Making the models work in residential education
- Cam Bestwick
- May 1, 2023
- 16 min read
Updated: May 11
I have always enjoyed this passage from Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman where Nobel Prize winning physicist and unrivalled explainer-of-things, Richard Feynman, complains about the unnecessary use of jargon:
There was this sociologist who had written a paper for us all to read ahead of time. I started to read the damn thing, and my eyes were coming out: I couldn’t make head nor tail of it! I figured it was because I hadn’t read any of the books on the list. I had this uneasy feeling of “I’m not adequate,” until finally I said to myself “I’m gonna stop, and read one sentence slowly so I can figure out what the hell it means.”So I stopped-at random-and read the next sentence very carefully. I can’t remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: “The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels.” I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? “People read.”Then I went over the next sentence, and realised that I could translate that one also. Then it became a kind of empty business: “Sometimes people read; sometimes people listen to the radio,” and so on, but written in such a fancy way that I couldn’t understand it at first, and when I finally deciphered it, there was nothing to it. |
His point is rather obvious: that people use complicated language to exaggerate to others how profound their ideas are. I would add a second reason people do this, which is to prevent interference from outsiders. Hereafter, I am going to call this attitude wannabe sophistication.
Feynman himself was the opposite of this. To him, true mastery of a topic meant knowing it so well you can explain it simply. So instead of excluding people from his work, he actually drew them in and made it interesting to them. I am going to call this attitude true sophistication.
This is the story of how I went from wannabe sophistication to true sophistication in one particular area of my work: my use of student development models in education-minded student housing.
Along the way you will see that, not only did I stop looking dumb by trying to look smart, I believe I made a really interesting discovery along the way that has the potential to support a massive step-change in the effectiveness of a certain category of student services: residential education.
A quick aside — about residential education
What is residential education?
Residential education is an umbrella term given to the broad range of programs, services, activities and opportunities for students living in dedicated student accommodation to enhance their learning. And because students who live together in close quarters will usually help and learn from each other anyway (i.e. without the help of staff), the focus of residential educators should be on the extent to which that learning was enhanced by their interventions. Residential Education is a field (not a discipline) that draws upon many disciplines to amplify and accelerate learning.
Why it's essential to have a good model:
To put it simply, in residential education, activity sprawls. The breadth of what a residential education team does seems to just expand, and expand, and expand without interruption. And even though it feels awkward to people like me who prefer to put their effort into fewer, higher-quality pieces of work, the unending sprawl is completely natural.
Residential education is organised around the principle of subsidiarity which means activity should be done at the lowest level of the organisation that can reliably carry it out. It's perfectly common for programs to be run for students by other students who are just one or two years further along in their studies. This is a way to resource the unending sprawl of programs I mentioned above, but it also tends to be more effective at engaging students, who seem to connect better with slightly older peers than much older, full-time, professional staff.
Therefore, the challenge with residential education is that it's absurdly easy for entire teams and departments, to become unfocused. The more people you rely on to carry out your programs, the more likely that some of those people will not understand the intent of the programs. This makes it more likely that your staff will simply do what they feel is right, or even what they enjoy the most, and then justify the value of that activity ex post facto (after they've already done it). If this kind of attitude is allowed to take hold, your organisation will end up using all its resources on things that kept your staff amused while those people you are all employed to serve serve (in this context: the students) receive the benefits of your services in a haphazard and random sort of way — in other words, only when luck prevails.
This gives rise to a tradeoff between creativity and control. On the one hand, you may want control what programs your people can organise to ensure they fit with the intent (perhaps through more rigorous planning and approval processes). However, if you don't let your staff be creative and design their own programs, — that they find exciting and they think are going to work — their motivation to do good work will fade.
The answer to this challenge is often a framework or a model. Having a simple, shareable representation of what the overall residential education program is trying to achieve allows team members to be creative, but also gives them some guardrails to keep them somewhat goal-directed. Sometimes organisations will adopt a model from the academic literature in its entirety, in a 'lift and shift' fashion (for example "we use Baxter-Magolda's self-authorship model"), and sometimes they make their own internal model by synthesising one or more academic models with the internal knowledge of their organisation. Whichever route is chosen, key thing is that the model actually shapes the decisions of the people in the lower levels of the organisation.
Next are some reflections on my attempts to develop the perfect model for residential education.
Version 1: wheel-style models
What is the model?
This is the most basic, uninspiring, and (sadly) the most commonplace model that exists in the Australian scene.
