While this week’s question is, “What is a new learning initiative that you would like to see in your school and how do you model this kind of learning yourself?” I decided to modify my answer to apply it to a different kind of classroom. I work in education, but not in a typical teacher and student environment. Last year I was a member of the Housing staff at the University of South Dakota. I’m hoping to make a permanent move to New Jersey or New York City and apply what I’ve learned, as well as bring along some new learning initiatives.
In Housing, we provide a community in which the students can learn. Resident Assistants create programming that generates opportunities for their residents to learn new things about themselves, and those around them. We also have to train our Resident Assistants to put on programs, as Hall Directors, which is the closest we bring the Resident Assistants to a classroom-style environment. Luckily, last semester, I was part of the Student Staff Training committee.
As we began the semester, we saw little to no involvement in our first student staff training event. These events happen once a month, and we decided that we needed to make a change in the way instruction was happening. Couros (2015, p. 50) discusses a teacher who returned from a teaching hiatus, and was stuck in her old ways. She was traditionally used to using an overhead projector with transparencies, but she could see that her students had experienced other learning methods, and this technology and its uses were now boring to them. Couros (2015, p. 51) says that sometimes teachers may stick with what they know, even if it’s boring and ineffective, simply because they aren’t challenged or provided empathy to generate a new learning style.
We immediately did work to change how these student staff training events were carried out. Traditionally, there may be a slideshow, and a presenter would come up to talk for an hour. We knew that we needed to find new methods to deliver the information that would keep the Resident Assistants involved. The most obvious problem was with cell phones. Resident Assistants may sit on their phone through an entire session, and if asked to put it away, they’d do so, but find other distractions. So, we opted to make the learning experience hands-on. For every future student staff training event, we made sure that every session had something to keep hands, eyes, and minds occupied.
For example, instead of spending an hour telling our Resident Assistants how to program for their residents, we gave them a few broad examples, and then we put on programs using those examples. The most notable examples of our change in instruction came in March, when we discussed putting on diversity-focused programs, and played a game show with the Resident Assistants called “Guess the Straight Person.” In another room, we talked about mental health and stress relief, followed by a program where Resident Assistants crafted stress-relief boxes. In another month, we discussed the importance of being cognizant with information on social media accounts by creating a game of Jeopardy with any publicly available information from the Resident Assistants’ social media pages.
We could have opted for the easy way out, but instead, we chose to put extra time into our planning, and it was a success. We changed our instruction style from a direct instructor-to-student style, to a more indirect social style, where everyone communicated with their peers. Our committee was empathetic to the Resident Assistants who were not engaged because they were bored, and in every following student staff training event, we received countless compliments from the Resident Assistants, because they felt like their two hours weren’t wasted. They learned something, and they got to have fun while doing it.
TET 715 Reflective Blog 