Intermediaries
As an intermediary, you have the opportunity to play a unique role in helping your member institutions reflect on their current student success efforts and the organizational structures that support them. Their learning will be a critical input to prioritizing and planning further action to enhance equitable student success.
Overview
Reflection and Sensemaking
The ITA is an online perception survey – which provides insight into current perception of student success activities by diverse stakeholders on a campus. This survey generates custom individual and aggregate reports. Eleven expert-created rubrics (on unique but integrated topic areas central to institutional transformation for equitable student success) support the perception survey.
The ITA drives a Sensemaking Conversation, which is a facilitated meeting that enables reflection with a diverse, cross-functional group of institutional leaders, faculty, and staff. It is the cornerstone of the ITA process.
The process (ITA and Sensemaking Conversation) helps 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.
As an intermediary, you have the opportunity to play a role in helping your partnerinstitutions reflect on their current student success efforts and the organizational structures that support them. Their learning provides you with input to plan for further action, including the provision of technical assistance.
The ITA is about reflection and Sensemaking — it is not intended to be evaluative. It’s an organized way to discover how stakeholders from across campuses see their institution.
The ITA is about reflection and Sensemaking — it is not intended to be evaluative. It’s an organized way to discover how stakeholders from across campuses see their institution.
Your role as an intermediary
As an intermediary, you have the opportunity to play a role supporting a range of institutions as they reflect on what may be necessary for them to prioritize to improve student outcomes, by providing outside expertise, technical assistance, and connections, or by creating groups of institutions who benefit from learning and working together.
ITA administration requires collaboration between the Transformation Team Lead at the institution and you, the intermediary. Administrator duties are flexible, and the load can be shared to suit your situation.
Responsibilities of the administrator(s) include:
- Explaining the vision and the value of the ITA to key stakeholders; providing context and making connections with other strategic initiatives and potential next steps
- Building out the calendar for this effort, including setting up substantial meetings
- Identifying and selecting participants and onboarding them
- Troubleshooting as participants sign up and take the perception survey
- Reviewing the survey results in a dashboard, and selecting areas to focus on in the Sensemaking Conversation
- Reviewing data points from other, related surveys or studies on a campus, including quantitative student outcomes data, campus climate findings, staff satisfaction analyses, etc.
- Preparing the agenda of the Sensemaking Conversation based on all findings
- Facilitating a Sensemaking Conversation by exploring interesting survey findings and asking probing questions
Support materials
Resources for administering the ITA and facilitating a Sensemaking Conversation.
Onboarding
Materials that help explain the purpose and recommended process behind the ITA.
Administrating the ITA survey and facilitating the Sensemaking Conversation
Materials that support the use of the ITA survey and planning for the Sensemaking Conversation.
Full rubrics for easy access during the Sensemaking Conversation.
Simple slides to use to onboard your participants
Template to create a workbook based on aggregate survey output.
Example physical artifacts to ground the in-person Sensemaking Conversation.
Examples that past facilitators have used to shepherd their team through Sensemaking Conversations.
Addresses what to do if participants wish to return to and complete the survey after completing a portion of the survey.
Your timeline
The ITA process works best when incorporated into existing and ongoing institutional planning and prioritization efforts. Engaging with the ITA process does entail a significant time commitment from the Transformation Team Lead and their Transformation Team, so it’s important to provide clear direction as to why you’re embarking on this work, how it will incorporate and reflect existing transformation efforts, and to be clear about the time needed.
The full process takes, on average, between 7 and 16 weeks. Some of the activities happen concurrently while many are reliant on the completion of others. Expect the following amount of time to be required for each activity at the institutional level:
- Intermediary and institution onboarding: 1–4 weeks
- Transformation team identification and recruitment: 1–2 months
- Deploy ITA survey: 2–3 weeks
- Review of ITA results: 2–3 weeks
- Sensemaking Conversation: Typically scheduled for 2–3 weeks after completing the perception survey. The conversation itself can be one 4–5 hour meeting, multiple 2 hour meetings, or whatever works best for schedules
- Debrief and defining next steps: Capitalize on momentum after the conversation— help Transformation Teams prioritize what they might take as next steps, whether it’s another meeting, smaller group discussions, delegated research, or another step toward making change.
