by Anna Bentley & Sarah Norek

In this conversation, you’ll hear Anna and Sarah discuss what it’s been like to be in learning environments for topics and skills unrelated to their OAS and ASC work, and teasing out how the experience and what they’ve been noticing about themselves in these spaces and this learning undeniably informs their work OAS and ASC work.  

We (Anna and Sarah) decided to try recording our conversation, rather than writing about it. If you prefer to read the transcript, that’s available too, or if you want to speed it all up, you should be able to change your playback settings. In this conversation, we didn’t get into how our learning experiences feel different from something like professional development, but it’s something we started talking about afterwards too (spoiler: we think it’s related to the fact that we’re in low-stakes, ungraded environments and we’re not responsible to bring the learning back or apply it to our roles, it just ends up that we do and we can, still).

Let us know what you think of this format or any questions/things you’re thinking about related to this topic! And thanks for listening 😊.

by Anna Bentley

Have you ever facilitated a meeting or taught a class that left you wondering, “Were they actually interested in this topic, or were they secretly bored out of their minds? Did I make any sense at all? Did they get anything out of that? Did I make everyone feel included?” Sometimes it feels impossible to read the room, and in those moments, I doubt my facilitation skills. And when you’re not sure what topics and facilitation moves are exciting for folks and which are dreadful, it’s hard to know how to adapt your next meeting to better suit their needs.

Last year was my first year supervising a small group of student employees and facilitating their weekly professional development meetings. Sometimes I’d ask student employees individually what they thought of the meeting afterwards, but I feared they were just being polite and giving me praise, being put on the spot like that. I mean, it’s hard to tell your supervisor, “Yeah, that meeting totally sucked. Your prompts made no sense, and you were way off your game. What were you thinking?!”

Tired of guessing how things landed for them, I knew I needed a system for feedback, but I wanted something that would capture everyone’s thoughts and would also be a tool for them to continue to engage with what they just learned. What I created was an anonymous paper evaluation form that both captured their thoughts and gave them a brief moment to connect what they just learned to their role. I chose a paper form intentionally, as folks integrate connections and meaning differently through writing compared to typing. I designed the form to be simple yet have lots of opportunity for optional open-ended feedback. I set aside the last five minutes of every meeting for everyone to complete this form at once, and it became a sort of ritual, something that they expected to fill out every week. As the weeks went on, I noticed they were giving more detailed responses to the open-ended questions, perhaps because they knew there was time set aside, and their peers were all doing this at the same time too.

By gathering feedback in this way, I’ve learned so much about myself as a facilitator and have made many small but reportedly impactful changes to the way I design and deliver content. For instance, I received feedback very quickly that our training agenda handouts were long and overwhelming. My colleague and I abbreviated the agenda the following week and heard that it was much more digestible. Some folks also commented that they wanted more time for group discussion after small group activities, as the time I was setting aside always seemed to get cut short. I made thoughtful adjustments and set more rigid time boundaries to honor the group discussions, and that led to much richer, meaningful closing conversations.

I’d love to share this evaluation form with you in case you’re curious about implementing something similar with your students or colleagues. Now I distribute this after every meeting I facilitate, including training sessions for new student employees and team meetings I facilitate with my pro staff colleagues. Two of my favorite items in the evaluation form that participants rate and comment on are (1) “The facilitator(s) cared about what I had to say” and (2) “I felt like I could be myself in today’s meeting.” These align with the values I prioritize as a supervisor of students. As my values and objectives evolve over time, this form will too. I hope this inspires you to adapt or develop a feedback tool that works for your values and needs!

by Anna Bentley

One of the most important meetings I have at work is one you might not expect. Since July 2021, the professional staff in the Academic Success Center & Writing Center have established a practice of synchronous, individual reflection and writing time, which is scheduled every other week for one hour. Originally, this began as a way to think about our work in a different way and potentially find threads of interest for content for The Success Kitchen, though there has never been any obligation to produce anything. This is a completely voluntary space where folks are free to reflect and write about whatever they choose.

