The Transformation Team is a small group of leaders who lead or manage work in at least one of the ITA topic areas, who will take a comprehensive survey and participate in the resulting Sensemaking Conversation. Your participation contributes to a method that builds on the shared values of institutions working to narrow attainment gaps and improve student outcomes.
The Student Success Community is a larger group of practitioners from across campus who will take an abbreviated version of the comprehensive survey and contribute to your institution leaders’ ability to reflect on current student success efforts.
The Institutional Transformation Assessment tool and the Sense Making process help postsecondary institutions reflect on existing student success efforts and the organizational structures that support them. It helps an institution learn more about its areas of strength and improvement, which are a critical input to prioritizing and planning further action to enhance equitable student success.
The Institutional Transformation Assessment is driven by a Sensemaking Conversation, which is a facilitated meeting that enables deep reflection with a diverse, cross-functional group of institutional leaders, faculty, and staff.
The Sensemaking Conversation is informed by an online perception survey – which provides insight into current perceptions of student success activities by different stakeholders on a campus. This survey generates custom individual and aggregate reports.
The perception survey is supported by rubrics. They drive broad reflection across 11 unique but integrated topic areas central to institutional transformation for equitable student success. The rubrics for these topics were created by leading experts in each
subject area.
The entire process is described in a robust set of guides, tools, templates, and resources designed for facilitators and participants at intermediaries and institutions.
Two Gardner Institute staff will come to your campus for a facilitated group conversation that enables deep reflection with a diverse, cross-functional set of institutional stakeholders. workshop with campus leaders to discuss
The Institutional Transformation Assessment is a set of questions that can help institutional leaders identify and discuss a current snapshot of how well they think they are doing in areas that are important for achieving student success and equity. Institutions use the Institutional Transformation Assessment in different ways that work for them—it could be helpful in identifying improvement opportunities, used as an annual review to assess progress, or as an input into strategic planning. It’s important to define how the assessment fits into your institution’s continuous improvement processes and communicate that to your core team.
100+ question Transformation Team version: 45–60 minutes
30+ Student Success Community question version: 15–20 minutes
Participants are not required to complete the survey in one sitting and receive instructions to return and pick up where they left off.
The ITA builds on research and observations from the Frontier Set. This study showed that institutional transformation—the realignment of structure, culture and business model to create a student experience that results in equitable improvements in outcomes and educational value—requires institutions to integrate inclusive practices and coherent learning environments designed with students in mind while leveraging a student-centered mission, catalytic leadership, strategic data use, and strategic finance in a robust continuous improvement process. The ITA’s structure reflects this integrated approach. It helps an institution learn more about its areas of strength and improvement in each of the categories, which are all critical input to prioritizing and planning further action to enhance equitable student success.
Depending on your institution, you may use some or all of the ITA’s categories. Also, in time, more questions and categories may be added to the ITA.
For more information about institutional transformation, the Transformation Model, and plenty of examples of transformation journeys, visit postsecondarytransformation.org.
For more information about the Frontier Set, visit frontierset.org.
The cornerstone of the ITA is the Sensemaking Conversation, which is a facilitated group conversation that enables deep reflection with a diverse, cross-functional set of institutional stakeholders. It is informed by insights into the current perception of student success work on a campus. The Sensemaking Conversation typically takes place over three or four hours. The goal of the conversation is to help an institution learn more about its areas of strength and improvement. This learning is a critical input to prioritizing and planning further action to enhance equitable student success.
"The Sensemaking sessions really helped bring together the different groups of people and allowed for greater insights into the operations at the institution.”
McMurry University
“Coming together to understand different perspectives is valuable. It is especially helpful for emerging leaders.”
Delaware State University
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