Professional staff are often the first contact students have with a college: a phone call to student services, a meeting with financial aid officers, facilities and operations staff while walking across campus, bookstore clerks, and a wide range of other personnel. Their interactions with students can set the stage for student success. Specifically, professional staff need to be engaged in system-changing efforts, be more involved in the development and implementation of campus-wide interventions, and to have a clear understanding of their important role in ensuring student success.

IEBC’s Caring Campus

IEBC has a proven method for engaging with professional staff to create a Caring Campus that ensures they are deeply involved in student success. Because it is beyond, but complementary to, the traditional staff development model, it involves deep coaching of professional staff. This means working with every student service and operations department that engages with students—directly or indirectly—at every point in the student’s experience, from connection to completion. Every staff member engages in a series of behavioral commitments around how they interact with students.

This is not traditional customer service training. According to the dictionary, a coach instructs in the fundamentals and directs strategy. That is what IEBC’s Caring Campus coaches do with professional staff: transmit knowledge about the fundamentals of what can be done to increase student connectedness to the college, which leads to increases in student success. Coaches also help departments and divisions to develop a strategy, grounded in behavioral commitments, that they can easily implement campus-wide.

As a result of this work, professional staff become engaged with students on a level that has not occurred before. The core benefit of this work is making a connection with students, many of whom have not had an adult who has cared about them in an educational system. This connection cannot be overestimated. As documented by Tinto in his seminal work on engagement Leaving College (1993), students leave because they do not feel connected to the institution; but that can be successfully addressed. We like to note that students come where they feel welcome and stay where they feel cared for.

In a research brief about Caring Campus, the Community College Research Center notes: 

• Caring Campus successfully positions staff as respected change makers.
• Caring Campus cultivates a sense of unity.
• Caring Campus enhances staff knowledge.
• Professional staff are also able to build their leadership skills and strengthen interpersonal relationships in ways that can lay the groundwork for future innovation and student-centered practices.
• Caring Campus has the potential to improve equity.

The Caring Campus process also integrates professional staff with the work of the faculty in support of student success, thus creating a true partnership among colleagues. An unanticipated benefit of this process is that, in evaluations of the initiative and its implementation at their college, professional staff report being happier about their work, are assuming more leadership in student success efforts, and that there is more collegiality among faculty and professional staff members.

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