Postsecondary ITA

Transformation Team Lead

As a Transformation Team Lead you will guide your team through the ITA process toward a fruitful, student success-oriented conversation that’s both insightful and actionable.

Overview

Reflection and Sensemaking

The 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.

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 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. During the conversation, you’ll help your colleagues 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. It’s important to include student- level data and other quantitative inputs in this discussion to help accurately reflect the capabilities of the institution and all the work that has been done to advance equitable student success on campus.

Reviewing the ITA results, particularly in areas where there is a large divergence in answers, is foundational for the Sensemaking Conversation. From there, the team should work to identify what’s next in making progress toward student success goals, ultimately landing on actionable next steps that enhance current activities or point to new or consolidated student success- focused initiatives. This opportunity to bring a diverse group of leaders together to have open and candid conversation is the most valuable part of using this method, and as a facilitator, you can play a unique role in ensuring the conversation is fruitful and actionable.

Your role as a Transformation Team lead

As a Transformation Team Lead you will guide your colleagues through the ITA process toward a fruitful, student success-oriented conversation that’s both insightful and actionable.

The administration of the ITA is often shared between you, the team lead at the institution and a point person at your intermediary, but you may involve others at your institution as well.

Administrator duties are flexible, and the load can be shared to suit your unique situation. Responsibilities of the administrator(s) include:

  • Building out the calendar for this effort, including setting up substantial meetings
  • Playing a key role in generating critical buy-in for this process among your colleagues
  • Selecting participants and onboarding them
  • Troubleshooting as participants sign up and take the survey online
  • Reviewing an in-depth dashboard of all the ITA responses and selecting areas to focus on in the Sensemaking Conversation
  • Facilitating the Sensemaking Conversation by exploring interesting ITA outputs and asking probing questions


If you’re the lead at an institution working with an intermediary, think about your skills and bandwidth and chart a path forward for the right level of support. Also consider any relevant institutional context that would be helpful to intermediary partners as you work together to plan the process. This might include information about existing or prior student success initiatives on campus, completion rates, or other relevant student data.

No matter where you and your colleagues are in your journey to improve equitable student success on your campus, 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 institutional leaders 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 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 discussing those results by the facilitator and a group of participants. Ultimately, the conversation provides a forum for a varied group of leaders from across an institution to come together to reflect and plan.

Support materials

Resources for facilitating 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 of physical artifact 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 initiatives or ongoing institutional planning and prioritization efforts. Engaging with the ITA does entail a significant time commitment from the Transformation Team Lead and their Transformation Team colleagues, so it’s important to have clear direction as to why you’re embarking on this work, how it will incorporate and reflect existing campus 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 survey 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 Team colleagues 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 process at your 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.

As the team lead, you will be responsible for shepherding your institution through the process of using these tools. Often an intermediary or external support partner can help you utilize this method, and they may bring unique insights or structure to the conversation.

To begin, you will need to build or leverage an existing core team of leaders who are deeply involved in transformation and student success (e.g., presidents, provosts, and deans), 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.

Depending on how tasks are shared with an intermediary partner, the Team Lead will be partially responsible for shepherding this process at the institution. Based on which responsibilities an intermediary takes 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 important that campus leaders who have high-level budget management responsibility for the subject areas covered in the ITA transformation categories complete the Transformation Team survey and 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. However, it’s inevitable to encounter scheduling challenges with groups the size and importance of those that comprise the campus Transformation Team, so some institutions may have a larger gap between the survey and Sensemaking Conversation. Keeping your team motivated and aware is especially important for scheduling.

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.

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

Follow the ITA checklist for some key steps to facilitating the ITA process at an institution.

Distribute the ITA

After you receive links for your institution you will move on to inviting participants. 

 

Copy the links and send them to your participants with the explanations below, along with any other context about the ITA and the process that you’d like to share. The Transformation Team Lead, Transformation Team and Student Success Community pages on this website are good options to share information. Send separate emails to the Transformation Team and Student Success Community participants to eliminate confusion.

Transformation Team

This group of 8–15 campus leaders who are deeply focused on and leading transformation and student success efforts at the institution, should take this 100+ question version of the survey. Copy the indented content below and add the links in the body of your email. 

[ADD TRANSFORMATION TEAM SURVEY LINK HERE] Click on this link to register to take the full Institutional Transformation Assessment. Plan on 45–60 minutes to take the assessment. (Do not use this link to return to the survey if you need to take a break at any point.)

[ADD RETURN TO ITA LINK HERE] If you need to exit the assessment at any point, use this link to resume taking the survey. Your login will be the email you registered with. 

[copy content=”100OFF”]

Student Success Community

Send this survey to the larger group of campus practitioners that will take the brief 30+ question survey but not participate in the Sensemaking Conversation—it is intended to bring in a wide range of insights to help your Transformation Team reflect. Copy the indented content below and add the links in the body of your email. 

[ADD STUDENT SUCCESS COMMUNITY SURVEY LINK HERE] Click on this link to register and take the 30+ question Institutional Transformation Assessment. This should take 15–20 minutes. (Do not use this link to return to the survey if you need to take a break at any point.)

[ADD RETURN TO ITA LINK HERE] If you need to exit the assessment at any point, use this link to resume taking the survey. Your login will be the email you registered with.

[copy content=”100OFF”]

ITA Links

After an institution is registered, there are a few important links that participants and facilitators will receive.

