To live and learn...

TV show I'm watching while writing this: Cory in the House (yup, you gotta love that Disneychannel)

Quote of the Day: "The real leader has no need to lead - he is content to point the way." - Henry Miller


It's Sunday and I've just spent the past few hours preparing for my staff meeting. Yup, working on a Sunday...but I know this week will be crazy (actually the next few weeks), so I'd rather have everything ready to go.

I work with the CHANGE - Emerging Community Leaders - Living Learning Community this year. And I've decided to try this new Residential Curriculum approach. So I spent all summer developing the outline of our curriculum. What I didn't get around to was making all the handouts and resource guides for my staff.
But let me start from the beginning...

This whole idea of having a Residential Curriculum means - at least from my understanding - that as the professional staff you develop a detailed plan of what initiatives you want to have going on in your community. You can go as far as making lesson plans for events or corridor meetings. The RAs, then, are the faciliators of those initiatives.

The way I've set up my curriculum, there's a theme each month. And each month, RAs are expected to have conversations with their residents about this theme, do a bulletin board that relates to the theme, and organize a corridor event related to that theme. And I give them resource guides for each of these initiatives, some more detailed than others. For example, for the first couple of corridor meetings, we had very detailed lesson plans with learning outcomes, activities, topics to cover and and and. But then, for the first corridor event, we simply asked them to do some type of team building activity. These ranged from playing team builders in the lounge to a scavenger hunt in teams to writing a song together. That way, while I know that residents are getting certain things out of the programs, RAs can still take ownership of their programs and use their creativity.

So far, this Residential Curriculum thing has been going really well. The RAs seem to like it. I think, at least, that my residents are getting a lot out of it.
But there's some challenges:
1) It takes quite some time to come up with all these resource guides, calendars for the RAs and and and.
2) One of the focuses of our curriculum is for the RAs to have individual conversations with residents about the monthly themes. While some of them are doing really well with these conversations, others just don't have as serious or meaningful conversations as I'd like them to have.
3) Similarly, it's hard to know how well the RAs faciliate the meetings based on my lesson plans. We talk in 1:1's afterwards to reflect on the meetings and events, but that still doesn't always give me a good understanding of what they did. And with ten RAs, I just don't have the time to go and observe everyone's meetings and events...I may have to start doing that soon though.
4) Since our department doesn't have the same model, RAs weren't trained in the general RA Training to be facilitators and to have those conversations...so a lot of that stuff had to happen during In-Hall Training and there just wasn't enough time for everything. Even now, during staff meetings, it's hard to get everything done.

Well, we'll just have to wait and see how things go....