. The committee chose the topic of RA training to reach a wide audience just because we know it’s a very challenging subject and a very challenging task to take on. So, fortunately, Amanda Perrin is here with us today to talk about training. So, here’s a little bit more about her presentation.
RA training is both a ton of fun and a ton of work. In this online session, Amanda hopes we can root in research around best practices in scaffolding and delivery methods that support content retention, and fun, and learning. Amanda will bring a few pieces of research and hope we can also enter in a communal sharing and learning space to share some awesome ideas with one another in the region in regards to RA training. So, with that, just a couple notes, this session will be recorded, you may have heard that when you joined, but we will be recording this to put on the UMR website. So, your name, or if you are showing your video will be visible in the recording.
Additionally, throughout this time, you all have been promoted to panelists, so that way we can see your faces, that’s a new function that we learned about. So, please just keep your microphones muted unless prompted by Amanda or other presenters. If you have any questions or if there’s something not working, you need access to be a panelist, please direct message Nicole or Aisha, or put it in the main chat and we’ll be able to help you on the side. And then, finally, we would like to thank our sponsor, Roompact, for making this happen. Yeah. So, with all of that, I am going to go ahead and turn it over to Amanda.

Amanda Perrin:
Thank you. I appreciate it. And thanks UMR for inviting me to do this, I’m a lady who read a book once, and so I get to be here with you today. So, as graciously mentioned, my name is Amanda Perrin, I use she/her pronouns, and I get to be the director of campus life at St. Catharine University. So, happy Friday morning, and you’ve decided to spend it with me and that’s not lost on me, I have a lot of gratitude for that. So, thank you. And as an extrovert, as I’ve said a couple of times, I love having your energy, so please feel free to use the chat or emojis, like I said, I’ll look a little bit like a pilot with all of these screens, and looking inside to side, so please continue to… I hope this is as engaging for you as I hope it is for me as well.
So, I’m in my 12th year in housing, right? Good, bad or otherwise, and I’m still getting to learn from you all as well. So, I hope that you’d be willing to share as much as you can, or want, or are hopeful to. And so, part of being the director of campus life means that I get to do residence life, orientation, and student-centered activities. So, what that means to me is there’s a ton of student leadership and student learning in all of that, and I’m still learning a lot about it, but I do like to root in theory. I’m kind of a theory geek, I was a bit raised at a R1, but now I’m in the CLA life, and I’m really, really appreciating leaning into a ton of relationships and centering my work around relationships. And so, while I’m still learning, please continue to add your input and your thoughts and ideas, and know that this is going to be a little theory-heavy research driven, as said in the intro.
But like I said, I’m no expert, I read a book once, I read a theory a couple of times, I’ve tried things, I’ve failed things, I’ve succeeded, and you’ll do the same, and I look forward to being in community together today. So, with that, I would love to know if you could throw in the chat or really unmute yourselves, right? We’re a small but mighty group today. Would love to hear from you, what are some things you hope that we get to talk about today? Because I have my agenda and would love to learn from you all. And I can try and adjust as we go along, and I’ll take some notes, but if you’re willing to throw in the chat and/or unmute yourself to share, what are some things that you would love to make sure that we talk about today, that’s on your mind as the month of August is right around the corner?

Nicole:
I’ll jump in, Amanda, Nicole from Kansas City, Kansas Community College. I would love to know more about trying to… There’s so much to cover, and figuring out what to cover and when to cover and how we can all fit it in, in the little time that we have so that our students actually retain the information.

