Topic: Facilitation and Processing Goal: To lead a successful discussion with the students about their experience with on-campus living and their relationship with the fellow, roommates, hall mates, and Resident Advisors (RA) of their residence hall. Also summarize how to apply for housing for the following year. Activities: Give a background of my living situation freshmen year and my experiences as an RA in a freshmen building for two years. Hold a discussion about the students’ own living experiences and go over the choices of living they have for their sophomore year. Evidence: Include a summary of the students’ remarks and a brochure summarizing how the housing application/sign-up process works and include descriptions of the various residence halls they could live in. From my experiences dealing with students' roommate issues ranging from having a roommate who drank and partied all the time, to having a roommate who stole your favorite hair brush, it is clear that a student's experience in the residence halls can make or break their college experience. This is why I took the opportunity to have a discussion on everyone's on-campus housing experience. I wanted to make it clear to my 101 students that the RAs are there to help you and act as a resource first, not to be the strict parent that everybody hates. I also felt the need to expand this presentation to cover housing applications for next year. The majority of my students are in the Talent Development program, which means that they must stay on-campus until the end of their junior year. I took this opportunity to discuss the pros/cons of each residence hall that they could live in next year, as well as explaining how to physically "sign-up" for housing, which is now a completely online process. I also included resources about off-campus housing for those who might be interested to live "down the line" in the future. |
Evidence:
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David also developed a discuss that went really well with my plan. Basically we started the class with me doing my presentation on the housing sign-up process for next year. I was pleasantly surprised with the amount of questions I was getting, and was glad that my advice was helping to clarify the whole process. Even though the presentation only took a little more than ten minutes, I spent 15 afterwards answering specific questions about housing (not just limited to signing up next year, but also about the room change process this year). After this, I helped David run his discussion about the god and bad of URI's on-campus facilities. The instructions are listed under evidence, and we essentially had the class split into groups to evaluate one of three focus areas (academics, housing, extra-curricular). I transcribed the main points students brought up during our discussion, some of which were very thought-provoking. It is always nice to hear feedback, whether positive or negative, about particular aspects of campus life, and hopefully this discussion helped to get our students to understand that they can also take initiative to make college what they want it to be. |
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