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		Beyond Traditional Staffing Patterns in Residence Halls: Leadership at Whitworth College By Richard Mandeville Associate Dean of Students Whitworth College Developed in the 1980's, the leadership program at Whitworth College was designed to reflect a wellness model, recognizing that each person has multiple components, each uniquely contributing to the person's growth and maturation. While noting these distinct components, the leadership program also mirrors the staff positions in our Student Life Division's administrative structure including staff in charge of the health center, the chapel, residence life, student government, career services, and diversity. The directors of these programs have specific areas of responsibility and meet as part of the Student Life Directors group to coordinate services and programs for students. Similarly, the leadership team for each living area on campus includes student leaders who have particular areas of expertise and programming interests. They are also charged with working as members of a larger, more diverse team to create a community in their living area that encourages the development and maturation of the students residing there. All of this is done within the context of Whitworth's mission as a Christian liberal arts college. Each student leader, other than those who are Resident Assistants, has dual reporting responsibilities, first to the Student Life Director who trains them in their specialty area, and second to the Resident Director who coordinates the leadership team for their particular residence hall or living area. While members of the leadership team each work a different number of hours, they are paid at the same hourly rate. Resident Assistants (One RA per floor or per House, or about one for every twenty students. Assigned to work 16 hours a week. On "duty" eight times a month. Report to their Resident Director.) Similar to their counterparts at other institutions, RAs at Whitworth are charged with developing relationships with each individual on their floor, and as well as creating social and educational programming. While we call RAs to be relational leaders, they are also the members of the leadership team who most frequently respond to behavioral violations. "Duty" takes place during a three-hour block of time each evening in each living area. The goal of duty is to create a welcoming space where residents can take a break, connect with other students, and build a stronger sense of community. RAs do this by facilitating an activity each evening that usually takes place in the main lounge of the living area. The activity may take anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour. The content varies widely (and wildly) from night to night. Categories (and examples) of duty activities include arts and crafts (a revival of all those grade school cut and paste actives), board games (Cranium and Spoons are currently popular), the question of the night (with resident's answers written out and posted), food (creative waffles and quesadillas made from whatever they can find in the fridge), and movies (someone recently showed a "Mr.T" motivational video made twenty years ago). While the RAs have more responsibility for duty than any other leaders, every leader on the team will be on duty at least once a month, and will sometimes be responsible for creating the duty activity. Ministry Coordinators (One MC per floor or per House. Assigned to work four hours per week. On duty once a month. Report to the Dean of the Chapel.) Ministry Coordinators create programs focused on the spiritual development of students. Because the needs and interests of students vary widely, MCs have created "S" groups to address a variety of needs. The "S" could stand for Seeker, Skeptic, Study, Support, or whatever best characterizes the focus of a particular group. An MC may only lead one group in his or her hall, but will help facilitate the creation of as many groups as are needed. For example, this fall semester one of our halls with 160 students and 7 MCs had approximately nine "S" groups involving 70 students. MCs are also available to meet with students individually for personal support and encouragement. Health Coordinators (One or two HCs per living area - on average about one per 100 students. Assigned to work five hours per week. On duty twice a month. Report to the Director of the Health Center.) In the residence halls, HCs provide programs that promote wellness and address health-related issues. They receive special training as first responders to medical emergencies in the halls and are called on for problems ranging from severe lacerations to colds and headaches. They work as part of a triage, or referral, team. HCs are usually, though not exclusively, students majoring in health related fields. They also work in the health center providing a variety of services alongside the professional staff. We recently added an additional health-related position. The Resident EMT (Emergency Medical Technician) is trained in emergency response and helps to coordinate after-hours care on campus. The student in this role assists HCs with more complicated cases and responds to 911 calls that originate from campus. Cultural Diversity Advocates (one per living area, or roughly one per 150 students. Assigned to work nine hours per week. On duty once a month. Report to the Assistant Dean for Programming and Diversity.) The primary goal for the students occupying the CDA role is building connections between international students, domestic multi-cultural students and majority culture students. CDAs are trained in cross-cultural communication. They help organize and run orientation for international students at the beginning of the year. As a result they are in a unique position to develop relationships with these students. Because they live in the residence halls, they are more aware of the particular adjustment issues that international students are encountering. CDAs create programs designed to educate majority students on diversity and cultural awareness. They also assist in several campus-wide programs such as our international banquet. Hall Presidents (one or two per living area. Assigned to work 10 hours per week. On duty four times a month. Report to the associated student Executive Vice President.) Hall Presidents are the only members of the leadership teams who are elected by their peers. They are also unique in that they report to a student leader rather than to a director from the Student Life Division. Hall Presidents serve as the student government representative for each living area. They write their living area's weekly newsletter and coordinate the efforts of their residents for a number of annual programs including Homecoming, Community Building Day, and Parents Weekend. Training The Student Life Directors and the Resident Directors coordinate training. Leaders arrive eight days prior to the opening of the residence halls. They spend the largest portion of each day receiving training for their particular position (RAs in one class, CDAs in another, etc.) Delivered by the various directors, these "position" sessions are designed to equip the students in each leadership position the specialized skills they need (for example, mediating roommate conflicts for RAs; learning cross cultural communication skills for CDAs; understanding confidentiality and performing triage for HCs; leading small groups for MCs; and running effective meetings for Hall Presidents) All the leaders meet together for one training session each day. These sessions concentrate on skills or topics of a general nature that apply to all student leaders, such as "Leading with Integrity" or "Building Healthy Relationships". Finally, each training day concludes with student leaders in their living area or residence hall team. Depending on the number of students residing in the living area, the leadership teams include eight to ten RAs, a similar number of MCs, one or two HCs, CDAs, and Hall Presidents. Facilitated by the Resident Directors, the leadership teams