S.T.E.P.
Student Training & Education Program
Plemmons Student Union
An Educational Approach to Designing Student Employment Programs
This manual outlines the S.T.E.P. program used by the Plemmons Student Union (PSU) at Appalachian State University. The intention of the S.T.E.P. program is to identify and develop opportunities for student learning during employment in the college union.
While most union professionals will quickly attest to the value of the student employment experience, much of the learning that occurs is incidental to the performance of tasks associated with various work positions. By developing an approach to student employment which incorporates intentional strategies such as learning outcomes surveys, core values, mission statements, employee transcripts, exit surveys and training techniques utilizing video production, you can offer students a co-curricular experience that will complement their classroom learning and foster their personal development.
As students begin to understand the educational element of their employment, and view their job not simply as a position, but as a process of learning – the quality of their work performance improves. The PSU has seen dramatic increases in the quality of customer service, work pride, and employee retention, and a decrease in absenteeism and tardiness after implementing the S.T.E.P. program.
While the S.T.E.P is heavily oriented toward our primary contacts with students during job interviews and semester training, its success lies in maintaining a year-long emphasis on the student union as a learning environment, with long-range opportunities for leadership growth, skills achievement, and solidifying a sense of community.
Through the S.T.E.P.,we feel we can bring greater value to a worker’s experience by providing a language to the student, a language that she will then use to make sense out of her particular union assignments. We generally refer to this as the language of learning outcomes. This language allows student workers to see their work assignments and peer interactions within the union as an opportunity for skills achievement, and as a complement to their classroom learning. The goal is to have them articulate for themselves the correlation between work task and learning outcomes, and the importance of skill outcomes in developing as an individual and as a job-seeking graduate of Appalachian.
A common problem with part-time, minimum wage employment is not that students lack the language to understand their work experience, but that their language is merely descriptive. If we ask a typical Operations Assistant staff what she has learned on a given day, she would most likely reply: Nothing, or at best, I’ve learned how to vacuum, stack tables and chairs, and straighten up the lounge. This also illustrates the tendency to view experiences as isolated and unconnected, rather than forming a coherent, integrated experience, which brings meaning and purpose to the work experience, and enhances motivation.
The purpose of an educational training program, then, is twofold: One, communicate to the student the broader context in which her work is performed (how their work affects the campus), and two, focus more on the skills learned in the performance of a task, rather than focusing on the task alone when discussing what it is that a student is doing while at work.
Building a Cathedral
We generally begin our training session with the following story:
The other day I was walking down the road and I saw three men laying stones with mortar. I came up to the first man and asked what he was doing. He replied, “I’m laying stones.” I asked if he enjoyed his work. He replied, “No! I hate it.” I went up to the second man and asked what he was doing. Although his work was no further along than the first man, he replied, “I’m building a wall.” When I asked if he enjoyed his work, he replied, “Yea, it’s pretty good. It puts food on the table.” I then came upon the third man, who was also at the same level of stone laying, and asked what he was doing. He replied, “I’m building a cathedral.” When asked if he enjoyed his work, he replied, “Yes, very much. It’s the greatest job in the world.”
This story illustrates the way in which students often see their work at the student union. Often they see what they are doing as simply performing a specific task, without much consequence other than the task’s immediate completion. They generally look at what they do as existing within the context of a work shift, and measure what they do by the amount of work completed in a given number of hours. This, of course, would be the perspective of the first stone layer. The third stone layer sees the bigger picture, and understands his specific tasks having the consequence of a larger and much grander design. The value he finds in his work has a lot to do with him seeing his work as it will effect others, in this case as a structure where people will come together for a common message through worship. Obviously, getting the students to see this bigger picture is one of the first goals of the S.T.E.P.
This story is followed by reading Appalachian’s Mission Statement. We then pose the question, “How does the student union advance the university’s educational mission?” After brainstorming input from the student workers, we introduce a statement that sums up recent national education findings: The most significant growth in a student’s development occurs outside of the classroom, during peer interaction. This is generally a novel idea among the students, and often contrary to their presuppositions about their education.
We now address the statement above on two levels. First, we discuss where on a campus do these out-of-classroom, peer interactions occur: residence halls, intramurals, meals, organization meetings, etc. Then we brainstorm the numerous opportunities for this interaction in the student union: training in the fitness center, eating meals in restaurants, socializing in the coffeehouse, group study in lounges, attending dances and bands, recreation in the game room and during the numerous meetings and special events held by student organizations. We emphasize that during these interactions, ideas are exchanged and discussed, social roles are challenged and assumed, and behaviors are modeled and modified. We also indicate that in the union’s numerous meetings, students are given leadership roles where they develop their organizational and personal skills.
We sum this up by stating that the student workers further the university’s education mission when they manage the game room or complete a room set-up -- because– they are facilitating environments where peer interaction and learning can occur. Each task that they complete, even in a small way, has the consequence of becoming an opportunity for students to interact, discuss ideas, and to practice leadership.
In this way you are able to describe the union’s integral role in furthering the university’s educational mission, which expands how the student will view the union and the influence of their work on the Appalachian campus.
We now bring a more narrow emphasis to the above statement, and look at the student’s own work as a peer-interactive, out-of-class experience that also occurs within the student union. We indicate that student workers develop and learn through peer interaction just as other students do who use the union, but also in the performance of their particular union work assignments. For example, in the normal course of an Information Desk Attendant’s work, she is able to work on communication, self confidence, problem solving, critical thinking, resourcefulness, and refinement of conduct and manners. In another example, in completing two room set-ups and making a round of the building, an Operations Assistant develops her leadership through time management (prioritizing assignment), delegation (getting who to do what), and communication (expressing your expectations/motivation).
To this point, everything discussed above is intended to provide a rationale for the students regarding the value of an educational student training program. The intention here has been to articulate the basis (and reasoning) of our overall training in the manner that it would be presented to our student workers.