Here’s how it works. First, we check in with each other briefly, and then we leave the meeting to reflect and write for 40 minutes. There are prompts to guide us if we want to use them, but we are free to write about anything we choose. After 40 minutes, we rejoin the meeting and take turns sharing as much or as little as we want about what we wrote.

Example prompts:

1. What is something a student has said or shared recently that you’d like to think more about or reflect on?
2. Talk about a recent leadership experience that’s on your mind. What was meaningful to you about that experience? If there were any challenges, how did you work through them?
3. What’s a favorite memory from your own learning experiences (in any context)? What made that experience valuable and important to you?

Through writing and reflection, we make space to generate ideas and insights, process experiences and emotions, deepen our awareness and understanding, make meaning and connections, feed creative energy, and develop our writing skills. I certainly have benefited from our collective reflection time. Before this, I had never had a writing practice, and I used to feel intimidated by a blank page. Now I find joy in writing freely and have grown more confident in my writing skills. I’ve used the time to write about work, draft articles like this for The Success Kitchen, journal and process emotions, make goals and lists, and even write poetry and fiction.

It’s been a gift to explore many facets of writing without any obligation to produce or perform, and it’s positively impacted the way I work. A few months ago, I began supervising a team of student staff after going many years without supervising anyone. I’ve used our reflection practice to unpack and discover my values around how I show up as a supervisor, a colleague, a parent, and a friend. Having the time to intentionally articulate who I want to be has made a difference in my relationships and my journey as a supervisor.

Beyond the practice of writing, what has made our reflection practice particularly powerful is what we get out of sharing with each other. Any of us could write on our own, but doing this together and sharing allows us to make connections and offer support to each other. Listening to my colleagues’ reflections inspires me and leads us to exploring ideas we otherwise may not have considered. We sometimes find, coincidentally, that our reflections are related, and we generate new ideas by hearing each other’s perspectives. Sometimes we share the emotions and challenges we’re experiencing, and our colleagues support us through that. Perhaps that is what I love the most about reflection and sharing – that it can be whatever kind of space you want or need it to be in that moment, and we’re able to connect on a different level than we can in other spaces.

As a unit, we find meaning in processing what we’re experiencing, articulating our ideas, sharing with each other, validating what each of us brings to the table, and supporting each other as whole people. To make this a reality, we put this on our calendars and count this as work. I’m energized by this practice, excited to see what’s possible, and curious to hear what beautiful, powerful ideas others have within them.

by Anna Bentley

Behavioral activation is a common approach to treating depression that involves improving mood by engaging in pleasurable or rewarding activities. These behaviors disrupt the cycle of inactivity that fuels and prolongs depression. Behavioral activation strategies can vary for everyone, but may include things like writing in a journal, going out for coffee, hiking, or watching a movie with a friend.

You don’t need to be experiencing depression to benefit from behavioral activation. The same strategies that improve our mood also help prevent burnout and increase productivity at work or school when we’re feeling stuck, overwhelmed, or unmotivated. Here are the steps to practice this approach:

1. Identify activities that bring you pleasure. There are several activity lists online that can be used for inspiration, or you can make your own list from scratch. If using a pre-made list, start by highlighting the activities you really enjoy and that reliably bring you pleasure. Cross off the things that aren’t for you.
2. Rate the activities you identified by how easy they are to complete and how rewarding they are. This worksheet can help you complete this. For me, I found that sitting down for a fresh cup of coffee is very easy for me to complete but has short-lived rewards, while going on a long hike is highly rewarding yet more difficult to complete.
3. Schedule activities that will give you positive experiences in your day. Here’s another tool you can use to schedule these activities, or you can use our weekly calendar. Start with simple activities that are easiest to integrate into your day, and build from there. You might start by just adding one rewarding activity in the morning, building that routine, and then adding more activities over time.

