FREE WEBCAST RECORDING How Community Colleges Are Pivoting This Fall to Meet the Needs of Students Learn how your two-year institution can best use your agility and unique strengths advantageously. Overview The pandemic coupled with economic hardship has created an enrollment shortfall for many community colleges. In many cases, those who were planning on attending this fall find themselves out of work, working additional hours, and/or grappling with childcare/homeschooling challenges. During this two-hour recorded discussion, you will hear about some of the barriers students are experiencing and how community colleges are pivoting to meet their needs. Who Should Attend This free recording will benefit leaders of two-year institutions at multiple levels and across functional areas. Agenda This recorded session will feature discussions around the following topics (the questions listed are illustrative and not exhaustive): How are institutions rethinking messaging, enrollment management processes, and retention efforts? As the “community’s colleges,” how are you helping your communities recover during this unique time period? What are curriculum considerations for this new COVID19 world? Have new partnerships emerged at your colleges as a result of COVID19? How might those be leveraged for future work together? Before accessing this free recording… Please sign […]
The pandemic coupled with economic hardship has created an enrollment shortfall for many community colleges. In many cases, those who were planning on attending this fall find themselves out of work, working additional hours, and/or grappling with childcare/homeschooling challenges. During this two-hour recorded discussion, you will hear about some of the barriers students are experiencing and how community colleges are pivoting to meet their needs.
After the live Title IX hearing, as a hearing panelist, you have the responsibility of determining the outcome of the case. You must analyze the facts, assess the credibility of witness testimony, and maintain razor-sharp focus on your sexual harassment policy definitions—all of which require technical skills and knowledge. However, there’s also an art to these meetings. You must be able to facilitate critical conversations in a high pressure and often emotional environment about how to interpret and manage implicit bias, gut feelings, and differences in attitudes and motives. Join us online for a four-hour virtual training to learn how to balance the science and art of high-pressure deliberations and facilitate successful meetings. Our expert instructor will provide you with a five-step framework to ensure you and your decision-making peers are structuring your meetings with efficiency and respect. You will practice the framework by applying the five steps to a mock case and immersing yourself in the role of the deliberation committee. You will also walk away with tips for how to prepare the determination letter.
READ THE WHOLE SERIES: Ask academic advising professionals what they perceive to be the primary role of academic advising, and you’ll most likely hear responses such as “to help students,” “to serve students,” or “to facilitate student growth and development.” All are appropriate responses which get to the most basic reason that advising departments exist; however, these objectives often remain ambiguous and ill-defined. What does “help” or “serve” look like? How is it achieved? Advising administrators need to assess the specific needs of the students whom they serve and implement a specific plan for meeting those needs. Here are three strategies for assessing student needs and three strategies for meeting student needs. 3 Strategies for Assessing Student Needs 1. Student Feedback: Formal Assessment Formal instruments, such as student satisfaction surveys, can be used to solicit feedback from students regarding their advising experience. When selecting or developing such an instrument, it is important to consider what it is that you most wish to learn. For example, surveys of this type are often designed to collect feedback on the advisor’s behaviors and characteristics. However, it is equally important to examine processes and student expectations in order to obtain a big picture view […]
READ THE WHOLE SERIES: Academic advising staff, comprised of both administrative support staff and advisors, may experience a great deal of stress and frustration as they work to manage the expectations of both students and administration. As frontline personnel, they are the first to be confronted when students experience problems and express dissatisfaction, yet they have little authority or control. By including these constituents in decision-making and planning, advising administrators are able to benefit from their diverse perspectives and maximize on the skills that each staff member brings to the department. This is particularly important because when we establish systems and procedures in response to student needs, there is frequently a risk that advising personnel will view these changes in a negative light. Advisors may anticipate that their own needs will be deprioritized as we work to meet the needs of students. For example, an edict such as “Advisors have 24-48 hours to respond to students” may cause additional stress on advisors who are already facing challenges in managing their workload. I recommend examining practices and procedures regularly, observing the impact on advising staff, and soliciting staff feedback proactively, so that you can begin to address employee needs while also […]
Prior to his current role, Will was the counseling psychologist and Director of Counseling & Psychological Services at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. He is best known for the Flexible Care Model, which is a culturally-informed system of providing psychological services on college campuses. The model focuses on same-day access to treatment, concise counseling sessions, an immediate treatment focus, and customized follow-up plans for students. He is an alumnus of Baldwin-Wallace College and the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where he received a PhD in Counseling Psychology. Will started his professional career as a one-person counseling center serving 4,000 at Washington State University Vancouver.
Ellen has been coordinating and directing assessment for DePaul’s division of student affairs for the past five years. She was responsible for developing and implementing the division’s integrated assessment model and creating formal processes to report results. Her responsibilities include chairing the division’s assessment committee, fostering a culture of assessment, increasing staff capacity around assessment, coordinating departmental assessment and research projects, coordinating divisional annual reporting processes, and sharing results. Ellen has presented on the topic of assessment at the NASPA annual conference, NASPA Assessment and Retention conference, and the Association of American Colleges and Universities and has had an accepted presentation at the Association for Institutional Research (AIR). She has also co-authored a chapter on a mixed methods approach to assessment in Student Affairs in an AIR monograph titled Using Mixed Methods in Institutional Research. Prior to her work in assessment, Ellen served DePaul for seven years as the director of academic enhancement, overseeing orientation and first-year experience.
The chief of staff can be a lonely role. Here is what experienced chiefs of staff have to say about how to find your feet in the role and identify key resources you’ll need. In this series of articles, experienced chiefs of staff offer critical advice on managing the chief of staff role. We will share their answers to questions such as these: Contributors to this series include: We hope you will enjoy the series and share each article with your peers. If you find these articles useful, please consider attending and learning from these and other experts at these virtual trainings: For today, here is our third installment in this series: 3. Finding Your Feet as a New (or Relatively New) Chief of Staff Academic Impressions. We know the chief of staff position can feel isolating at times—there is usually only one chief of staff on campus, so you don’t have peers in the role on campus to compare notes with. And not a lot of training and professional development opportunities exist for chiefs of staff. There isn’t a handbook on how to be an effective chief of staff. You have each been in the position. Thinking back, what […]
Learn fresh ideas for how you can communicate with deposited students to prevent summer melt and increase yield at your institution. During the webcast, you will learn how to: Make your yield communications more successful Use print, digital, and social media channels as tools to prevent summer melt Educate and mobilize cross-campus partners to create a more seamless strategy Throughout this training, you will see numerous examples of effective yield communications. These examples, combined with a practically-focused presentation, will help you apply what you learn to your own institutional context.
