SEAHO Report - Spring 2021 - 16

FEATURE ARTICLES
created a Google Site that served as a one-stop shop for our RAs to access and utilize training content, the
schedule, and other resources. This is also something we intend to keep, and we have already started adding
more to it as the Google Site has created a flexible platform for us to do extensive resource-sharing with our
students and contributes to engaging our staff in a platform that makes sense.
Create an In-Hall Guide
The in-hall guide served as an overall facilitation guide for supervisors to use during in-hall time with their
individual staff and helped provide consistency in delivering content to our student staff outside of scheduled
training sessions. It was extremely important for us to establish solid expectations on how the guide needed
to be used by supervisors. Content was always outlined in chronological order and reflective of the sessions
that students experienced earlier in the day. Aligning material was also imperative when we had to consider
student staff's ability to retain information in a virtual environment, where interaction and facilitation was a
bit different than what we would see in person. Additionally, preparing and distributing an in-hall guide to
supervisors far enough in advance to the actual training is important to ensure that everyone has adequate
time to prepare and ask questions as they arise. We took a lot of intentional time to make sure everything was
accessible too: hyperlinking documents that may have been referenced, learning outcomes from the day, and
the training schedule. This made the in-hall guide a one-stop shop for any and all things related to training so
that supervisors knew where to find something and felt confident facilitating.
Behind Closed Doors
For many departments, Behind Closed Doors is a yearly tradition in which we can see what our staff have
learned from training. In a non-COVID year, we would split our RAs up by new and returning staff members,
and the returning RAs are responsible for serving as actors in our scenarios while our new RAs utilize their
skills to see how much they have learned. This would be set up in one of our residence halls and the new RAs
would get into groups and go from room to room acting out the scenarios with the returners split up randomly
in each room. The returning RAs provide feedback at the end.
Due to COVID-19, we had to completely reimagine what this would look like, but we still wanted to incorporate
BCDs into our RA training plan. We thought through several different options, and ultimately decided that the
best, safest, and most effective way to do BCDs was to do them by staff, in hall, in smaller groups. Each of
our staff typically has about 50% returners who, in addition to our professional and graduate staff, were able
to serve as our actors. Another large component of BCDs is our campus partners participating and providing
guidance and feedback to our new RAs. This year, we asked each of our campus partners to record a video
outlining the best ways to handle a specific scenario and how RAs could utilize campus resources in assisting
our students. We also uploaded these videos to our RA Google Site so staff could refer to them at any time.
Changing BCDs to this format proved to be very effective for our staff members. Many of our new RAs explained
how they felt much more at ease doing BCDs because they were acting out scenarios with their own staff,
instead of with returning RAs from across campus. Our returning RAs expressed that they were taking it more
seriously because they would be responding to incidents with these specific new RAs and wanted to make sure
they were prepared. As professional staff, this required us to be more hands-on with the entire process, which
allowed us the opportunity to provide support and specific instructions for how the scenarios would actually
play out in our individual communities.
Overall, this new format was incredibly beneficial and something that we will likely continue beyond COVID-19.
It allowed us the opportunity to think critically about what the purpose of BCDs is, why we continue to do them,
and how to make the experience more impactful for our students.
Make an Assessment Plan and Stick to It!
It is important to always assess the things you do, but especially important when you are trying something
completely different from what has been done in the past. Creating and sticking to a detailed assessment plan
helped our committee consistently revisit the learning outcomes we established for staff training and ensure
we were truly meeting those outcomes and the needs of our student staff. Always start with your " why " and
consider what will be done with the data: Is this a model you want to keep in your department? Do you want
to make additional changes or go back to the way you were doing training pre-COVID? Having the numbers to
back up how effective training was for your student staff from previous years and the year you implemented
significant changes is important. Sharing that data out with your professional staff and leadership team is even
more important so they can see and understand what the impact of that training was as well.

SEAHO Report - Spring 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of SEAHO Report - Spring 2021