Transforming the Foundational Postsecondary Experience ™ focuses on closing performance gaps and improving student success outcomes in ways that move toward eliminating factors such as demographics and zip code as the best predictors of who gets to graduate.
The Foundational Postsecondary Experience refers to the critical first two years of college education and typically involves the accumulation of sixty semester credits toward a degree. Through a process of system redesign, institutions participating in the effort will develop and implement plans over a five-year period to close inequitable performance gaps, enhance teaching and learning practices, and promote student success, completion, and retention.
Your journey will begin with the discovery phase. A key component of that phase is the Institutional Transformation Assessment which is a process to help postsecondary institutions reflect on existing student success efforts and the organizational structures that support them. Your institution will 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.
It takes an extraordinary amount of time and dedication to make significant changes; there is no magic bullet. Committing to a five-year process helps solidify an institutes commitment to the communities they serve.
You will have the full support of the entire Gardner Institute Staff as you create and complete your journey, while also having a dedicated Relationship Manager who will guide you on your journey throughout the process.
You will not be in this work alone, you will join a cohort of 7-12 institutions who are also at the same place in the journey, as well as teams from previous cohorts. Cohort 1 began in June 2023, Cohort 2 in June 2024. We are now recruiting for Cohort 3.
The Institute’s team of data security and informatics experts provide technological support to ensure your university can run a successful and secure Transformation project.
An initial phase (spanning approximately the first six months) where Gardner Institute staff work with institutions to identify redundancies, gaps, capacities, readiness, and abilities.
Launched during the first year of the project, this phase establishes and strengthens the directions and conditions for implementation success including: ●Institutional data capacity and evaluation development ●Institutional senior leadership (Boards and Cabinets) capacity development ●Institutional unit leadership (Deans and department heads) capacity development ●Faculty development
Deep support for redesigning various aspects of the foundational college experience (launched during the second year of the approach) informed by the results of the initial discovery phase. Areas for deeper work with the Gardner Institute and partners include: ●Redesign of the first college year (first-year experience) ●Redesign of the gateway course experience – both course structures and pedagogy ●Redesign of curricula – especially through the application of curricular analytics that expose inefficient and inequitable design and outcomes ●Ongoing leadership capacity development
Ongoing scaling, evaluation, capacity development, continuous improvement, and national dissemination support including: ●Scaling and refinement support ●Dashboards and other means to track leading, intermediate, and long-term performance measures to make sure that the strategies are operationalized and harmonized to yield the desired goal – so every student can graduate ●Ongoing capacity development for leadership ●National rating effort (optional)
Now accepting applications on a rolling basis. This work is supported in part by Ascendium Education Group, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the ECMC Foundation, the Lumina Foundation, and The Kresge Foundation.
Fees are based on an institution’s undergraduate enrollment and are available by emailing Info@gardnerinstitute.org for more information.
Currently accepting applications for Cohort 3.
Louisiana State University Shreveport joins initiative hoping to transform early college experience
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