A core principle behind why behavioral activation works is that action often precedes emotion. Sometimes at work or at school, we want to wait until we’re motivated before we start a project. However, the action of engaging in a rewarding activity can give us the energy we need to fuel our work. Maybe you’ve had an experience where you found yourself more vibrant and energized once you got going on a project, even though you were initially reluctant to start.

Next time you notice a lack of motivation or the temptation to procrastinate, I invite you to consider how you can bring pleasure into the experience. Here are a few rewarding activities that I sometimes schedule into my day while I’m working on campus:

• Start the day with a fresh cup of coffee, and take a minute to really savor it before starting my work.
• Write down my intention for the day as soon as I get into the office.
• Listen to a special Spotify playlist whenever I’m completing a repetitive task.
• Have walking meetings with my colleagues when possible.
• Go on a short walk around campus during my lunch break. Sometimes I like to visit a building I’ve never been inside before, or I like to take pictures of beautiful things I discover on campus, like trees, flowers, and artwork.
• Send an email to campus partners I haven’t spoken with for a while, just to say hello.
• Doodle in my notebook between back-to-back meetings for a quick mental reset.

Intentionally integrating these pleasurable and rewarding activities into my day gives me the boost of energy I need when I’m feeling unmotivated. What activities bring you energy, help clear your mind, or inspire inspiration? What would it look like to schedule those activities into your work? Share your ideas with us in the comments!

by Anna Bentley

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been so much individual and collective loss. In one way or another, all of us have grieved or are still grieving the loss of something — from loved ones, to the sudden disruptions in school and work, to the plans we had for our lives that didn’t include a pandemic. Perhaps all of us hoped early on that we would “defeat” COVID or “get back to normal,” but now we’re realizing we’re going to have to adapt to a new kind of future. How do we move forward while also acknowledging each other’s grief and loss?

When thinking of this question, I’m inspired by Dr. Shawn Ginwright’s The Future of Healing: Shifting from Trauma Informed Care to Healing Centered Engagement. How can we create environments for well-being in our communities and in our work here at OSU in the midst of COVID-19, the climate crisis, racial injustice, and our personal hardships? Here are a few insights inspired by Ginwright’s piece and my own lived experience that help me reconcile how I can look forward to the future without glossing over the very real suffering that so many of us are experiencing.

1. We can experience grief and joy at the same time. Human beings are complex, and we’re capable of experiencing hope, joy, inspiration, and fulfillment in the midst of great loss. We don’t need to ignore or forget about our grief in order to experience joy. In the Academic Success Center & Writing Center, one way we’ve made space for this at work is by having multiple intentional conversations about how we’re feeling with the return to campus. I think we all have felt some combination of excitement, nervousness, and confusion about in-person activities at OSU. For me, talking about this openly validated my feelings, helped me process some of my grief, and made room for me to enjoy working on campus again.

2. Individual and collective healing are interconnected. We can’t create and sustain environments for well-being when we’re consistently overwhelmed, burned out, and not present. We have to do our own inner work to process our emotions and experiences so that we can support our students, work to dismantle oppressive systems, and create environments for well-being. Just like our individual well-being impacts the spaces and communities of which we’re a part, the well-being of our community can create space for our individual healing. I think about what that looks like for me in the context of OSU. How does the way I show up to work impact the well-being of my colleagues, campus partners, and the spaces I occupy? Where are the groups and spaces on campus where I feel safe and reenergized and that promote my healing? In what ways can our department expand how we support students’ well-being and create spaces where everyone feels safe, celebrated, and empowered and knows that they belong?