Amanda Perrin:
Thanks for that. Brooks says, “Different ideas and promising practices for keeping students engaged and increasing student learning.” Awesome, check, we’ll do that. Other things? “Best way to get students really engaged in programming.” I feel like some of these things, if I figured that out, I’d be making millions of dollars. But we’re going to get there together, for sure. Thanks, Carly. Other things? Okay, great. Well, we will get mowing along, and if there’s things that come up, please feel free to continue to utilize the chat. Okay? So, first things first, I want to talk about what some of the outcomes are today. So, something that the UMR committee gave me, these are specifically from them, that they hope that we learned today, I think we’re going to really hit one and two, I feel like you’ve probably got some of that, and so we’re just going to graze on these.
So, the first is to reflect on previous experiences with student staff training. You all have taught someone something before, whether it’s been reflecting on past training or how you’ve actually trained and supported someone before, I am confident you all will get to reflect through some of the things we’ll talk about today. Outcome two, about introducing basic organizational strategies around when to do things and how, I imagine most of you, your RA training is… How many of you, if you could raise your hand, whether it be through a emoji or something, is your training already built? Right now you’re looking at tweaking more than you are building? Is anybody… Okay. Is anybody’s like, we’re at level one? We haven’t quite built it yet?
Okay. Okay, awesome. So, this is where I think, I made this assumption is like we’re two weeks out for some of us, three weeks out for some, but could be where we’re at. But outcome three and four is where I’ve decided to really root us in today. So, provide some research driven methods of information retention to incorporate throughout sessions, so how do students learn, and how are they going to actually retain all of this stuff? We do 10 days of training, or eight days of training, or whatever your training schedule is, how do we actually get them to remember these things that we’re trying to tell them, in a succinct manner? And so, there’s a couple of theoretical frameworks that we’re going to utilize today… Oops. To do that. And I just, hang on one second, I just lost my stuff. Give me one second.
So, we’re going to do this through these four major frameworks, and we’re going to do so in a social justice lens. When I talk about social justice, Dr. Leonard Taylor taught me something that I think is super wise. When we think about social justice work, I think about it in history, theory itself, which is what we’re going to cover here, but without thinking about those two pieces in the context of where you are, your department, your team, your division, we can’t actually do this successfully without thinking about the context in which we’re going to be doing things in. So, I want you to think about those three pieces as we’re going through all of these different frameworks. So, first, I have Switch is a book I love, love, love, love, around organizational change, they talk about how our brain works, how the brain science incorporates things, and it’s by Dan and Chip Heath. It was written, I think in 2005, the citations in here.
We’re going to cover Yosso’s Cultural Wealth Model, which really roots in thinking about BIPOC student transition into college. We’re leveraging this in orientation right now, but I think there’s some really great applied learning when it comes to RA training. Norman Webb’s Depth of Knowledge Levels, so this is really high in education systems and thinking about how we actually scaffold learning, or how we might take people to a next level when it comes to their learning and retention, which many of you seem interested in. And then we’re going to cover a little bit of Peter Block’s work in the book Community. He does a lot… His work, some people love, some people don’t. I love it, I think it’s got a cool hippie vibe to it, some people don’t quite jive with it, but I think that I’ve been able to pull out a couple things that a lot of people might jive with.
So, first we’re going to cover the Heath Brothers. When I think about RA training and what RA training is going to be like, I want to think of it as a nice peaceful bike ride, where things are just going well. But generally what it ends up with is I am getting sprayed in the face with water with all of these unexpected things that happen in August, and it’s just not as slick as I’d like it to be. So, the Heath brothers talk about how our brains work in the rider, the elephant, and the path. And so, we’re going to divide their book into these three different subsections. So, the rider is your source of truth, it’s the smallest part of our brains, and oftentimes we push this hard. We love to root ourselves in truth, or in fact, and sometimes we can tell in the world around us, it’s not the logic or the truth or the fact that really drives us, but we oftentimes will sit in this space of truth or fact, when it comes to how we want to try and motivate someone.
The rider, so the rider is our logic, and the elephant is our emotional brain, and that takes up the biggest part of our brain. And so, oftentimes we only use the rider to try and motivate someone to do something when the emotion or the persuasion is needed there for our elephant. So, if you can picture this rider on top of an elephant, or trying to get this elephant somewhere to go. It’d be like if my mom told me to clean my room and I have no motivation to do so because my organizational technique is fine the way it is. And it’s just not the way that she wants it, right? Without an additional motivation to do that. So, however, the rider does provide clarity and direction. So, we don’t want to completely forget about logic, obviously, because we can then make some clearer decisions when we think about the clarity, which is what we can oftentimes provide for our students.
So, without the rider, the emotional side will just continue to spin in their wheels, and just be an emotional circle. So, some things to consider with our rider. Self-control is limited, and I have a fun story about this. I am an Aldi shopper. Is anybody else an Aldi shopper? Maybe? Okay, great. Aldi is, I am now the woman who buys clothes at the grocery store. That is who I am, and I’m going to lean into that identity, and I’m going to be cool with it. And when I go to Aldi, I also have a four-year-old daughter, who’s the cutest thing since forever, and she loves her fruit and veggies. And when I walk in fruit and veggies fill the front of the store, and I’m deciding, okay, I want apples. Great. Which apples? Because there’s 12 varieties. I also know that I need a purple onion, and Aldi sells onions in bags, but I don’t need four purple onions, I just need one purple onion. So, I can go to Cub and get the purple onion, but it’s going to cost the same at Cub as it is at Aldi for the four.
If I need an extra, then I have the bag anyway. Oh, and then do we need green onions? I’m not sure. We could add it to the menu, they sound good today. Oh, and what about strawberries? I need to look at this carton. Is this good enough? I don’t know, they’re a little pink. So, I’m using a ton of logic in this first half of the store. And it’s not even the first half, it’s the first section of the store. And then I walk down, and I get my bread and my bagels, and by the time I get to the third aisle, and if you’ve been to Aldi, you understand what I mean, this Aldi aisle of shame, you know what I’m talking about? Where they’ve got this swing that’s made out of macrame, that looks so comfy, I have no place to put a swing. I have no… But I bought one. Yeah, it was only $15, right? My self-control has gone out the window.
And it’s a strategy, and it’s awful for me who’s trying not to impulse buy, but it’s because all of my self-control, that limited self-control, has now been used up, because it’s limited, my logic abilities is limited in our brains. So, when we’re out of self-control, I have to make too many decisions, we lack creativity and focus and our impulses will run wild. And so, when I think about that with our RAs, and how we’re structuring our training, when are we asking them to be the most creative? In my experience, what we’ve done is we’ve tried to scaffold, and I think that this is well-intended and from a great place, but we say in the morning, we’re going to teach you the content, and in the afternoon we’re going to tell you to be creative and come up with your plan.
