Student Success Community
As a Student Success Community Participant, you are part of a larger group of practitioners from across campus who will take an abbreviated version of the ITA survey contributing to your institution’s effort to narrow attainment gaps and improve student outcomes.
Overview
Reflection and Sensemaking
The Institutional Transformation Assessment (ITA) is a process to 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. It’s structured around eleven transformation categories, which are organized by a framework including pathways, solutions, and institutional capacities.
The ITA is about reflection and Sensemaking — it is not intended to be evaluative. It’s an organized way to get a good view of how a broad team of stakeholders view their institution.
The collective responses of the team members to the ITA survey are designed to inform a structured Sensemaking Conversation among key leaders at the institution and to fuel a deep and effective discussion around priorities and next steps. Your responses, combined with the responses of your colleagues, will help campus leaders reflect on the outputs from the ITA (summarized in a dashboard) as well as other sources of information, such as key performance indicators and student success metrics.
Your role as a Student Success Community participant
You are part of the Student Success Community—an important group of practitioners from across campus who will take an abbreviated version of the comprehensive ITA survey. Your responses will provide institutional leaders a realistic pulse on how existing campus transformation efforts are broadly viewed and where these efforts could be better amplified.
No matter where your institution is on its journey of continuous improvement, this method can help support deeper reflection via a structured conversation that builds off of a perception-gathering assessment, as well as other inputs. It builds upon the shared values of institutions working to narrow attainment gaps and to improve student outcomes, and centers on the power of gathering together to have a new kind of conversation about transforming institutions for student success.
The Institutional Transformation Assessment (ITA) was built on a foundation of rubrics, created by experts, that represent current standards in a range of solution areas and operating capacities. The rubrics offer a common language to help align and orient teams to standards. It’s important to know that the ITA is not intended to be evaluative; rather, it’s designed to assess perceptions in order to support and streamline reflection. That reflection comes in the form of a dynamic Sensemaking Conversation—the cornerstone of this method. The conversation is grounded in the results of the ITA survey and structured around considering those results by both the facilitator and participants. Ultimately, the conversation provides a forum for a varied group of leaders from across an institution to come together to reflect and plan. Your input directly contributes to this process.
Your timeline
The ITA supports institutional transformation – a continuous improvement process – by enabling efficient and effective conversations about efforts related to student success.
Registering for and taking the ITA Student Success Community survey will require about 15- 30 minutes and it is important you complete as much of the survey as possible.
Taking the ITA survey
Use the conversation checklist to learn about a few things you can do to prepare. Follow the ITA checklist for some key steps to participating in the ITA survey at an institution.
Taking the ITA survey
Research has determined that focusing on the broad set of topics found in ITA at the same time is likely to yield a more effective, faster path to an institution’s transformation towards improving student success.
The cross-functional part of this work where each team member is aware of each other’s role and contributions to transformation is critical. The core idea of the ITA is that people from all different functional specialties and groups converge on this one survey together.
There are topic areas that you may have a strong, working familiarity with and some that are completely unfamiliar. This is okay! Responding with “I don’t know” to these unfamiliar questions is perfectly fine. Completing the entire survey across all topic areas, can lead to valuable realizations where people can see connections between their work and the work others lead. This builds awareness of areas that seem unrelated but often have a lot of intersection.
ITA Links
You will receive a registration link specific to the Student Success Community survey from your Team Lead that was created uniquely for your institution. Plan to take 15-20 minutes to complete the survey and know that it’s not required that you complete it all at once.
Returning to the Institutional Transformation Assessment:
If you do not complete the ITA survey in one sitting, you are able to return and pick up where you left off.
To do so, you’ll need to use the Return to ITA link, which was included in the original invitation email that you received. Alternatively, you can use the link in the Return to survey email that was automatically sent to you after you registered for the ITA (make sure to check your spam folder if you don’t see it in your inbox—email subject is “ITA Return Link,” sent from itaAdmin@qemailserver.com).
It’s important to use the Return to ITA link and not the original registration link in the invite email. Using the registration link to return to your partially completed survey will cause a “duplicate panel member” error because the ITA survey will assume you are registering again.
If you receive a this error, they have two options:
- You may alert your team lead to the error and they can clear the duplicate profile. (Be aware that this may take 24-48 hours.)
- You may click on the original registration link again, but you will need to use a different email address and take the survey from the beginning again. Please note that any progress made with your original login will be lost.
Staying involved
Everyone participating in, facilitating or administering the ITA has a valuable role. As part of the Student Success Community, you will take the ITA survey. Your participation in the survey can help your institution learn from your experience, enabling the Transformation Team to have deeper, more reflective conversations about what’s working to increase student success and what can be improved.
This happens in an insightful conversation between department leaders called Sensemaking, which is fueled by the responses gathered from this ITA survey. This Sensemaking Conversation digs deep and connects the dots between departments and efforts to bring together a diverse group of campus stakeholders, examine perceptions, and set new priorities.
