Explaining Res Life Through MS Paint

There are many of us of a certain age who first explored creativity on desktop computers using PC Paintbrush. Generously referred to as "graphics editing software," it was an opportunity for a kid to try something on a computer that he could previously only do on paper. The substitution of technology in place of paper was fun and led to some brilliant artistic creations in elementary school computer labs everywhere.

PC Paintbrush became Microsoft Paint and the average computer user gained access to more and more sophisticated graphics editing software, but there's still a little bit of magic and fun left with MS Paint. I decided to dust off the skills and create a few pictures that sum up life in Residential Life. Turns out it's remarkably therapeutic and an awesome way to procrastinate.

Inspired by #MSPaintMonday, which is primarily used by those who talk about college football on Reddit, I give you the res life and student affairs version of a tremendous time-waster...

 

 

I also thought it might be fun to create a few that sum up professional life in student affairs. I was right - it was fun.

Think you have some fun pictures to create? You know you want to try it. I'd love for you to share them - Tweet them to me (@pottscharlie)!

#SAChat Final Thought: Practice Makes Progress

I'm honored to have another post appear on the Student Affairs Collective. It's about the value of writing professionally and why it's important to write, write again and then write some more.

Check it out HERE.

The Top 5 Res Life Skills You Need to Survive the Zombie Apocalypse

It's that time of the year. Halloween. Ghosts, goblins and ghouls. It's a holiday for those who love being scared and being scary.

So in honor of Halloween, let's talk about The Top 5 Res Life Skills You Need to Survive the Zombie Apocalypse: 

1. Occupancy Management. When the Zombies show up for your brains, it would be wise to retreat to your underground shelter. But who is staying in which bed? Do you have enough pillows and sheets? Need some loft kits so you can bunk up and create more space? Your occupancy management skills will come in handy!

2. Rationing Food. Did you mistakenly advertise a hall program to last from 9-11pm only to run out of food by 9:05pm? It's happened to all of us. But you've been polishing the food rationing skills, making sure that there are enough toppings for all those ice cream sundaes you'll need to serve. With the Zombie Apocalypse, you never know how much time you'll be spending in shelter so you'll need to ration your food as strictly as you do those milk and cookies at a hall council event.

3. Active listening. This one will be very handy. First, Zombies kind of drag softly across the ground and often grunt nearly inaudibly as they approach. All that time living in a residence hall has prepared you to hear even the most cat-like movements outside your apartment door - so you should be ready for Zombie visitors! Your active listening skills will also come in handy if you should enter into dialogue with said approaching Zombies. Seated in an open position, ready to receive the grunts and moans with approving nods will help greatly. Repeating and paraphrasing may help put the Zombies at ease and buy you some time to escape.

4. Mediation. Another place your active listening skills will serve you well is mediation. Perhaps you are face to face with a Zombie - ask them what their main concerns are with your existence. Use "I" statements (i.e. "I need you to stop gnawing at my skull" or "I need you to stop grunting so loudly. It's quiet hours.") and try to work out issues before they get out of hand. A behavioral agreement is recommended - get the offending undead to agree to be upfront, honest and open about how they will behave to move forward in a peaceful manner.

5. Delegation. You can't survive off the apocalypse by yourself. But you've assembled a great team to assist you, so use them! Need someone to board up the windows? Ask an RA! Need someone to take inventory of dried goods? Rely on your colleagues! There will be lots of tasks and lots of opportunities for group decision-making - trust your co-workers and maximize your group's effectiveness in keeping the brain-eaters at bay.

Of course, the downside is that because you are dedicated professionals you have spent much time and energy developing skills and acquiring knowledge to make you smarter. Smarter means a bigger brain, right? Bigger brain means more appetizing target for the Zombies. But focus on the skills listed above and I'm sure you'll be fine...

Good luck to you this Halloween!

(*Note: Nothing in this blog post is scientifically accurate. Pretty sure Zombies don't even exist).

(Or do they?....)

Proving Yourself Right

I still get caught up in this. I want to be sure I'm the one with the right answer. And while I'm constantly humbled by the fact that there's no possible way I can know everything, I still want to be right.

I've realized that no matter what I do, there is always someone somewhere doing it better than I ever could. It's the old adage about how it's more important to surround yourself with smart people than to try to be the smartest person in your organization.

It's draining to prove others wrong. It inhibits partnerships and collaboration. It leads to quicker burn-out. And it just makes for a crappy work environment.

So focus on proving yourself right.