By then, our students have already made a ton of decisions, they’re getting texts from their friends, they’ve decided what to wear in the morning, if they’re going to eat breakfast, if they’re not, what they’re going to have for lunch, what color pen should they use in the morning… What are the things that they’ve already had to do before we’ve asked them to be creative, and so they’re exhausted by the afternoon. And we hope that they have lots of energy, and we know that’s not going to happen, and part of that’s their logic has been used up, they’re done. And so, their ability to be creative and innovative just isn’t there, brain science would tell us that. So, let’s move into our emotion a little bit. That’s what I’m going to refer to as an elephant. Our brains work mostly in this elephant mode, this is our, when change efforts fail or when we’re implementing something new, it’s usually the emotion’s fault.
And anytime you take a six-ton animal and you put it against a human, the six-ton animal is going to win. If you’ve ever had a time where you’ve overeaten, or overslept, or procrastinated on something, short-term wins will outdo our long-term gains every time. So, for instance, we have white supremacy culture definitions interwoven within throughout us, thinking about sense of urgency, perfection, and so on, as part of where this elephant really takes over and has us make these decisions on things that we don’t want to have to actually implement. So, an example would be my supervisor telling me that I should take notes on staff in one-on-ones. And I’m like, I don’t want to, that’s going to take up too much time, too much… And I have to organize that, and sort that, I don’t want to do that.
The motivation though, where that logic comes in, would be the motivation is well then your evals at the end of the year are going to be much easier. So, we’re trying to take this emotion of, ugh, I don’t want to do this and trying to divert it with a different pathway. So, how do I get to steer my elephant? Right now, on July 26th is what today is, I am overwhelmed. Is anyone else feeling overwhelmed? I’m feeling overwhelmed. We’ve got orientation around the corner, we’ve never… By the way, this marriage happened a year ago, so we’ve never done orientation. I haven’t done orientation before. I’ve attended an orientation many times, never planned an orientation. So, our first orientation is in five weeks. Our enrollment’s way up, and we’re down like eight orientation leaders, I don’t know where I’m going to pull those from in eight days.
We’ve got orientation to plan, a move-in to plan, while there’s a new construction project that just popped up in our parking lot, where move-in happens. It’s just thing after thing after thing. RAs are coming in like a week, athlete move-in is happening around the corner, I’m a little overwhelmed, and so is the team. And so, when my emotion starts to take over, all I want to do is go to Starbucks and go grab a quick lavender latte that they don’t have anymore. That’s all I want to do, I just want to avoid. Because I become so overwhelmed, my emotion just starts spinning in circles and actually kicking off and starting something becomes really hard. So, I’m curious for you all, are there moments where you feel like your elephant wins out?
Are there things or tasks where your elephant wins every time, and you need something to kickstart you? If one or two people want open up your mics or throw in the chat one or two things that this is when my elephant for sure takes over at work. Or maybe I’m the only one. Navigating conflict? Oh, Brooks, that’s such a good one. Or I’d rather just go, I’m just going to go get my coffee, and we’ll take care of that in a little bit. Oh my gosh, that resonates deep in my stomach, I don’t want to talk about that, that was a little real. Anybody else? Anybody else? To-do list to get done before this month. Yeah, when tired and overwhelmed. Ah right? Yeah, when we’re not taking care of our full selves too sometimes, or when we don’t have capacity to do that? Absolutely. Thanks for sharing so I didn’t feel so alone. I’m so grateful. Okay, great.
Burned out, that happens more than I want it to. Yeah. Campus wide meetings, for sure. Absolutely. Yes. Thank you for helping me feel like I’m in community, I appreciate that. So, how do we label folks? So, you probably, I try and give myself grace, there are times when I don’t when it comes to that, I just feel like a failure, but that’s a whole nother session. How do we label other folks when we feel like that elephant is winning over? Lots of times we will label this person as crazy, we might label this person as they don’t care, or they’re skittish and only wanting the quickest gratification, when really it’s like maybe some self soothing needs to occur. And this usually pops up for us and for others, we’re full of reactions and untamed defaults and looking to be given some clear direction from our rider.
So, if somebody could say to us, can you just do these two things, or this one… Right? Instead of this giant overwhelming thing in front of us, what are some logical first steps we can take so we can start to really think about our elephant in a different way? One way that this plays out for me to the Ras… I know this is being recorded, but don’t tell anybody. Is when an RA comes to me and says, not usually to me, but when I hear, right? I need an exception to training. To coming to training. Has anybody gotten any of those this year? I’m watching the housing Facebook pages and I know that people are getting those right now. When somebody comes to me and says, I need an exception to miss training, and my first gut reaction, my default is, are you kidding me?
We give you the dates before you apply, when you apply, we review them at the kickoff, we give you an actual physical copy, we make you sign something that says you did read the mandatory dates, and now you’re telling us a week before move-in that you don’t want to come, or that you’re unable to come. Are you kidding me? And oof, that is not how I want to lead either. And so, while that’s my default emotion, there are pathways I’ve needed to create with others to ensure that the logic can come in too, my rider can be in charge of the elephant in that moment, and shape a path. And so, I’m going to talk a little bit about how we shape environment. When the elephant and the rider disagree, I’ve said this a couple of times, clarity is often needed. And this can look like resistance sometimes from our teams, of not wanting to do something.
And if you remember my Aldi thing that I talked about, a way that I’ve shaped my path, a literal path, in Aldi is now I make my grocery list… I make a grocery list that’s been helpful. And I do so based on the layout of the store, so I know exactly what items I need to get, and once I’m out of that aisle, I don’t even look at anything else in the aisle. So, I have shaped my path to help decrease my ability to have to buy porch swings when I don’t have a porch, that kind of thing, right? An experiment that was done is they invited, researchers, brought folks to a movie theater and they made some really stale, nasty popcorn. And I love movie theater popcorn, but this was a couple of days old, and they gave people different popcorn buckets. And some had smaller and some had larger.
And while everyone agreed that the popcorn was rank, and the same amount of bad, the people with the larger popcorn buckets actually ate more popcorn than the people with the small buckets. And I share that story to say, how are we shaping the environments, when we think about the path, the path is the environment, how are we shaping RA training and how people come into the space, and use the space, and how they, our forms we have them fill out, how are we engaging their logic, their rider, to help support the elephant when we’re creating systems? So, we need to be tweaking environments around ourselves with people who can use to tamper emotions of our elephant, while also honoring how it really helps support decisions. We also don’t want to make decisions devoid of emotions, so I hope that I’m not portraying that either. But this can also help us cut down on bias, which can be really helpful, and I believe everybody on this call is hopeful to do that. And as we can blame people for a problem, often it’s not people, it’s our situation, it’s the environment.
So, when an RA comes in late, [inaudible 00:22:40] comes in late, something that we think about is, gosh, what in the environment could be causing this RA to come in late repeatedly? Is it that their room is too hot and they’re not sleeping well? Is it that they’ve got something going on at home? Are they just tired all the time? And let’s talk to them about that and what that means. When we’re in the middle of training, it’s continually happening, sometimes that’s not where it hits us the most, and sometimes we need other people to come in and help support in that. The path or the environment doesn’t always have to be a physical thing, it can also be community and people to help us through that. If we want people to change behavior, we need to think about how we can do that. Is anyone implementing anything new that you think might help change some behaviors or thoughts around how RA’s view things or think about things when it comes to your training? I’m curious.

