For People Who Struggle with Evaluations

Sometimes something hits you so squarely in the face that you wonder how you hadn't seen it all along. As a co-chair of our RA Training committee for the past few months, I've had the opportunity to be part of a fabulous process wherein we deconstructed RA training and built it from the ground up on the RAs' job descriptions and on how we evaluate them by, *gasp*, using the RA yearly evaluation to inform what we taught our RAs during training. That has been a phenomenal process and we were even able to streamline and condense a monstrous training into a svelte nine-day affair.

That being said, I recently had to cancel all of my one-on-ones with my summer RAs because it's Hall Coordinator and RA training season and I just didn't have the time any longer. So I instituted weekly reports instead. Now, during the year I meet semi-monthly with my RAs and have them send in a weekly report e-mail during the off weeks. For the summer -- because of its shortness and the fewer residents per RA -- I did away with weeklies to give the summer RAs time to enjoy life at a summer's pace. But I had an epiphany about the weeklies and decided to, *gasp*, use the RA evaluation to inform how I structured the weekly report template.

For example: One of the facets of the position on which we evaluate our RAs is how well they've been a Counselor to their residents. So one of the questions on the template asks them to tell me how they've been a Counselor during the past week and I provide examples drawn from the categories listed underneath "Counselor" on the evaluation. I have the hardest time filling out evaluations with meaningful commentary so I figure this will give me documentation of things they've done (and probably done well if they're volunteering the information!).

Just thought I'd share that nugget of wisdom. I shared it at a staff meeting today and everyone was amazed and took a note, even though I thought I would be the last one to realize we should do things that way.