At the most fundamental level, the wheel-style models established a bunch of categories that represent areas of activity that students should be available to students. Those categories are almost always the 'same six' areas: social, academic, career, civic, cultural, and wellbeing activities.
They all tend to look something like this:
The underlying idea is that student development should be 'holistic' (which is why the visual motif is always a flower, or a wheel, or something circular)— an assumption that has been so accepted for so long that it's rarely discussed anymore. But as I've become more experienced in this field I have come to see it as problematic.
What was good about this model?
The wheel-style models are effective at putting some kind of structure around a program where activity is sprawling too quickly. However, I believe these models end up being more of a coping mechanism for that challenge than a solution to it.
These models can also help vanquish the perception that your organisation's programs are ad hoc. They allow you to communicate to outsiders that there's method to the madness — that sheer sprawl of activity is not only a good thing, but it's intended!
What was wrong with this model?
Besides the obvious lack of ambition I think these models are dangerous because they blur cause and effect instead of clarifying it.
It's never clear if the categories in these models are outcomes, drivers, or a mediating variable in between. They are usually a mishmash of all three.
Ultimately, services based on these models seem to end up with staff doing whatever they feel like doing, regardless of whether it's good practice or not.
Ironically, these models perpetuate the ad hoc programming they are supposed to be countering, because it gives staff an easy way to spin any activity into something educational.
In fact, a user of these models could go as far as to claim their residential education skills are so sophisticated and so nuanced it is camouflaged to literally all observers! For instance:
If a staff member got lazy and organised a last-minute pizza night? No worries, that was "social connection, acculturation and diverse peer interaction."
Or if another staff member just wanted to play video games with the students? No problem! They were "ensuring students de-stress to maintain their wellbeing."
I'm not saying that these example activities have no benefit to students, I'm simply highlighting how easy it is to claim that activities have educational value after the activity has occurred, regardless of the staff member's intentions at the design stage.
What lesson did I take into the next version?
A residential education model should help staff to delineate the desired outcomes from the drivers of those outcomes, so they can pursue activities most likely to produce the desired outcomes.
Version 2: a hierarchy-style model
What is the model?
Unlike the wheel-style models, a hierarchy-style models contain more of a mechanistic explanation for student success. It shows the user the underlying mechanics of how student success can be generated. So instead of saying to the user 'just do X' it says something like 'doing X and Y can lead to Z'.
There can be many ways to show how student success happens, and there's no definitive representation of a hierarchy-style model that trumps all others yet (but one of the most popular conceptions is to show a student lifecycle that spans their whole journey including before, during and after their studies).
The model is one such representation which I used for a time. It is a very simple summary of how a several outcomes build on each other throughout the student lifecycle. The pyramid shape helps to reinforce this idea, but hierarchical representations can take other forms too.
In this case, the four outcomes in the student journey could be rolled up into a simple mnemonic, called the student 'TRIP'. There was a lot of research and detail that sat underneath this, but in short, the four outcomes were:
Transition — means the student had made the adjustment to university life.
Retention — means the student is persisting with their education and not at risk of dropping out.
Involvement — means the student is engaged in more of what their institution has to offer, and not just the minimum requirements of their course.
Performance — means the student is achieving their goals with respect to their academic achievements and career readiness.
What was good about this model?
As the name suggests, the model doesn't treat its component parts equally. It gives primacy to one element which is held up as the ultimate goal (in this case "Performance") and articulates how the elements can contribute to that goal.
In this model there's a relationship between every element and the goal, and there's also a relationship between each of the adjacent elements. It gives the user of this model four relationships which they could think of as principles when designing a program. These are:
If students don't transition, they won't be retained.
If students aren't retained, they can't be involved.
If students aren't retained, they can't perform.
If students aren't involved, their performance is limited.
So in summary, what's good about these models is that they tend to work backwards from a goal to explain how different inputs or intermediate steps can lead to that goal being achieved; and that explanation really equips the users of these models to design better programs.
What was wrong with this model?
Ultimately what prevented this model from being effective was that the users needed to read and internalise many other materials in order to apply it.
Behind each of the slabs in this pyramid was a body of literature that offered detailed explanations of all the possibilities and pitfalls involved. Moreover, in that literature, a lot of the recommendations for good practice are not intuitive, and they tend to be expressed in unnecessarily cryptic language. So to apply this model well the user needs to be motivated enough to do the extra work, which only a few people will do. And for your organisation systematically applies the model, you need a critical mass of people to do that extra work to make it part of the culture (a big ask).