Nadia:
I can share something really quick.

Amanda Perrin:
I can’t wait. Nadia, I can’t wait.

Nadia:
Hey, I’m Nadia, I use they/them pronouns, and I work at Doane University. So, we’re changing a lot from last year, we have a small group of returners, so something that we’re doing on that second day is having a dinner just with our returners, to be like, hey, we know things are different, and it might not be what you’re used to, but try to have an open look at it because we’re doing this to improve your experience.

Amanda Perrin:
I think that’s great, thank you for sharing that. Are you also willing to talk about how you’ve rebranded Behind Closed Doors?

Nadia:
You know I am.

Amanda Perrin:
Thank you.

Nadia:
So, we are framing our Behind Closed Doors as LARPing, because one of my co-workers thought behind closed doors sounded a little too much like hazing, and we have a big Greek population here. So, if we’re discouraging hazing within other organizations, we wanted to reflect that as well. So, yeah, we’re calling it LARPing, and our whole student affairs division is getting behind that. And yeah.

Amanda Perrin:
I think that is hilarious, and I think it really engages emotion and logic at the same time, right? We’re like, it’s not this, we’re kind of bringing some fun into it. Hazing is not a thing on our campus, but gosh, to call it LARPing would be hilarious, because we even have a LARPing group on campus. And so, it’s kind of the shtick that our students would really jive with. Thanks for sharing that, Nadia, I appreciate it. So, yeah, and it’s hard to be creative when we’re feeling really tired right before August, as I said earlier. But when we really start to get in community and think about how we can adjust things, move things around, it can be cool what we can come up with in shaping your environment. Super helpful. Okay, I’m going to move into Yosso’s Cultural Wealth Model. Yosso talks about six pieces of capital, cultural capital, that every student brings in. In this model, the goal is to de-center task and center on relationships.
So, Yosso focuses on capturing the talents, strengths, and experiences that specifically students of color bring with them into the college environment. She believes that we should approach experiences with students, specifically BIPOC students, from a strengths-based perspective. And so, the way that we’ve been thinking about utilizing this and leveraging this in orientation, this model, and some of the things that I think about is it also balances out with a couple other theories and some books that we’re reading, and how it balances out and starts to decolonize some of the things we’re doing by really re-centering the student narrative and the student experience on what we’re developing and doing. And so, I’ll share a little bit more about that in a second. So, we’ve got aspirational, linguistic, familial, social, navigational, and resistance capitals. A person understanding their own personal capital supports empowerment and confidence in their own personal capital, and starts to help the student understand and want to take control of their own learning and growth.
So, when I think about retention of knowledge, I think about, gosh, if I’m invested in this, if this is something that I feel like I already have a 20%, 30%, 40% buy into, because these are things I’ve experienced and I can see myself in this, I’m going to be more willing to take that in, because my brain science is going to allow me to do that. So, as we review the six capital types, I want you to think about your sessions, that maybe either you are presenting or that you’re asking others to do, and thinking about how you might leverage some of these in your trainings. So, the first is aspirational, this is a student’s hopes and dreams. And while usually family plays into this a little bit, but it’s a student’s hopes and dreams as to why they came to college and what they hope to gain afterwards.
And one thing I like to think about is, gosh, what if we asked our RAs what are their hopes and dreams, and not necessarily within the RA position, but how the RA position can help them achieve their hopes and dreams? How can it help them get there? Through art, maybe you could do this, or through storytelling, maybe even personal [inaudible 00:27:57] creation, where they can make something that really displays who they are. We do an activity where we just go on Amazon and buy $100 worth of vinyl stickers, and they either get a binder, or a water bottle, or we’ve done different things every year, and they get to pick stickers that kind of show up for them and then tell stories around why these show up for them. But I would think about, I don’t know, leveling that activity up, and thinking about how does this tie to their aspirations?
Linguistic, this is a language and communication skills that students bring with them already. As a 37-year-old white lady, me being the only voice or the leading voice in the room can be a lot, and it’s sometimes really helpful and is other times not as helpful as it could be. Our students speak a language that I don’t, they speak 18-year-old. That’s not me, I was on TikTok last night, and I’ll talk about that later. And all of us are from different cultures and different backgrounds, and they’re going to have different pauses, and sounds, and tones, and rhythms, that I’m not going to have, and that are probably different than what you have as well, as we have a myriad of different students who attend our institutions.
So, I cannot express enough that storytelling, storytelling, storytelling is at the root of where linguistic capital can really start to show up and be vibrant. Having students share their own narratives is vital and what their own skills are. This brings their whole selves into their conversation and allows them to be an expert in something that they’re already an expert in, which is themselves. They have a whole life that they lived before they got here, which we all know, and that can help add vibrancy and asset to our departments and to our communities. And so, how can we start to fold that in, and it can also help support belonging within our teams. Familial are the humans in their lives. So, in storytelling, talking about who’s helped them achieve this hope or dream, who are the supporters? Who in their lives are the ones who want this hope and dream for them?
At the same time, who within their family, that they would identify as family, might be an obstacle that pauses them from their progress, but have other skills that they need or have taught them to get to where they are today? When I was in grad school, I went to grad school at Minnesota State Mankato, and Cindy Janey there did this activity called your Board of Directors, and she would give us basically an oval on a sheet of paper, and we would write down who is your board of directors, who are your people, who are the folks who helped, who you go to for different things? And I think sometimes thinking about who are the folks who are helping you get to where you are, and then being able to support where you want to go next and who are those people, and putting them around your board, physically writing them down, which can be shared or not shared, can be really helpful and help people see, you’ve already got folks in your corner.