3. Designing inclusive environments for well-being requires collaboration. If we’re going to create environments for well-being where everyone belongs and feels safe, we need to work together, and we’ll need everyone’s hopes, dreams, ideas, and imagination. In order to do that well, we need to practice collaboration on a regular basis so we can further develop those skills. We collaborate frequently in the ASC & Writing Center, from engaging with the Student Affairs Priority to writing blog posts like this one. For this blog, collaboration looks like meeting as a team to discuss ideas for topics, deciding together who will be writing and who will be a “writing buddy,” and meeting with our writing buddies to gather feedback on drafts. Collaboration is a practice that requires learning and unlearning, humility, confidence to share our voice, openness to listening and receiving, and a willingness to redistribute power. Collaborating daily on different projects, big and small, gives us opportunities to continuously cultivate those skills.

Dr. Shawn Ginwright’s piece invites me to consider my role in creating conditions for well-being at work and in my community so that we can build a bright and more equitable future. What helps you hope for and imagine a bright future in the midst of great hardship? What does collaboration look like in your department or circles outside of work? I’d love to hear your ideas in the comments.

 by Anna Bentley

Please visit this document for an accessible version of this article.

In support of the Division of Student Affairs (DSA) Priority, the Academic Success Center & Writing Center identified areas of our work to critically examine in order to create more equitable student success outcomes.

Our unit holds a shared value around equity work and engaging with the Priority. During the 2020-2021 academic year, we engaged in a year-long exploration of four topics:

(1) Equity in recruitment and hiring of student employees

(2) Merit’s impact on equity and student success

(3) Research, literature, and theory

(4) Work culture/decision-making

We designed a structure for learning about these topics that emphasized shared responsibility and a collaborative approach.

Shared Responsibility to Equity Work

Sometimes we don’t know how to make things better when systems produce inequitable outcomes. We may feel like we need to be an expert in a topic before we offer our ideas, or we need to have an expert tell us what to do in order to make changes. But when it comes to transforming systems and programs that we affect through our decisions and leadership, we can’t wait for an expert to emerge or for us all to know everything before we move forward.

Our team knew that we had a lot to learn about our topic areas, and we all came to the table with different perspectives and degrees of understanding. However, we also acknowledged that we are experts in our own experiences, we are all capable of facilitating conversations, and we all have a responsibility to equity work. With this in mind, we designed an approach to learning together where we had shared responsibility for leading our team’s learning.

Our Collaborative Learning Approach

Each topic for exploration was led by 2-3 members of the ASC & Writing Center. We started by creating milestone documents so we could define our project scope and goals, plan for learning activities, identify takeaways and possible actions, document actions we would take, and create an assessment plan. This structure kept us from rushing the process and jumping to action right away before we were engaged in exploration and learning. Milestone documents also held us accountable to taking action instead of staying in the learning phase indefinitely. The visual below offers a brief description of our milestone documents and the timeline for our projects.

Though we all shared a common timeline and framework for our approach to learning, our topic leaders facilitated topics in ways that were unique to them. Some of our activities included writing about our personal experiences, answering prompts related to selected readings, interviewing campus partners, and creating comprehensive project summaries. Group discussions followed nearly all of these activities so we could hear each other’s ideas and experiences and further our learning together. Topic leads designed learning activities, but everyone in our unit contributed to learning by engaging in group activities. Designing this structure for collaborative learning gave us a greater sense of engagement with the DSA Priority and a deeper understanding of other perspectives, while also developing our team facilitation skills. This graphic below describes our topics for the 2020-2021 academic year.

Looking Ahead

At the end of the last academic year, we assessed our approach to engaging with the DSA Priority and continued to improve our learning process. Moving forward, we’re keeping our milestone documents and our collaborative, facilitative approach. This year we’ll explore four new topics, exploring two topics throughout summer and fall and two topics in winter and spring.

As we begin exploring a new set of topics, we’re keeping in mind that we must constantly revisit and apply what we’ve already learned. We still have a lot to do to transform our practices, processes, and policies to improve student success and produce equitable outcomes for Students of Color. We’re committed to ongoing learning, critically examining our approach to serving students, and positively transforming our systems and structures.