Prepare
Administering the ITA survey
Follow the “How do we get started checklist” for some key steps to preparing for administering the ITA survey at an institution.
Identifying participants
There are two versions of the ITA survey, designed to engage two different groups of participants: the Transformation Team survey (consisting of the full 100+ questions from the 11 rubrics) and the Student Success Community survey (consisting of an abbreviated 30+ questions chosen from the 11 rubrics).
The Transformation Team is a core team of campus leaders who are most deeply involved in and responsible for student success work. They will participate in the full, 100+ question version of the perception survey and the Sensemaking Conversation.
The Student Success Community consists of a broader group of faculty, staff, and practitioners from across a campus. They can provide additional perspective by participating in the abbreviated, 30+ question survey. They do not participate in the Sensemaking Conversation, but their perceptions of the institution can be valuable in comparison to those results from the Transformation Team.
For each institution that you plan to engage with there should be a designated point of contact: the Transformation Team Lead. This lead is responsible for shepherding their institution through the process of using these tools with your help.
The team lead will work to build or leverage an existing team of leaders who are deeply involved in transformation and student success (e.g., presidents, provosts, and deans) to build the Transformation Team, as well as identify a larger group that reflects the broader campus community (e.g., department leads, administrators, and faculty), whose insights will be valuable in enhancing conversations.
The team lead may rely on you, the Intermediary Lead, to answer questions and provide support— both for tactical issues and for questions about goals and generating engagement.
Think ahead to your goals as an intermediary for using the ITA: What does your organization see as an ideal outcome? How can you build a relationship with an institution that drives you both toward that outcome? What support will your member institutions need as they reflect, decide on a course of action, and prepare to move forward?
Depending on your level of involvement, the Team Lead will be partially responsible for shepherding this process at the institution. Based on which responsibilities you take on as an external facilitator and partner, the team lead may:
- Provide participants with their ITA registration links and accompanying instructions
- Support participants as they take the survey and field any questions from the team including troubleshooting requests
- Review the institution’s survey results and assist with planning the Sensemaking Conversation
- Support facilitation of the Sensemaking Conversation, including capturing output from the conversation
This should be a group of 8–15 campus leaders who are deeply focused on and leading transformation and student success efforts at the institution. This group will take the full 100+ question survey and participate in the Sensemaking Conversation.
It’s important to have a diverse team— this will help ensure that your work generates new insights and campus- wide involvement and participation. Invite leaders from all areas of campus who are directly responsible for leading and managing–or have subject matter expertise in–at least one of the transformation categories (Digital Learning, Advising, Developmental Education, Emergency Aid, Pathways, Leadership & Culture, Strategic Finance, Institutional Research, Information Technology, and Policy.) Examples of these types of participants include:
- Chancellor / President
- Provosts / Vice Presidents / Vice Chancellors
- Deans / Directors / Department Chairs
This is a larger group that will take the brief 30+ question survey but not participate in the Sensemaking Conversation. This shorter survey provides an opportunity to gather input from practitioners who are directly involved in implementing the transformation categories being assessed, and help gauge awareness and understanding across campus. Examples of these types of participants include:
- Department leads and staff
- Administrators, faculty, and staff
- Optional: students who chair and/or serve on committees such as Budget and Planning, Institutional Effectiveness,Student Success, Academic Senate, etc.
- External partners and stakeholders such as members of boards and advisory committees
It is highly recommended that you ensure that the people with high-level budget management responsibility for the subject areas covered in the ITA transformation categories are in the room during the Sensemaking Conversation so that they have the ability to make decisions, review and align necessary budgets, and feel accountable towards progress being made.