And for folks who can’t think of folks, this social part is where I think they’ll be able to [inaudible 00:30:54] out even more. So, social is more this peer-to-peer connector. These are folks I think about as cheerleaders, or the folks who are going to gas you up, the folks who you know, if you call them, they’re there for you. They’re ones who also know your skills. So, this cultural capital model really talks about, I already have a lot of the skills I need, I’m just going to continue to build on those skills. So, we used to do a mentor, an RA mentor program, like mentor/mentee, returner/ new person, does anybody else still do that? Or anybody else do that? Yeah, I think that’s great.
One thing that Yosso though has challenged me on is that rather than doing mentor/mentee, think about mentor/mentor, that both parties have something to teach, it’s just different to teach. So then there’s no power structure between them, and that’s part of the decolonization, is that there’s no person who’s more expert than another, there’s just different skills and different expertise, because we’re thinking in an asset model now, right? Both are bringing social capital to the table. Navigational is a person’s ability to navigate hostile or unsupportive environments. So, empowering skills that they already have. To say that our students have come to our colleges without having to navigate a hostile or unsupportive environment is I think laughable to all of us, right? We’ve all done that, and so have they, it’s just different now.
So, one way I was thinking about this for training is to think about doing a reflection activity around, based on your identities, your personal identities, what are some things that you might have to think about responding to while on duty differently, based on your identities? And let’s talk through the skills you’ve already developed or you already have that have helped you navigate that, so when you’re in those moments that feel high pressured, or maybe it’s the end of the day and our ability to think creatively is lower, we’ve already practiced, and thought about, and leveraged and supported these skills you already have to do this really, really well, in front of folks, or with folks, who are maybe not in your social capital circle.
Inner team conflict is also another thing I think about. How are we going to, as a group, start to think about how we confront one another? What are our communication styles, and how are they different, and how do they show up differently, again, based on our identities and what do we prefer and appreciate, and what are our skills that we already do really, really well? Lastly, the sixth is resistance capital. This is rooted in securing equal rights and collective freedom in its foundation. So, seeing how this training, and thinking about how your skills impact and support a community wider than yourself.
So, this could be like at the end of training, or maybe at the end of a day even, thinking about the skills that they have that they’ve started to hone or sharpen throughout the day, how might they leverage those skills outside of the RA position in their greater community, not just at St. Cate’s, or at your home institution, but in their student teaching job, or in their preceptorship, or at home, or at the Chipotle hourly job they have, or how it’s going to help them in their longer term hopes and dreams, because then they can cycle back, and the skills that they already have again, sharpening, to help them reach those aspirational capital pieces.
So, now that we’re thinking about the brilliance that’s already within our students, we’re going to go into some teaching techniques, okay? We’re going to hang out with an educator, his name is Norman Webb… And anybody heard of the Depths of Knowledge Levels? So, some of you are familiar. So, if I miss some things, hit me up and say you did that wrong, or chime in, I’d love to hear more. Because I feel like a newbie at this, but I thought it looked pretty cool, and it’s something that we’ve been leaning into a bit. So, there’s four different types of knowledge depth level, recall, knowledge application, strategic thinking, and then depending on what article you’re reading, extended thinking or critical thinking. Let me just affirm that you all do this already in a lot of ways. My hope in talking about this today is we can build some common language, and then that you could do some extended thinking or critical thinking into what might happen next, or what could we do next within our community.
So, first is recall. This is simple exercise procedures, this is remembering facts. It’s little need for extended processing to solve anything really, right? It’s what is your alcohol policy? What is the guest policy? What time is duty? You pick up the phone at 4:30 and you turn it in at 8:00. My weekly report is due on Monday and I know where to get it. There’s not a lot of time that we’re… It’s a lot of just memorization. And this is where some of us spend a lot of time in training, and I’ll admit that this is where we have spent a lot of time in training. And it’s not bad, and we need people to know things, that they can regurgitate, that’s important. But since you’re giving me some of your time, I thought we’d talk about a couple of other ways too. So, this is also really helpful when a new process is in place and we need clarity.
When our folks are swimming in a motion, this is not a time to leave recall, recall is a really good time to use that when you’re implementing change that’s already been creatively thought about, and we just need to get this done, recall is a really great strategy to use for that. Next is knowledge application. This is where we choose an appropriate route to correctly solve a problem or a question. There is a right way and there is a right answer. So, maybe a student not knowing where their employment expectations are, but they know that they’re on the RA website, and so they’re going to navigate their way to that. So, there is an answer, where are my expectations? They’re on this form, it’s on this website. Or an RA is writing an incident report and they forget the five Ws that go into the first sentence of an incident report, right?
Okay, great. There is a right answer to that, this is where you can find it, and this is how you write it, right? There’s a right answer for this question. Knowledge application, again, really it’s that next step into, if you can’t remember the facts, this is how you get to those facts. We just plug and chug our answers. Strategic thinking and critical thinking are where, I think we do it sometimes, but it’s not fast. And so, when we’re looking to shorten our training schedule, or do things more efficiently, strategic and critical thinking probably aren’t going to be where we go. But I do think that there’s some, and you probably will too, I think there’s some strong advantages to that. So, strategic thinking is more abstract. So, there’s many different ways you could get to the correct answer, but there still is a correct answer.
So, for instance, last year we had an RA that was doing some rounds and they came across… We still have bathtubs. Anybody else have bathtubs? Okay, great, I’m glad we’re alone in that. So, we have bathtubs in our traditional halls, like one, right behind a door, and so the RA’s check those, and a knob fell off when the student was checking. And out of that knob came lots of water, as you could imagine. And this student went, well, there are a couple of things I could do. I could call public safety to call our facilities workers to shut off the water, I could go hunt for a wrench, I could grab a bucket and start scooping water out of this bathtub for hours, I could call professional staff, I could call my partner, who’s on duty, but at the end of the day, we need the water shut off, and for it not to flood, right?