• Be an advocate for your own ideas.
• Learn from your failures. (We all make them. Accept it and learn from it).
• Don't forget to celebrate your successes - even the small ones.

Rethinking Education via Social Media

What does social media use teach our students? More importantly, what is it teaching us about how we help students develop? It might be time to rethink our approach.

At our most recent meeting of the Associated Twin Cities College Housing Administrators (ATCCHA), we had an interesting conversation about the use of social media use in professional development. (Check out the Slideshare link - the result of a fun collaboration with Erica Thompson). Prior to the meeting we conducted a brief survey to assess social media use among group members, and respondents were asked to cite concerns they had with student social media use on their campuses. Most focused on the perceived deterioration of skills.

A few examples of our concerns with student use of social media:
"[Students] constantly looking at phones - in and out of class."
"Addiction of quantity over quality of relationships."
"Trying to solve issues passively (being passive-aggressive)."
"Deterioration of in-person skills."
"Lack of professionalism [online]."
"Not understanding 'it's out there forever.'"
"Blurring boundaries with administrators/staff."

Valid questions all. But as I was sharing these survey comments with the group, I began to think more deeply about how these comments - and the approach many of us take to social media use - creates a negative framing of the impact of social media.

We take the adult normative perspective when analyzing our students' social media use. Rey Junco outlines this idea in his book, Engaging Students Through Social Media (a great read - highly recommended), and this view of social media use is problematic because it limits our understanding of how students are processing what they are learning and developing while using these tools.

We need to re-frame our perspective and do what we do in most other aspects of our jobs - find the learning moments and center our ideas of development on the students in front of us. The seven items listed above are all concerns that can be addressed. Rather than looking at the things from our adult normative perspective, we need to be open to the pedagogical potential of social media use. 

• "Deterioration of in-person skills"? Perhaps we should focus on the soft skills and how students can integrate networking tools into real-life situations.
• "Lack of professionalism online"? Let's demonstrate what professionalism on social media looks like and encourage students to take steps to professionalize accounts before a job search.
• "Blurring boundaries with administrators/staff"? Have the tough conversation about the significance and importance of boundaries and how you can hold each other accountable.
• "Students constantly looking at phones - in and out of class"? Give them a reason to connect with your department while they are doing it. Put educational info on their screens. Or even create opportunities to "unplug" and promote aspects of wellbeing that encourage other forms of interaction.

We're educators. As a profession, we spent years and years and years teaching these skills before the creation of social media. Social media is not an imposition, it's just another layer of student identity that informs our approach to assisting in their development.

Reframe. Refocus. Rethink. Instead of assuming social media use is a distraction to daily life for students, grab the positive aspects of it and create opportunities to teach skills that integrate social media use. Shift your thinking about the power of social media use for students and incorporate it into the things you already do so well.

The Ankle Tape Theory

We were fortunate to have a visit from Dr. Henry Emmons this week. Dr. Emmons is a well-known psychiatrist who works with several colleges and is the author of The Chemistry of Joy and The Chemistry of Calm. He focuses primarily on resilience and came to speak with our Division of Student Life staff, students and faculty about building resilience in college students.

Resilience is a thing right now. It's teetering on the edge of being a buzzword in Student Affairs, but it's an emerging area of significance for our profession. Teaching resiliency skills is what will shift us to a proactive profession rather than a reactive profession.

During a focus group discussion today, some of the student affairs staff in the room talked about how we spend time and energy "wrapping around" our students to assist and protect them. This raises questions for me about how much we enable behavior that is not indicative of resilience and how much we limit growth for our students. Do we try so hard to protect that we actually inhibit growth?

The analogy that came to mind for what often happens in student affairs was of having your ankles taped. As any athlete (or washed-up former-wanna-be-athlete like myself) can attest, coaches and athletic trainers always insist upon having athletes tape their ankles for practice and games. The wrapping of ankles in layers of athletic tape stabilizes the muscles and ligaments to shore up against unnecessary contortions and potential injury. Taping limits the mobility of ankles - which lowers the risk of injury. After all, the less we stray from the straight and narrow the less likely we are to fail or get hurt.

Taping is tedious and time-consuming but ultimately gives the athlete peace of mind and a feeling of stability. But the theory always was that taping your ankles every single day ultimately lowered your resistance to injury the next time you did NOT have your ankles taped. The idea was that the security of the tape actually taught your muscles to weaken, therefore actually leaving you much more susceptible to injury when you were out working on your skills by yourself. As Student Affairs professionals, we often wrap our students in this protective layer that ultimately weakens the ability for student to develop the resiliency tools they need to be successful on their own.

