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Res Life

and empowering, and, most important, it emphasizes peer education. By creating formal or informal mentoring and advising relationships – distinct from supervisory ones – professional and student staff can learn from one another and develop strong bonds that may lead to increased commitment to the workplace, greater comfort in offering and receiving feedback, and stronger affinity to the organization’s mission and values. Ensuring that there are opportunities for reflection is both practical and potentially transformative. Providing students with time to think in a guided manner about what they are learning affords them an opportunity to critically engage with how the material is influencing their knowledge, perceptions, emotions, and actions. This process often encourages students to modify behaviors, re-conceptualize processes, evaluate previously held perspectives, and engage in action planning with greater thought and intention.

many opportunities to complete teambased assignments or tasks to build the collaborative capacity of the team, foster a collaborative spirit, and encourage the growth of new and sustained friendships. Many colleges and universities now emphasize courses and programs that help students explore cultures, life experiences, and worldviews different from their own. These studies – which may address U.S. diversity, world cultures, or both – often explore difficult differences such as racial, ethnic, and gender inequality. Utilize staff training to tackle some of these difficult issues within the organization. By working across differences, student staff will become better at interacting with their residents and other peers who are different from them. Field-based experiential learning with community partners is an instructional strategy that can be integrated as a component of student staff training. A key element in these programs is the opportunity students have to both apply what they are learning in realworld settings and to reflect in an intentionally facilitated setting on their service experiences. These programs model the idea that giving something back to the community is an important college outcome and that working with community partners is good preparation for citizenship, work, and life. Internships are an increasingly common form of experiential learning. Consider allowing student interns to be a part of the staff training planning process for an extended period of time in a meaningful, supervised way. When possible, collaborate with faculty to offer course credit for the experience. Often this is possible if the students complete a project or paper that is approved by a faculty member. On many campuses, the assessment of student involvement in active learning practices such as these has made it possible to assess their contribution to students’ cumulative learning. Finding meaningful ways to integrate these highimpact practices into annual sessions

can create an intentional, systematic, and effective training program.

Putting It All into Practice
As the time comes to implement annual staff training sessions, it is important to find ways to pull all of the pieces together to make it happen. While it may seem daunting to re-design or reconceptualize a training program that may not have changed in many years, there are a few simple short-term and long-term steps that can be taken to help put it all into practice. Training may be expanded from just the nuts and bolts of residence hall operation to include more on the development of leadership skills. Such an emphasis should produce marked improvements in staff engagement, initiative, and personal development. Since not every residence life staff has the right players to conduct a successful training program, partnering with leadership educators within the faculty and student affairs staff to design and implement training sessions can result in an effective use of resources. Institutional, regional, and national sources can also be used to gain access to the tools and resources necessary to be successful in planning a holistic leadership development training program for student staff. In higher education, it is often said that we work in silos, but it is important to avoid this kind of isolation in training efforts. Model a team approach to accomplishing this task, and engage students in the planning process to help determine what skills and concepts matter most. In addition, assess the process at all steps in order to measure the achievement of learning outcomes and to determine student satisfaction with the utility of the topics presented. Capturing this data can help improve future training sessions and adapt a curriculum to better meet the needs of student staff in their growth as leaders. tS
Joshua I. Hiscock is the coordinator for the National
Clearinghouse for Leadership Programs at the University of Maryland in College Park.

Making an Impact
In 2008, the American Association of Colleges and Universities released a set of 10 high-impact practices that were widely tested and shown to be beneficial to the learning of college students from many backgrounds. These practices are broad and have application in many aspects of higher education – both inside and outside of the classroom. Four highimpact practices have direct applicability to student staff training and, when implemented, increase the complexity of training sessions: collaborative assignments and projects, diversity and global learning, service-learning and community-based learning, and internships. Collaborative learning combines two key goals: learning to work and solve problems in the company of others and sharpening one’s own understanding by listening seriously to the insights of others, especially those with different backgrounds and life experiences. During training, provide staff with
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Talking STick

Talking Stick - May/June 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Talking Stick - May/June 2012