There is a right answer to this, how we get there, there could be 50 different ways, but there is a right answer. And so, we think about how we’re structuring training sessions, this sometimes can come in the way of duty case studies or Behind Closed Doors. There’s sometimes usually a right answer or right ending that we need for some policy confrontation pieces, but at the end of the day, how you got there, the wording that you used could be different. Critical thinking. There is no clear solution, this is where we’re most creative, but there’s a real world issue that we need to solve, and that we need to work through. So, one way that we’ve done this is during COVID we had lots of data from students about things they loved and didn’t love, and we said, great, here’s all of the data, let’s sift through it together and figure out what we need to do.
We thought the problem was A, the problem is actually B, so let’s figure out how to address problem B together in community. So, it’s sifting through data, lots of people throwing up lots of ideas on the wall, and then we try to figure this out. This might happen with some different program planning, this might happen with case studies, in some case studies, especially around mental health, or around different types of more personal one-on-one pieces, this is where critical thinking might come into play more. And as stated earlier, think about this when structuring your days, if you really want to do some critical thinking, we should probably do that at the beginning of the day, when our juices are still going, when we haven’t made a ton of decisions yet, and think about more of the facts and recall at the end of the day, when it’s just more of an exchange of information.
Now, you might have to scaffold differently, but when thinking about our brain science and how our brains work, it might be a way that you think about structuring your training a little bit differently. So, here are some of Amanda’s hot takes, stay with me and then we’ll open up for some question, dialogue, sharing stuff. [inaudible 00:40:30] talking at you. So, some hot takes that I have, building common language. So, one thing that we’ve already done today is we’ve built common language, and I think that this is so vital when we think about communication, and skill building, and affirmation. So, now, when we talk about aspirational capital, you and I know what we’re talking about. Or when I ask about recall, you and I now know what we’re talking about. We have a common language, we do this a lot when it comes to identity, education, and learning together, we do this a lot when it comes to…
And we’ve started to leverage it as a department, and white supremacy culture and supervision, so now we can start to name it for one another, when it comes to calling one another into a space to have conversations, this common language can be a really great way to say, hey, this is what’s going on. And I name that with ground rules too. So, I am someone who, maybe don’t judge me too much for this, but I actually hate ground rules, with an asterisk. So, I hate ground rules with an asterisk because I don’t love when we just do ground rules and put them on the wall, and that’s where they live to die. I love ground rules when we take that extra step and talk about how we’re going to hold each other accountable to those ground rules, and oftentimes that’s through the common language. So, maybe during RA training, in my staff, we’ve decided that we are going to, in order to call one another in, we’re going to do a little point with a wink, and say, [inaudible 00:41:59], and then we’re going to talk about something later.
Or whatever it is, whatever… When somebody is violating those ground rules, that we have a way in our community that we’re going to hold one another accountable to ensure that we’re addressing when those ground rules are broken. Those are when I love ground rules, is when we say, as a community, we are committing to this, these are our commitments, and this is how we’re going to make sure those commitments are held up. So, Peter Block is that book that I talked about, that you might love or not love, he talks about [inaudible 00:42:32] I pulled out of his book, five different things that I think can be really helpful when it comes to RA training.
The first and foremost, I know that this sounds like duh, but he talks about greeting people when they come into a space, and he talks about it in a way where when folks come into a space, oftentimes, I don’t know what you do, but one of the first things I might do, if I feel like I’m coming into a space, especially alone, is I’m immediately on my phone. Does anybody else do that? Okay, great. And what he says is, we’re searching for connection. We walk into an empty room, or a room with other people who maybe didn’t say hi, and not in a rude way, and I don’t take it personally, but subconsciously I’m like, there’s this fear that starts to come in, and we go to our phones for connection. And so, he says, as soon as people walk in the door we greet, and we make it… Not a cheerleader greeting, but a very intentional, thoughtful, authentic greeting.
And maybe that means you have three or four different people greeting, saying, hi, I’m so glad that you’re here today, how was your night last night? I’m so glad you’re here in the morning. And doing a really warm welcome along the way so folks don’t feel, [inaudible 00:43:43] don’t feel alone and isolated when they come into the room. And those words I think carry a lot of weight for me, when I think about what might be the experience, subconsciously, I’m like, oh yeah, okay, sure. I could see that. He also talks about late arrivals, and making sure you start on time, not to wait for folks, but also thinking about when people come into the room, not to in a shaming way, acknowledge, but to acknowledge and bring them into the group, and also welcome them the same way we did before, with other folks. Hey, what’s your name? I’m so glad that you’re here. Thanks so much for being able to make it today, it looks like it might’ve been a rough morning, or something, to acknowledge and bring them into the group, and how important that can be.
Because then we’re starting to center what we really care about. Do we care more about accountability or do we care more that the person is there? And sometimes that just knocks me on my butt when I’m in the middle of tasks, and I’m like, ugh, thanks for re-centering people in this, I needed that, right? He talks about, and I call it the wave goodbye, but he talks about also when someone leaves, and this is where it gets a little hippie, but I kind of dig it. So, if somebody has to leave early, he talks about leaving something on the table or in the space from that person, because when a person leaves, it shifts the energy in the room, whether it’s from the back of the room or whatever. Even if it’s slightly, it shifts the energy because he talks about the loss of that person in the group being devastating sometimes to the energy.
And so, sometimes when we can acknowledge the person leaving and not have them sneak out the back, but everybody did like a, hey, good luck whatever you’re doing, we’ll see you soon, and they can leave a piece of them there, like their handout or something, that can keep their energy moving in the room. You might buy into it, you might not. I think it’s a cool concept, I wanted to share it with you all. He also talks about how the session doesn’t begin until everyone speaks aloud, until every voice is heard, and I think that that’s really powerful, whether it’s a one word check-in or something, but that not everyone has fully arrived until they’ve gotten to speak into the space.