focus on identifying goals for their team and community for the coming year, clarifying needs of their residents and creating specific programs to address those needs, and preparing for the opening orientation meetings with new residents. During the academic year, all student leaders enroll in a one-credit course, Leadership in Community. The weekly course is organized so that in the course of a month, leaders will meet twice by position and twice in their leadership team. Once a semester, all student leaders will meet together for training. Benefits The first set of benefits of our leadership program derives from increasing the number and types of leadership positions. By providing positions with different requirements and foci, we attract a wider cross-section of our student body. Barker and Gump (1964) point out the importance of having a greater number of "opportunities for satisfaction and participations for each individual" (Chickering, p. 301). Increasing the number of leaders means more students are experiencing our leadership training. The rewards of holding a leadership position are well documented, reflecting gains in social concern and altruistic values (Pascarella, Ethington, and Smart, 1988). Juniors and seniors fill the majority of our leadership positions, increasing the number of upper class students who live on campus. According to Astin, the characteristics of the peer group "produce some of the strongest . . . effects on student development" (Astin, 351). Astin recommends designing co-curricular programs to take advantage of this influence. By increasing the percentage of upper class students on campus, the leadership program influences the student culture. While our program has increased the number and type of leadership positions, the actual weekly hours required from most leaders has been reduced to ten or fewer hours. This allows students to benefit from being in leadership while avoiding the possible curvilinear relationship between participation in co-curricular activities and personal growth (Kuh, 9). That is, the benefits of involvement increase as the level of involvement increases, but only to a point. Once the level of involvement or the number of hours a student invests in the co-curricular experience becomes too high, the benefits diminish. By keeping the weekly commitment lower, we hope that students are able to be involved in leadership without negatively affecting other areas of their lives. The second set of benefits of the leadership program relates to the collaborative experience the program creates for students and full-time staff. Being a member of a team in which multiple roles and perspectives are represented more closely resembles the work world that students encounter after college. The program also necessitates collaboration between all Student Life Directors. Directors work in concert to design the selection process, the initial training schedule, and the leadership class. Directors are responsible for training their leaders, giving them the opportunity to teach and the potential to develop mentoring relationships. One final benefit of our leadership program is the programmatic, community-building focus of "duty". Every evening in every living area, our leaders are creating fun, sometimes provocative activities that draw students together. We believe duty makes our student leaders more visible, more available, and more relationally focused. Challenges While the leadership program has significant benefits, it is not without challenges. We have been successful in increasing the number of leadership positions. But, in doing so, our leadership teams now range from sixteen to twenty-five students. The size of the teams makes it more difficult for Resident Directors to provide individual attention to students and to create a sense of cohesiveness among team members. A second continuing challenge our program faces is that on a team of sixteen to twenty-five students, there may be only one (and never more than two) student who occupies the CDA, HC or HP role. Because of the larger number of RAs and MCs students in the other positions sometimes feel marginalized or experience greater difficulty in being heard. A final challenge for program is one associated with any position that reports to two supervisors. The Directors hire for their particular leadership position and meet throughout the year with their student leaders to conduct training classes. But the Resident Director has more opportunity to observe the daily interactions of that student leader with residents and within the leadership team. In order to have a complete picture of how well a student leader does her or her job, the RD's and Directors need consistent opportunities to communicate with each other. Creating formal and informal opportunities for that communication is difficult. Conclusion In 1990, the Carnegie Commission published Campus Life: In Search of Community. The monograph cited the need students had for deeper experiences of community. If anything, the desire of students to experience community, to belong to something larger than themselves, has increased. One of the outcomes and ongoing goals of the leadership program at Whitworth College is to help students see that they are part of a larger community to which they are responsible (Carnegie, 54). The program increases the number of students holding positions with significant levels of responsibility. They are placed on a team with peers who have diverse specialties, but who all are committed to creating a healthy community in their living area. They are trained and supervised by Student Life Directors and Resident Directors in very low student: teacher ratios, encouraging the possibility of mentoring relationships. The challenges associated with developing and managing a leadership program like this one are considerable. It requires coordination and a serious commitment of staff hours. However, the benefits of the leadership program are significant. The peer culture is positively impacted because of the presence of more juniors and seniors in the living areas. Staff benefit from the opportunity to select, train, and supervise a specialized group of leaders in an environment that requires collaboration in order to succeed. The student leaders themselves are the beneficiaries of the most important outcomes of the leadership program. The program ensures that more students are experiencing leadership training, accruing the growth associated with being in a leadership role, and participating in a collaborative work environment with a team of students. References: Astin, A.W. (1993). What Matters in college? Four critical years revisited. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Barker, R.G. & Gump, P.V. (1964). Big School, Small School. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. (1990). Campus Life: In Search of Community. Lawrenceville, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Chickering, A.W. & Reisser, L. (1993). Education and Identity. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Kuh, G., Schuh, J.H., & Whitt, E.J. and Associates (1991). Involving Colleges: Encouraging Student Learning and Personal Development Through Out-of-Class Experience. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Pascarella, E.T., Ethington, C.A., and Smart, J.C. "The Influence of College on Humanitarian / Civic Involvement Values." Journal of Higher Education, 1988, 59, 412-437. About the Author Richard Mandeville is the Associate Dean of Students at Whitworth College, a Christian liberal arts college affiliated with the Presbyterian Church, USA. Prior to coming to Whitworth, he worked at Western Montana College and at the University of Northern Colorado, where he earned a Ph.D. in College Student Personnel Administration. His dissertation, which studied predictors of student involvement in co-curricular activities, was awarded the Graduate Dean's Citation for Excellence. He has served as Director of Student Life for Semester at Sea. In addition to his administrative role at Whitworth, he teaches in the college's Leadership Studies program.