Just like the wheel models above, if people's heart isn't in it, the they will use the language from your model to justify the things they would have done in the absence of any model. Sadly, the same examples of lazy programming in the previous section can still fly once someone learns the language of this new model:
The last minute pizza night example moves from 'social' to 'involvement'
The get-paid-to-play-video-games example moves from 'wellbeing' to 'retention'
The hierarchy-style models, then, also have the effect of entrenching the user's pre-existing attitudes instead of challenging tose attitudes. So even though this type of model did succeed in helping the most motivated people to get better, it also helped the least motivated users get away with sloppy work. Then, because the effect of bad programming is is so much larger than good programming, I felt I had to abandon this style of model.
What lesson did I take into the next version?
A residential education model should speak for itself and require minimal training for someone to start understanding and applying it.
Version 3: a matrix-style model
What is the model?
Around the time I realised the PERT (pyramid) model above was failing to have the desired effect, I was enamoured by a keynote presentation at the annual conference of the Australia & New Zealand Student Services Association (ANZSSA) from Professor Lily Kong, the Provost & Lee Kong Chian Professor of Social Sciences at Singapore Management University (SMU) at the time, who was presenting on SMU's new student experience framework.
SMU had recently reviewed their student experience framework completely. By "completely" I mean they effectively pressed Ctrl+A+Delete and started over! They held nothing as sacred. From the presentation it sounded like the organisation had contemplated, in the most pure and unconstrained way possible, what kind of experience they wanted to create for their students. What they came up with was this kind of grid (see below) where students would be developed in two ways:
In different skills (e.g. thinking skills, communication skills, intra-personal skills, etc.); but also
In different domains in which to apply those skills (i.e. to contribute) which could happen on different scales (e.g. as an individual, but also as the member of a team, organisation, community, and society).
Their model looked something like this:
I was really impressed with the way the framework so explicitly acknowledged that student learning had to occur in different environments to better equip them for life beyond university. In housing, we sometimes struggle to convince our peers that a residence is ultimately is a place of learning, so I figured it had fantastic applicability to residential education.
I set up the following domains to replace the student TRIP outcomes, which were a roll-up of my university's target graduate attributes at the time, as well as two well-established lists of important learning outcomes for students in residences — which came from the Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education (CAS) and the American Association of Colleges and Universities. Here is the roll up in case you are interested:
Then I put them in a matrix with similar scales to the SMU framework, being "The Individual", "The Team" and "The Community".
The idea was that someone whose job was to develop and deliver programs could self-evaluate and self-correct on the go. All they had to do was to follow the arrows!
For example, if a residence had a really strong academic program that was deeply engaging the students who were succeeding at an individual, small group and whole-of-community level, that community could improve by broadening out its offering to include other types of non-academic student development like career readiness and global citizenship.
Or alternatively, if you encountered an individual student who was really well-rounded and showed great maturity and skill in all the areas of development, they could go to the next level by using those qualities for the benefit of a team or community they belonged to.
What was good about this model?
With everyone following this type of model, people would always have a clear idea of how they could get to the next level. And if everyone in the system could nudge themselves or others in the right direction, at all times, then the quality of programming would keep improving all the time.
I also thought this type of model really solved the problems created from the previous hierarchy-style models. The issue with matching your activity to lifecycles is that it assumes that people go through the same phases of a journey in the same sequence, and at roughly the same times. The reality is usually more messy.
In contrast to that, I felt this matrix-style model was more granular, more sensitive to differences, and still offered people a clear sense of how to improve based on wherever they were in their journey. It was kind of saying 'if you are here, then next you could go there' but where "here" and "there" were for individual students could be different places.
What was wrong with this model?
This model seemed to work okay in practice if you constantly reminded people of it.
While student leaders could understand it and see how to apply it with only about 30 minutes of training, and most of them seemed to buy into it, over time they fell back into old habits.
I also noticed over time that the names of the domains were too complex, which made them fade from people's memories. I knew this because whenever I would snap quiz someone 'what's a domain on the framework' I would only ever get the first one as an answer. To correct this, I gave people copies of the matrix to keep close at hand, I ran refresher training, and I kept reminding people to always refer back to the model.
But in the end I concluded that if there are too many elements to remember, or the names of them are lengthy, technical, or in some other way clumsy, the model doesn't permeate their perception or their thinking, which it needs to do.
What lesson did I take into the next version?
A residential education model should be lightweight enough to be memorised (or it won't get used).