And what he says what that does is it allows people to then hear their own voice in this space, and in the community, to then feel more open and willing to share that. I though that was kind of cool. And then he talks about putting life on the wall. So, I don’t know about you, but we do not have a residence life space that holds all of our staff, we just don’t. So, we’re oftentimes in lots of different classrooms, and he talks about utilizing art or something to put up on the walls. And so, we, at the beginning of our training, we’ll do some intersectionality art thing that we have students do, and then we’ll put that art, or maybe you could do Polaroid picture, I don’t know, something, where when students walk in, they can actually start to identify themselves in the space, and look at that space as they’re own for the week or two weeks that you’re doing training. And he calls it putting life on the wall and ensuring that students can see themselves, which I thought was kind of cool.
Okay, a couple more things. When you’re breaking up a group, let me do this here. When you’re breaking up a group using icebreaker. So, sometimes we’ll do an activity where we say line up in your birthday month without talking, right? So, people have done that, right? That feels fairly pretty common, that’s circuit 2004 right here. I’ve done that once or twice. And a cool thing to do is infuse that into your own session. So, instead of counting off by numbers at tables, after you’ve done your lecture piece, having folks stand up and like, okay, I want you to get in birth month order from whatever, figure it out, and then you can count by three. So, it adds a little bit of team dynamic, gets people up and moving, you can say, all of my Capricorns over here, and all my Scorpios over there, after they’ve done an activity and get to know another a little bit more. And I get to see like, ooh, I knew the Leos were over there, yep, I could tell. So, just, you can start to feel things out.
I also think about when we’re getting to things that are maybe a little bit more controversial or personal, we can also use a spectrum activity. So, I’ll use an example of like, is a hot dog a sandwich? Some people feel really spicy about this and others don’t. And you might do something a little more serious. And then, you might put them on a spectrum, and say, you absolutely believe that a hot dog is a sandwich, or you think that is blasphemous, right? Get on your spectrum. Now, we’re going to do 24 RAs are here, right? Just because math is easy that way, and we’re going to count one to 12, one to 12, and I want my 12s together, my ones together, or however you want to do that, so you can get opposing thoughts together in the same group.
There are different ways you can start to ask some different questions to mix up groups, that isn’t, well, now we’re going to count by threes just at your tables or whatever, it can be some really intentional group making that can be fun for them as well. They can get to know another a little bit better too, which is great. Okay. So, then we’ve got your tools. I talked about your tools a little bit, but that’s the last thing. If you are looking for sessions, or you want to make sure you’ve covered everything, my goodness, ChatGPT, she will tell you exactly when to put what sessions. If you write RA training, 10 days, she will list you everything that you need to know. So, use her, she has got a good starting point, I would just say make sure it’s not a copy/paste. She is there to support you, she is not as smart as you.
So, leverage your assistant the best way that you can, and then make sure that you’re going through and sorting through the things that she’s telling you to do. But if you’re worried that you’re missing something, I use her to write all kinds of things, and then I edit it out. Utilize each other, there’s some brilliance here in our community. Throw your emails in the chats, DM one another, get some ideas. And then for me, TikTok is the new Ted Talk. I am pretty obsessed. I love good stories, I love storytelling, I love when people tell me cool stories, which is why there’s a potato, eggs, and coffee on here, I’m going to tell you a story in a minute. But I leverage and utilize TikTok a lot when I think about trying to leverage language capital that students are using.
When I start to think about, gosh, I’m not 18, but what is happening? And so, yesterday I went on TikTok, and on my FYP, for reasons I do not understand, seniors, maybe you’ve seen this, seniors in high school are getting their senior year book bags… Have you seen this trend? Okay, so they’re buying Spider-Man book bags, or Disney book bags, Cars book bags… It’s a thing right now. And I was like, oh, admissions, you should totally get on this. But yeah, so I don’t know how… It just keeps me up to date, right? So, when I see Hello Kitty and Spider-Man book bags next year, now I don’t know why, and it’ll be helpful.
But I’m going to leave you with a quick story, I love this story, and it helps me… Your sister had a Hello Kitty for senior year. See this… Yeah, who would’ve thought that was a thing? I think it’s beautiful and wonderful, and I love that they’re leaning into that. But I would’ve never known. Nicholas Caprio, I don’t know if anybody follows him, but he is a great storyteller, and he tells a story that I fall in love with every time. And when I was thinking about you all, and I was thinking about what the common people call August, and that month that we live in, this story… It made me think of this story. And I want to tell you this story today, if you’re willing.
And then we’ll open up for some questions and conversation. So, Nicholas tells a story that goes, there’s a father and a daughter, the daughter comes home after a really tough week and is complaining, venting about a really tough week. She had a really hard time and just couldn’t shake it. The father started three pots of water to boil. In those pots of water he put potatoes in one, eggs in another, and coffee in the last. He let the water boil for about 20 minutes. The daughter at this point becoming kind of annoyed because she would like some response from her father. After 20 minutes, he took the potatoes out of the water and put them in a bowl, he took the eggs out of that water and put them in a bowl, and then he laded some coffee into a cup.
He asked his daughter, “What do you see?” And she said, “Potatoes, eggs, and coffee.” Her father laughed and said, “I want you to look a little closer. Potatoes are tough and sturdy, but when placed into this boiling water, they broke down and became mush. Eggs that are usually fragile, the shells can barely protect the liquid that’s inside, became tough and rubbery. However, the coffee bean was unique, and it decided to change the water.” So, as the things around us happen and the things happen to us, around us, in this month we call August, I want you to think about how you want to react and what you want it to be at the end, and how might you change the water.
Whether it be leveraging these theories, taking a quick idea, or utilizing your community, I hope that you get to find ways to change the water for you, to be nice and tasty. So, that’s what I have, I want you to think… Please know that you’re awesome, leverage your tools, your community, and your own capital, and I think you’re great. And I hope that we get to stay in touch. So, if you have any questions, I’m open to that.