To make for the most impactful ITA process possible, it is critical to ensure a diverse set of campus leaders participate in this conversation and collaborate on how to proceed with what is uncovered in the Sensemaking Conversation.
Disseminating the Student Success Community survey far and wide across the institution to a variety of campus practitioners provides a strong, consistent mechanism for collecting diverse feedback. This offers the Transformation Team a pulse on how their campus’ transformation efforts are broadly viewed and where these efforts could be better amplified.
Encouraging involvement
Every institution’s journey with the ITA process looks different. Some institutions will follow the timeline exactly and have the Sensemaking Conversation a couple of weeks after collecting participants’ survey responses. Others may have a larger gap between the survey and Sensemaking Conversation for a number of reasons. Keeping your team motivated and aware of where they are in the process is critical and can make scheduling easier.
Ensuring participants are aware of the process and timeline, even if they’re not participating in Sensemaking, makes everyone feel validated and valued. It is important that participants understand how important their contributions are to the greater effort.
The Student Success Community survey participants in particular may be unclear about the impact their survey responses can have on the process. If they’re not given enough information or aren’t aware of the larger context of what they’re participating in, they may not be motivated to take the survey or feel like they wasted their time participating.
Additionally, you want to give participants a sense of when and where their information is going to be used and when and where the results will be tabulated, particularly those who won’t have the benefit of participating in the Sensemaking Conversation.
Register institution
To get started with the ITA survey, you’ll complete a one- time registration for the institution, accessed via a link to the registration portal.
Note: this may not be applicable for your use case— administrators may generate links for you.
If you do need to register, enter the following information about the institution:
1.
Use Case – the default is “Standard,” but change if necessary
2.
Lead Contact Information – your name and email address
3.
Affiliations – any affiliations the institution is associated with
4.
Sector- private or public
5.
Institution Type – 2- year or 4- year institution
6.
State
7.
Institution name
8.
Assessment – select if you are using one or both versions of the survey (100+ question and 30+ question)
9.
Sections – there are ten categories in the ITA survey, keep all selected unless proceeding with a smaller selection
Collect data
Distribute the ITA survey
Distribute the ITA survey
Each user should set up an account with the Gardner Platform.
Intermediary Administrator
Transformation Team or Student Success Communities
o Schedule the date and time for survey to be sent and conclude (default is Eastern Time)
o Designate times for invitations to be sent (immediately or scheduled)
o Schedule and send survey reminders
• View and filter results
Intermediary Administrator
- Navigate the platform to see systems, institutions, users, and results
- Create users with institutional administration or institutional dashboard roles
- Customize the survey by adding text and logo
- View and filter results
Institutional Administrator
- Manage the survey.
- Add individual users to take the ITA
o Designate users as Transformation Team or Student Success Communities - Schedule the date and time for survey to be sent and conclude (default is Eastern Time)
- Designate times for invitations to be sent (immediately or scheduled)
- Schedule and send survey reminders
- Add individual users to take the ITA
- View and filter results
Collect and analyze results
It’s important to note that the ITA is not intended to be evaluative; rather, it provides a common language across critical topics that can lead to more efficient and effective conversations about an institution’s efforts to address student success and equity. It is intended to help gauge perceptions from across the institution and support active reflection and conversation. These conversations may look different depending on the institution: they could support a strategic planning effort, help assess progress on a new initiative, or become a regular part of a multi-year, campus-wide improvement process.
Continuous improvement relies on effective, open dialogue. The ITA process provides a structure for conversations with leaders and practitioners across different units and departments to make sense of the campus environment when it comes to student success. The process makes it possible to collectively reflect on and discuss an institution’s current state and a plan for the future, building the habit of actionable dialogue.
The ITA is designed to support holistic, cross-departmental reflection and conversation. All questions/themes (derived from expert-authored rubrics) are interconnected; it is recommended to have participants reflect on all topics, even those they are less familiar with. This may be an important data point for an institution to consider. However, once all results are in, it may be helpful to have a deeper follow-up conversation with stakeholders involved in a specific rubric topic (e.g., advising or institutional research).