I'm not sure if the theory that the constant use of tape actually weakens the muscles underneath is true. I asked the resident expert in my family (my brother-in-law is an athletic trainer in training) and he has heard that theory and said that he's not sure, though he knows for sure that taping an ankle really only truly provides optimal support for the first 15-20 minutes. The protective layer we wrap around our students really only enables them to have a strong start, but the stability begins to fade as they venture out on their own. This is a critique of our profession - we want to be supporters and the people who nudge students in the right direction, but too often I see us propping up, doing work for our students, and often working harder than they are to stay afloat. So whether the ankle tape theory is true or not, we don't really know for sure until we run out of tape.

Dr. Emmons left us with several important things to think about, but perhaps none more important to me than this: "There is no isolated environment." From residence halls to the classroom to the career center to the party on Saturday night - every environment within which our students engage affects them. And we can't insure that we have enough tape to get them through each one.

Teaching resiliency SKILLS is what matters. Knowledge is helpful, but skills - the actual tools - is what will affect our students the most. I encourage you to read, research and understand what resilience means on your campus and for your students and find ways to help teach those skills.

How will you help teach resiliency skills rather than reach for the tape the next time a student needs support?

Think Time Thursday: Finding Group Flow

I have been trying to think creatively lately. We are well into the routine of a new school year now; back into the routine of meetings, roommate mediation conversations, meetings, training sessions, meetings, conduct meetings, more meetings and then a couple more meetings. While routine provides stability and anchors us in many ways, it can also detract from the freedom some of us feel we need in order to think creatively.

I wrote about creativity in Student Affairs back in July and have tried to incorporate ways that we can think about things differently in our department. One of our attempts is "Think Time Thursday." I scheduled an hour at 3pm on every other Thursday throughout the semester that is set aside as purely "thinking time" - time for my staff to put our brains together to think about a problem in a new way, to generate ideas and to then turn those ideas into actionable items. Free of agendas, free of demands, free of phone calls and text messages - this is time for our brains to kick into high gear TOGETHER.

We've had one "Think Time Thursday" already and it was a success despite some early hesitation from my staff. I purposely didn't tell them too much about the plan. We showed up at the meeting space and moved tables away from the whiteboard so that it was a stand up meeting. Stand up meetings are a part of many corporate cultures and I think they have tremendous value. I like this blog post by Martin Fowler about stand up meetings. Fowler outlines a few essentials to the stand up meeting.

1. To help start the day well. (We did this in the afternoon.. but oh well)
2. To support improvement. (We chose a topic from a brainstorm and the only rule was to come up with things that we wanted to be better at doing).
3. To reinforce focus on the right things. (We narrowed our focus to the things that were most important at this moment for the team and the department).
4. To reinforce a sense of team. (These are solution-oriented group conversations. Teamwork!)
5. To communicate what is going on. (Again, focusing on the most pressing needs of the department at the moment and hear everyone's ideas).

We started with a silent brainstorm to come up with ideas for things we wanted to improve in terms of a service or function in our department. We then sorted those post-it note ideas into "short term" and "long term." We latched onto a couple short-term ideas and put the long-term ideas in the parking lot until later. Our energy increased as we jumped into making an action plan for the three items we chose - our decision process was focused, our intent was positive and our willingness to self-select tasks was high.

Our Think Time whiteboard full of ideas:

Our hesitations and barriers to starting were rooted in the fact that the staff wasn't really sure what was about to happen. That was intentional, but caused some hesitancy for the first 5 minutes. Another roadblock? We didn't want to stand. It was unnatural and felt like extra work (and some group members chose to take a seat after the first 15 minutes and I think it slowed our conversation), but for the most part it kept us moving and on task.

We have chosen a couple potential topics for future Think Time Thursday sessions and I am now anticipating these meetings more than any other meeting I have/get to attend. Creativity in a team setting - finding "group flow"- is a powerful thing.

So how are you building time into your routine to be creative? This question may feel counter-intuitive. For lots of us, creativity isn't something we can build into a calendar. It's a whim, a muse, an inspirational moment that allows us to put pen to paper (or click away at a keyboard) or draw on a whiteboard and think about things differently. And you know what? Sometimes we do our best work when we're tired, so building time into an already taxing routine can actually be a good thing.

How are you getting your colleagues involved in the creative process? Your team has great ideas - utilize them!