Speaker 5:
If y’all have questions, feel free to unmute yourself and ask away, comments, et cetera.

Amanda Perrin:
Or if there’s things you want to share with each other, I feel like I’m doing this cool thing and I just want people to know it because it’s rad. Or things you’re thinking about.

Aisha Lee:
So, one thing that we’re trying for our senior staff, so not necessarily student staff, is trying to find a way to complete training autonomously. And so, I was thinking about that a lot, Amanda, when you were talking about the pathway, because the goal is trying to conserve energy, have ready for move in, be able to retain the information, and reference it later. So, yeah, I’m not sure, it’s our first try, it’s going okay I think enough, but I don’t know if there’s any other creative strategies or thoughts out there from the group of different ways that we’re trying to innovate training. Yeah.

Amanda Perrin:
Is it still within a timed period?

Aisha Lee:
So, what we tried this week… Or so, it was an entire week, we called it the Canvas Week, we had a couple in-person checkpoints that we would be together as a group. We had a schedule that was a recommendation of, you may want to try completing the modules at this point. We gave them, so if it was a module that would take 15 minutes, we would account for an hour, so that way you can move at your own pace. So, yeah, it was more of a recommendation, and then we gave them the deadline of 50% completed by Wednesday, 100% completed by Friday. So then they can complete it within the day, within the timeframe, or if they wanted to do it at night, in the morning… Yeah. So, that’s what we’re trying at least, but yeah, that’s initial thought-

Amanda Perrin:
It sounds like some great path shaping, for sure. Thinking about it’s not all due on the Thursday before move in, and then you’re like, ah. Yeah. That’s brilliant. Thanks for sharing that. Awesome, well, I really appreciate the time and the effort and energy, if anybody’s interested in continuing to connect, I love a good connection, so hit me up. Would love to chat. And thanks for being willing to give me some of your Friday, you could be out on a beach somewhere. Not that there’s a lot of Midwest beaches, but you know what I mean.

Aisha Lee:
Wonderful. Yes. Well, round of applause, I wish I had a sound board to give a standing ovation, but that was incredible, Amanda, thank you so much. Yeah, and thank all of you for being with us today, we really love seeing your faces, especially here on a Friday. Yeah, another big shout out to our sponsor, Roompact, for making this happen, and being able to bring us together to collaborate. As mentioned before, it’s the hope of the Professional Development Committee to continue providing these experiences, so with that, we’ve identified some topics and we have ideas of maybe what you’d like to cover, but please let us know if you have any ideas of your own, yeah, we’re always willing to take in that feedback and would love to provide something that’s going to cater to what you’re looking for.
If you have any of those ideas, we actually have a Gmail account for our Professional Development Committee, it’s at UMRACUHO.ProDivo@Gmail.com. So, yeah, so please let us know if you have any ideas or any suggestions on what we can do in the future to keep providing that. But with that, we will go ahead and let you go and hope you have a wonderful rest of your day.