At our Leadership Summits in Arizona and New York last week, we gathered dozens of presidents, provosts, vice presidents, and student success champions who are driving strategic decisions on how we improve student outcomes and experiences. Below are a few of my reflections from our time together.
We are possibilists.
According to Hans Rosling, in his book Factfulness, a possibilist is someone who sees progress and is filled with
“conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful."
It was clear from the conversations and presentations throughout the day at our Leadership Summits, that we’re a community of possibilists.
[cta_box note="FORUM title="CONNECT WITH LEADERSHIP SUMMIT ATTENDEES:" CONTENT="Join the discussion forum on the Civitas Hub to connect with peers and share work you are excited about or would like feedback on." link_text="JOIN THE DISCUSSION" links_to="https://hub.civitaslearning.com/support/discussions"]
Our National Advisory Board shared progress on research about students today — so that we may better understand how to support their educational journeys. They also explored how institutions are navigating culture shifts so that they can make the most of their data and take on historically overwhelming challenges like reforming pathways and closing equity gaps. Our Co-Founders also gave an update on how we’re prioritizing measurement, intelligence, and unification to help our customers sustainably improve outcomes. And our host, Amazon Web Services, shared what is possible with cloud and machine learning.
With precise knowledge about their institution and their students, a handful of our customers joined panels and lead presentations on their work around building trust in data, driving adoption, forming effective student success teams, and taking coordinated action to capitalize on new opportunities to remove barriers for students.
We have momentum.
Every institution is on a different part of their journey toward building a system of intelligence and changing institutional culture to facilitate more proactive action on the insights they find. Every day they are finding real, measurable opportunities to help students.
Every institution represented at Leadership Summit was confident in the milestones they were achieving, and they shared that even though this can be hard work, it is good work that we are doing together. In the past year alone, we’ve added new functionality to our solution, expertise to our team, customers to our community, and resources to tackle our mission. And, our partner colleges and universities are seeing more improved outcomes than ever.
We need to continue to learn from each other.
One day was not enough to connect with everyone in the room. We need more opportunities to get to know the “how tos” behind our successes and the lessons they learned from the challenges we face.
We’re committed to continuing our work to create the right opportunities for different roles across different institutions to learn from each other. This could be to exchange strategies and thoughts on where the student success movement is headed, or to trade practical advice on how to do this work. We’ll continue to do that here on our blog, but we also have the Civitas Hub for our customers to connect with each other directly. We invite you to join our discussion on the Civitas Hub (must be a Civitas Learning institution) or to start your own thread!
And, stay tuned in as we continue to spotlight what — and how — our customers are doing to improve outcomes for their students today.
[cta_box note="FORUM title="CONNECT WITH LEADERSHIP SUMMIT ATTENDEES:" CONTENT="Join the discussion forum on the Civitas Hub to connect with peers and share work you are excited about or would like feedback on." link_text="JOIN THE DISCUSSION" links_to="https://hub.civitaslearning.com/support/discussions"]
The post Three Takeaways from Leadership Summit appeared first on Civitas Learning Space.