Version 4: a checklist-style model
When I scratched out the matrix-style model I was feeling somewhat deflated. For the second time I had tried a thoughtful and sophisticated alternative to the basic wheel-style models and it had failed. I was starting to think I should give up.
But the time for a revolution had arrived.
There is a colleague of mine who is magically abreast of everyone is doing, everywhere. We had worked together a few years prior and continued to bounce ideas off one another on an almost weekly basis. He sent me a link to a wonderful piece of Res Ed collateral being used by the Student Affairs team at Oklahoma State Universit (OSU) which I immediately recognised as having enormous potential. It was this:
It looks too simple to be game-changing right? So what's the big innovation here? The model was direct-to-students.
This led to a huge revelation for me: throughout all the previous iterations I had been assuming that the only way that residential education programming could be mature and follow the known drivers of student success was through skilled intermediaries like myself. I thought that intermediaries should read and understand the research and then translate it for the next link in the chain, who would translate for the next link, and so on, until it reached the students. I was wrong.
This attitude has ego written all over it. It's not real thinking, it's hoping. Hoping that I would be needed (regardless of whether or not that's true). That I'm not disposable. Really, I had been trying to make a framework that said to the world "Look how much stuff I've read and synthesised. Look how knowledgeable I am. You should consult me. You should need me."
Clearly, whoever did this piece of work at OSU didn't have the same ego issues as me — the ones that Feynman laments in the introduction to this article. Instead, they must have poured their energy into trying to make things simple for other people.
When I brought this to my own institution at the time (by then, another one), I couldn't quite cut down my thinking to so few statements. I ended up with this:
They are not quite as simple as the OSU version, but they are still simple enough for me to hand out to a first year (freshman) student on their first day of university and say:
"During your whole time with us, I want you to do your best to make these statements true for you. If you get stuck — that is, if you are trying your best but one or more of them is not coming true for you — you must promise to come and talk to a member of staff about it. Can you commit to that?" |
And I think this share-ability directly to the student (the removal of intermediarie) is the most profound improvement I ever made.
What seems good about this model?
I say "seems" because I am in the process of trialling it now and am waiting to see if it is superior and by how much.
I am expecting this model will have a number of advantages over the previous ones. Not least of which is because it incorporates the lessons learned from the previous attempts:
It's simple but not simplistic.
It requires no further explanation or training to start applying it.
It's communicates the drivers of success. It tells people what works.
It is lightweight enough to remember.
I think it also has another game-changing quality to it:
Students can use the model as a starting point when they want to reflect and potentially self-diagnose why their university experience isn't going so well. Once again, this requires no explanation or training. The student would read the statements aloud and if one of them didn't feel true for them, that's probably what they need to work on next, making it true(r)!
For example, if a student feels "down" or "sad" this actually a quite vague notion which is hard to address. But if the statement "I am connected to others" doesn't feel true for them, that's a little more specific. It's linked to the drivers of success and, crucially, it tells the student or the staff member that a very promising intervention would be to help that student to get more networked and make some new friends.
It gives the student a really, simple, clear map to success. It tells them how to go about managing their own success from moment-to-moment and it gives them a trigger for when they should be seeking the help of a staff member. Moreover, the staff using this model to support students have not made themselves irrelevant, they made themselves more relevant.
This, in turn, reduces the time spent by staff translating their knowledge for students, which rationalises their time and makes the whole system more efficient. They can use their new discretionary time to create new or better opportunities for students to actually get in and do the things that make a difference: to develop resilience, get connected, embrace challenges, seek support, and invest time and energy into educational pursuits.
What might be wrong with this model?
I'll let you know! It is still too early to know, but I am dreading the day when I observe some kind of fatal flaw in the way it's being used, but if that happens, I will come back and expand on this article and share what I try next.
Conclusion
At the beginning I drew a distinction between "wannabe sophistication" where people use complicated language to exaggerate to others how profound their ideas are and prevent outside interference with "true sophistication" where you know something so well you can explain it simply.
With wannabe sophistication you can claim to be thinking about what your audience needs, but you are truly thinking about yourself. Then, you will inevitably arrive at the conclusion that "the audience needs me" and set about designing systems that rely on you. I've come to recognise any situation where I think I'm needed as a signal that I haven't developed my thinking on that topic enough.
I also said that I stopped looking dumb when I stopped trying to look smart. In this example I've tried to replace a complex theory with four sentences on a page. It sounds dumb when I put it that way, but it could be one of the smarted things I've ever done.