Resources needed & preparing for Sensemaking
The ITA survey results are one set of perspectives from institutional participants -it is only one data source. We recommend preparing for a Sensemaking Conversation by looking at other data sources as well (e.g., institutional contextual factors, student KPIs, faculty feedback, campus climate survey results, etc.)
If student success is at the center of this process, having a baseline understanding of student level key performance indicators (KPI’s) is critical. Equally as important is understanding what is not being measured. Going through this process to collect supporting data can be inspirational–leading teams to identify specific areas they’d like to begin measuring in the future in addition to solidifying the metrics they are already examining.
The ITA is built to help inform an institution’s continuous improvement journey. This sort of strategic planning is not necessarily launched by the ITA process, and in many cases has been happening at an institution for a long time. Likewise, there are a lot of student success efforts and programs well underway. Incorporating information from these results, efforts and programs is a key part of planning for the Sensemaking Conversation.
Student level KPI’s and results from ongoing strategic programs and other efforts on campus should be included in the Sensemaking Conversation as they provide greater context and depth to the process.
Download and follow the Sensemaking Conversation checklist to know what you can do to prepare.
Exploring the Dashboard
The ITA outputs are the backbone of this process. You’ll have access to a dashboard where you can watch the replies roll in and dig into meaningful insights once the ITA completion deadline has passed. The dashboard can be a little overwhelming at first, but you’ll soon narrow in on the pieces of information that are most useful to you. Your goal is to identify trends, zones of divergence, highs and lows, and other interesting responses.
Some guiding questions and ideas to help you filter (and a reminder: set date filters of your deployment time, so you’re only looking at the current round, not data from previous deployments):
- Which areas were rated highest by the group? Lowest?
- Compare the average results of the Transformation Team versus the Student Success Community
- Here’s an example of what this might look like in practice:
On Digital Learning indicator 7, which asks about the use of analytics to support engagement and feedback between faculty and students, the Student Success Community replies clustered around “Emerging” while the Transformation Team replies were mostly “Exemplary.”Ask yourself what this might mean, and prepare questions to guide your team in discussion, such as: What could contribute to this divergence? What’s our history of using analytics for engagement? Perhaps the tools are in place, but instructors don’t know how to use them?
- Here’s an example of what this might look like in practice:
- Look for divergence by digging into individual question responses, as high and low ratings may be hidden within an average
- Look for indicators from different topics that touch on similar issues, approaches, or topics, and compare ratings
- Here’s an example of what this might look like in practice:
Advising indicator 2 asks if there is a shared definition of equity and an understanding of how it informs the way the institution organizes student support. The Transformation Team replied “Accomplished.”Institutional Policy indicator 2 similarly inquires about a shared equity definition and how it is or isn’t operationalized in the development and refinement of institutional policies and procedures. Here the Transformation Team replied “Emerging.”
Ask yourself what this might mean, and prepare questions to guide your team in discussion, such as: What might be the disconnect between equity being more deeply understood and it being applied in student support?
- Here’s an example of what this might look like in practice:
- Did role or subject matter knowledge impact how participants answered?
- Are there areas where there were a lot of “I don’t know” or “Not applicable” answers? Did that vary by role in ways worth examining?
- Are there specific topics, such as advising or pathways, that have been a priority for the institution? Do the results match up with the effort that has gone into prior work on them?
Know that your Transformation Team will only receive their individual results in PDF form—only you have access to the dashboard. Distilling some key insights and pulling them into a form that you can use to guide sense-making is key.
The Transformation Team will receive their ITA results in an automated email from Qualtrics, which often goes to spam. Before your sense-making session, remind them to find and save their results.
Planning for Sensemaking
There are two key aspects of planning here: preparing ITA outputs to support the conversation (as explored in the section above) and planning your approach to facilitation.
