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!

The Trouble with Being Anonymous

Are you familiar with Yik Yak? It's gained popularity since it's release in 2013 and is now on lots of college campuses. It's a social media app that allows you to post thoughts with absolute anonymity. It pulls all "Yaks" from within up to a 10-mile radius of your location. It's based on proximity to others using it, so on a college campus there's a steady flow of "Yaks." You can vote a post up or down and the more popular posts get attention.

It's been catching on all around the country. Perhaps it's been around at your campus for awhile, but it only took off in the last couple weeks or so on my campus (the start of the new year).

This isn't social networking. There's no meaningful engagement.

There's nothing I read in my campus's Yaks related to the power of positive connections. As I read through the "yaks" here, there's only hatred, mockery and biased language. People are saying negative things about the institution and each other.

As a concerned student affairs professional, I fear for what this type of app means for the safety of our students. What do we do when someone posts about suicidal thoughts? What if someone posts about a crime? An assault? We are forced to be idle bystanders and it's uncomfortable.

This is destructive. I know many who study social media advocate for the ability to have anonymous forums. There is evidence to show that those who are not in privileged positions find power in being anonymous. But I think even those advocates would feel this is something different. Yik Yak appears only to be intended for destructive, hateful posts.

One of my colleagues decided to post on Yik Yak tonight. She posted a positive message with a positive quote. It was voted down so much and so quickly within five minutes that the post was removed and her account was suspended for 24 hours.

Oliver Burkeman wrote an interesting piece in The Guardian in June about the nature of anonymous social media. In it, he asks "By inviting us to communicate anonymously... the new generation of apps has launched a real-world test of a puzzle that goes back to Plato. When our identities are concealed, do we automatically degenerate into amoral, foul-mouthed bullies? Or, freed from the pressure of maintaining a flawless public facade, might we discover new ways to relate to one another with compassion and honesty?"

Burkeman is onto something there, but he might be a few years too early (which in this day and age is a couple of digital generations worth of growth). Maybe the hateful and often disgusting posts are part of a new freedom and students will grow out of it and the app will evolve. I've only seen destructive behavior with Yik Yak. I hope it changes.

We can do better than this.

Have you had discussions about Yik Yak with students? What's helpful?

How have you helped students negotiate the messages we send about not being a bystander with the helplessness that comes from watching anonymous posts pile up?