Onboarding New Professional Staff to a Student Affairs or Residential Curriculum
Student Affairs offices, particularly those within residence life and education, typically see a steady turn over of professionals year-to-year. When building and maintaining a curriculum, it can sometimes be a challenge to onboard new staff members who (1) may not be familiar with the model at all or (2) are not familiar with your institution’s specific implementation of the curricular approach. There are a number of strategies you can employ to ensure greater traction and continuity for your curricular efforts while maintaining progress over time. The following are five strategies you can… Read More
Six Videos To Use During Residence Life Professional Staff Training (With Bonus Curriculum Videos!)
I provide a number of training and consulting services for professionals in college housing and residence life. In the course of developing materials for these services, we’ve identified a number of high quality videos that address topics related to higher education and student learning. The following are some of our favorites that make excellent conversation starters for any professional staff training you may be conducting. The first set of videos below address larger macro-issues, while the bonus set of videos at the end come from ACPA Video on Demand and address residential curriculum more… Read More
Implications for Staff Member Duties, Selection, Training, and Development When Transitioning to a Curricular Approach
Transitioning to a residential curriculum is as much about educational plan development as it is about organizational change. The reason for this is that curricular approaches are often paradigmatic change–change predicated on an entirely new set of premises. In other words, rather than just rearranging the furniture in the room, you’re changing the entire room itself. Because of this, there are many implications for how your organization itself may need to change to account for a curricular focus. Chief among these changes may be related to your staff member duties, and your… Read More
ResLife Myth #4: RA Training Needs To Be Two Weeks To Be Effective
A number of departments and institutions have recognized that as the roles of residential education staff have evolved and technology has advanced, many of the assumptions upon which training programs were previously built no longer hold true. For example, resident assistant and student staff training programs typically occur in August, before residence halls open for the academic year, and can often last as long as two weeks. But do they need to be this long? And do they always need to occur in-person and in August? In my opinion, we need to re-evaluate and… Read More
Relaunching SATechResources and (Higher)EdTechResources dot com…
In doing my research I often come across great tutorials on social and digital technology as well as excellent examples of their use in higher education. Rather than keep them to myself, I decided to post them publicly to help others “get up to speed” on these tools and their uses. I’ve been doing this for a number of years now, and as my resource pages grew, it became time for a redesign (and a unification). Enter: HigherEdTechResources.com aka SATechResources.com. Below you will find links to topics on my completely redesigned resources page. It includes… Read More