Exploring the Sensemaking Tool Library can be a good way to get inspiration. You’ll see past users’ approaches to pulling interesting pieces off the dashboard and the ITA content itself into workbooks, presentations, and Excel sheets to build a string of questions to drive the conversation. There’s no need to go through the ITA question by question and discuss the responses—but there is value in touching on each topic. This breadth is a strength of the ITA, as the diversity of topics and people in the room results in that magic silo-busting work we’re always looking for: data people learning about how they impact advising while finance people learn about nuances of digital learning, and the like.
The Sensemaking Posters can also provide structure to your session. The North Star activity is a great way to begin, and the ITA “wheel” can serve to track your progress though the topics visually and allows your team to quickly see and compare aggregate ratings for each topic. The priority matrix and sense-making questions are useful as you wrap up the session and look to what’s next.
As you plan, it’s important to remember that the ITA outputs are qualitative—they reflect the participants’ perceptions. Bringing in quantitative data from the institution is key to making this conversation tangible and actionable. Information on past and ongoing student success initiatives is also valuable, as it can serve as a starting point for new approaches.
As for the meeting, whether in-person or virtual, know that there is a lot of ground to cover. You’ll need 4-6 hours, so think about the disposition of your team: would they work best in a full day of focused work, or across a few sessions? Past users have found success in both long, focused sessions and having two or more shorter meetings. It can be helpful to have a note-taker and timekeeper. Keep in mind that the facilitator will be busy with his or her role, so if the institutional team lead has subject matter expertise to contribute, sometimes it’s more important for them to be a participant than the facilitator.
Large group time is nicely balanced with breakouts, both with small groups that are already familiar with one another and groupings created intentionally to mix people up across departments. This session can be an opportunity for members of the Transformation Team to shine by sharing their knowledge and perspectives, so make space for that, too. Read on in the next section for an overview of key session components and how to deliver them virtually.
Send agendas in advance, with the following items in mind:
- Timing for the session(s), including breaks
- Questions for subject matter experts about synthesized ITA outputs
- A request for participants to bring their individual ITA results
- A brief outline of the kind of meaningful engagement you’re expectin
Sensemaking
Facilitating Sensemaking
Download and follow the Sensemaking Conversation sample agenda to know how to prepare for and guide the session
The Sensemaking Conversation
The Sensemaking Conversation is a meeting of those most deeply involved in transformation efforts at an institution. The outputs of the ITA survey support a dynamic discussion that drives the group toward better understanding and actionable next steps.
The Sensemaking Conversation can also build on other data points, resources or metrics. The goal is to create a forum for a cross-functional team of key stakeholders to come together to make sense of the institutional environment, by organizing data until the environment is understood well enough to enable reasonable planning decisions.
With participants having used the ITA survey to prepare, the conversation should grow from a reflection on the institution’s current state to a planning discussion about which actions to take next to work toward student success goals. This is a big conversation, but the ITA categories can lend structure that makes it more approachable.
Seeing as no two institutions look exactly alike, and no two work to improve in exactly the same way, this process is intended to flex to fit into existing work. As an external intermediary, you may be able to look across an institution’s ongoing planning efforts and see where this conversation might best fit.
Many have found this conversation deeply valuable—especially in the way that it brings a diverse group together to have an open dialogue. The flexible structure of the conversation keeps insight flowing from all directions, and can give the group momentum to cover a wide range of topics and drive toward real next steps. As a facilitator, it’s your role to provide that structure and spur the conversation along, when necessary.
Though you are planning the initial meeting, the real intent—and value of—this structure is supporting the creation of a new kind of conversation, a skill that will live on after the initial meeting.
| Key session component | How to facilitate effectively… | …and some considerations for virtual sessions |
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Open the meeting intentionally to ground and unite the team |
Briefly speak to the promise of higher education, and the current inequities and inefficiencies that are leaving students behind.
Remind participants to have their individual ITA results handy. |
Address any technical issues.
