Complex Community Council Recruitment Cards

You always want student recruitment for leadership positions to have a personal touch, something a mass-email or a poster just wont do.

We wanted to have something for our RAs to hand out residents during our Complex Community Councils (the hall governments for our residence hall complexes). I designed these to appeal to different students and to carry a consistent message that we carried throughout much of our marketing; “You’ve Got Potential, We’ve Got Opportunities”.

We printed these cards from VistaPrint.com and divided them up amongst the staff to hand out to students. This gave them a clear reason to walk up and mention this to people and gave us a clearer way to measure their effort to recruit students.

This year, I re-printed the cards but changed the slogan to “You’ve Got Talent, We’ve Got Opportunities”. This change to talent goes along with similar language changes we have made in our marketing and programs. The cards are all printed on recycled paper and include a request to please recycle the card through our single stream recycling.

These proved effective and were liked by staff and students alike. We always tend to over estimate the numbers we needed and when we print them in the future we will work on finding a way to make the website the same year after year so we can re-use them.

The Green Team Cards (located bottom left in the picture) are reusable and we use them to recruit students throughout the year. Green Teams are student groups that focus on education, programming and advocacy regarding environmental sustainability on campus.

Thanks for reading,

Paul Miller…

Problem Based Learning (PBL)

Hello all,

A while back i was attending a certification workshop for PBL use in the Classroom. I was one of two student affairs professionals in a room full of faculty. It was a very interesting session and it was helpful to have faculty there providing their examples as well as grappling with how to write an effective PBL.

For those of you who have not had experience with PBL, Wikipedia has the simplest explanation.

Compliments of Wikipedia (October 10th, 2011)

“Problem-based learning (PBL) is a student-centered pedagogy in which students learn about a subject in the context of complex, multifaceted, and realistic problems

Characteristics of PBL are:

• Learning is driven by challenging, open-ended, ill-defined and ill-structured problems.
• Students generally work in collaborative groups.
• Teachers take on the role as “facilitators” of learning.”

During that workshop I put together this PBL for Hall Directors and veteran Resident Assistants. The focus is on a student who was stopped by the police due to stumbling and open wounds on his knees and hands. This PBL is structured to take place during a 1-1 where the staff member gets the “initial blurb”. From there, they decide who to gather the important information to best be able to help the student. The supervisor then acts as the other people, depending on who the staff member would speak to. For example, if the staff member said they would first go to the RA, then the supervisor pretends to be the RA while the staff member asks them to questions they would ask the RA.

The supervisor goes off the student profile and what they choose to answer based off of the questions. The purpose of this is to give the staff member experience and practice digging through what at-first appears to be a simple issue, and identify the different concerns as they uncover the complexities.

This PBL is in draft form and has not been used yet, but I plan on testing it out this semester with a Hall Director. Overall, it was an interesting session and it was great working with faculty on putting this together. Attached are the drafts of the PBL including learning outcomes, an outline, and second part to try out later. The second attachment is a draft of a rubric for each of the learning outcomes.

Any feedback on how this draft can improved or how others have used PBL’s in training would be appreciated!

PBL_Alcohol_Student.docx

PBL_Rubric.docx

Draft Development Plans

Here is a draft of a development plan that I had put together and presented on during a NASPA regional Conference. This plan is meant for graduate student hall directors.

The plan had two parts, the Learning Outcomes and plan outline and then is broken down month by month.

I ended up not using this due to a different staff development pilot project that I was asked to develop and work on with another colleague of mine. The pilot porgram took up the time that would have been alloted to this plan and ultimately still provided a plan for staff development.

Again this is a draft and is my own work.

Dickinson_HD_Development_Learning_Outcomes.pdf

Monthly_HD_Development_plan_10-11.pdf

What is an RA candidate to do?

Our RA Interview process includes an exciting and full weekend of interviewing all of the candidates and then we invite specific people we want to see more of to our complex group processes.

The Complex group process is more about working as a team and getting a feel for the RA position. We have a brief introduction to the RA position. We have a number of activities that gets them thinking about the position.

The following document is an activity that I put together for the Complex group process for all First Year residence halls. The purpose is to get them talking in their small group of candidates and to get a glimpse of where their priorities for the position currently are.

In this activity they are already in small groups, having just discussed their FY of college and reflected on a video. Each group receives an envelope with about 15 different possible components to a floor meeting written down. They are asked to unanimously decide on which three they will include. While we do have more than three things during our first floor meetings, they are asked to choose the three things they would choose if they needed to boil it down to just three.

What we got from this exercise was increased participation from candidates, a discussion so lively that we ourselves wanted to join, and some great ideas on what we can do to improve our first floor meetings.

What helped was that groups were forced to choose their top three components and could only include three. We wanted people to discuss things, advocate for what they felt was important and then come to a consensus as a group.

Overall this was a huge success and one that we will tweak in terms of components, but one that I will continue using.

Floor_Meeting_Activity.pdf