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Introduce participants and share ground rules |
Establish roles, including facilitator, note-taker and timekeeper.
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List all the participants’ names on a slide or virtual whiteboard, and run through a roll call.
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Use a north star activity to align your team |
This activity can help align and inspire your team. Introduce the exercise as a way to get everyone on the same page about your north star as an institution, and to help you more clearly define what student success means to you. Remind your team that it’s natural and expected for a diversity of opinions to emerge.
Or think of your own! Give your team 5 minutes to complete the sentence on individual Post-its—more than one answer is OK. At the end of 5 minutes, ask each team member to read their responses and place their Post-its on the board.
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Use a virtual whiteboard for this activity—it could be a good way to get your team acclimated to working in a virtual space by adding Post-its, clustering them, and voting.
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Explore the ITA results (this will be the bulk of your time!) |
Leaning on the prep work you did before the meeting, move through the ITA topic by topic, zeroing in on indicators or clusters of interest.
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Use breakout rooms to foster more conversation—people are often more willing to chime in within smaller groups.
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Refer to the ITA rubrics |
Digging into the language of the rubrics to tease out the nuances between levels often merits interesting conversation.
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Screenshot interesting indicators and compile them in a slide deck or on a virtual whiteboard—or simply have the PDF pulled up and be ready to screenshare. |
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Use a workbook or posters to track progress |
Creating a workbook or some other kind of artifact can help keep participants engaged—ask them to take notes at defined periods. (See examples in the Sense-Making Tool Library.)
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A digital workbook can also be useful, as can polling tools such as MentiMeter, which you can use to gauge which topics participants are most interested in diving deep on, or what kind of changes they’re hopeful for.
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Wrap up with priorities and next steps |
Take note of what the group gets excited about and follow those leads, spurring the group to think deeply and broadly about the issues they wind up exploring—ask who they could reach out to, what’s been done in the past, or who might be best suited to research potential approaches or lead change efforts.
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This is a great time to use a virtual whiteboard to visually ideate on next steps and priorities—often a “diverge / converge” approach can work here: give time for participants to generate lots of ideas, then take a break while you or another leader clusters ideas around patterns. From there, the group can reconvene and work to prioritize ideas for action or investigation. |
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Keep track of your work and your plans |
You’ll have access to the “post sense-making meeting survey” on the ITA Qualtrics site; it will ask you:
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You could pose these questions at the beginning of the session and again at the end, to track evolution in thinking across the group. At the start of the session, you could post them on a collaborative whiteboard and ask participants to add thoughts during an early break, then close the boards and revisit them at the end to see how thinking has or hasn’t changed based on the conversations they’ve had. |
Reflections from previous participants
“I hope that immediately our thinking is informed by this. I hope that [in] everything we do moving forward … we see this as data. We should quote from it liberally, we should rely on it, we should use it as one of our building blocks.”
Dean of Science and Math
“It was useful to see where the … team had the greatest variance in scores. It highlighted areas that need more inter-departmental communication so as to create shared meaning around various metrics.”
VP of Institutional Advancement
“Just getting together in a small but diverse group helped identify what pockets around campus have information and which do not. This really emphasized our need for better communication across campus.”
Transformation Core Team Member
Debrief
Following up on the Sensemaking Conversation
This process is most successful when it goes beyond uncovering insights and sparking ideas for change, and helps build a habit of cross-cutting, thoughtful conversation. As an intermediary, think about how you might keep the spirit of this process alive.
Of course, the ITA survey is available to take again and compare the results, but in the short term, creating a “north star” can help the Transformation Team maintain this collaborative momentum.
The group exercise itself builds cohesion across the Transformation Team, and the output can be used as:
- A kickoff to future meetings
- A reminder to keep on desks or computer desktops
- A mini-tool to onboard new partners
- A rubric to check future work against to see if it aligns with fundamental goals
As an intermediary, the institution will likely look to you to bring outside solutions or ideas to address some of the priorities determined through this process, so be ready to act on those needs.