Returning to the Institutional Transformation Assessment:

When taking the ITA survey, it’s okay if participants don’t complete the entire assessment in one sitting—they will be able to return and pick up where they left off.

To do so, they’ll need to use the Return to ITA link, which was included in the original invitation email that they received. Alternatively, they can use the link in the Return to ITA email that was automatically sent to them after they registered for the ITA (they should check their spam folder if they don’t see it in their 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 their partially completed survey will cause a “duplicate panel member” error because the survey will assume they are registering again.

If they receive a this error, they have two options:

  1. They may alert your team lead to the error and the team lead can clear the duplicate profile. (Be aware that this may take 24-48 hours.)
  2. They may click on the original link again, but they will need to use a different email address and take the survey from the beginning again. Please note that any progress made with their original login will be lost.
Link Who it’s for What it’s for

Survey link- Transformation Team

Transformation Team

Participant ITA survey links, to be shared via email by a facilitator

Survey link- Student Success Community

Student Success Community

Participant ITA survey links, to be shared via email by a facilitator

“Return to the ITA survey” link

Participants

Used by participants to return and complete ITA survey

Dashboard logons

Facilitators

Used to access dashboards and monitor response rates and then review ITA outputs in preparation for Sensemaking

Post-Sensemaking survey link and credentials

Facilitators

To be accessed at the tail end of Sensemaking to answer a few key questions that will be saved for future reference.

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 a conversation to dig in deep 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 process 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 sense-making

The ITA survey results is 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 period, 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?

  • 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?

  • 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 in order 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 as a way 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:

  • Timing for the session(s), including breaks
  • Any questions you might have for subject matter experts about synthesized ITA outputs you’ll be leaning on
  • A request for participants to bring their individual ITA results
  • A brief outline of the kind of meaningful engagement you’re expecting

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 the heart of this process. It is a meeting of leaders and 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 the campus environment for student success.


The Sensemaking Conversation can also build on other data points, resources, or metrics, and provides a forum for a cross-functional team of key stakeholders to come together. Many have found this conversation deeply valuable—especially in the way that it brings a diverse group together to have an open dialogue.

The structure of the conversation is flexible. As the facilitator you can decide the structure that is needed to stimulate a deep conversation. With the full group of participants having used the ITA survey to prepare, the conversation should grow from a reflection about 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.

Key session component How to facilitate effectively… …and some considerations for virtual sessions

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.


Celebrate the group’s hard work to date, and speak to past or ongoing student success efforts.


Frame these sessions as an innovative approach to breaking down silos and forging new paths forward to serve students.

Remind participants to have their individual ITA results handy.

Address any technical issues.


Post the agenda for the day (including timing of breaks) in the chat window for easy access.

Introduce participants and share ground rules

Establish roles, including facilitator, note-taker and timekeeper.


Set ground rules for speaking and sharing; address the dynamics at play with senior leaders in the room.


Offer avenues for constructive disagreement, such as comment cards, silent voting, or a speaker stick.

List all the participants’ names on a slide or virtual whiteboard, and run through a roll call.


Use a simple icebreaker to get everyone used to unmuting themselves and speaking up.


Co-create virtual ground rules; establish when and how you’ll use the chat function, and when you’d like people to speak.

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.


At the top of a whiteboard, wall, or flipchart, write a prompt such as:


“Student success is…”
“Student success looks like…”
“We deliver on our promises to our students when…”
“Our institution is at its best when…”
“Equity on our campus looks like…”

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.


Discuss the responses together for 10 minutes. Does your team notice any common themes? Does anything surprise you? Where are ideas converging or diverging?


Ask each person to vote for the statements that most resonate with them by drawing a star on a maximum of three Post-its.


Select the top-voted statement (this may involve some group rewriting if there are a couple favorites, and that’s great—the goal is a mutually resonant statement). This can stay at the top of the board and serve as a reminder in future meetings of this work—it’s also a great piece to include in any follow-up.

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.


Be sure to save the output—your north star statement—and drop it in the chat window or at the beginning of any slide decks you share in future meetings with the team.

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.


Ask participants to chime in if they agree or disagree with the aggregate rating on a given indicator.


Don’t try to review every indicator, or make it through every topic in one session—select focus areas within each topic and divvy them across sessions (or one session broken up with breaks.)


Based on results, other quantitative data, and knowledge about past work, you could create clusters of topics that inform one another (for example, leadership and advising).


Bring in KPIs and data to add depth to the conversation and the ITA’s qualitative outputs.

Use breakout rooms to foster more conversation—people are often more willing to chime in within smaller groups.


Intentionally cluster participants around interesting indicators, and send them to breakouts to discuss and share back.


Use a virtual whiteboard (like Google Jamboard, Mural, Miro, or InVision) to capture thoughts in the moment—you can pre-build a board with screenshots of ITA results or key questions, then allow participants to add their own comments.


Offering multiple ways for people to comment (voice, chat, Post-it) can help more people participate—this is a benefit of virtual work!

Refer to the ITA rubrics

Digging into the language of the rubrics to tease out the nuances between levels often merits interesting conversation.


The rubrics are available in Excel and PDF form via the ITA homepage—your participants’ results (which they were automatically emailed after they finished the ITA) also have the full ITA content, overlaid with their response.

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.

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.)


In the past, groups have used the “wheel” poster to land on a rating for each topic—sometimes the Transformation Team nudges the final rating in one direction if the results for a topic area were scattered.


You may decide not to focus on coming to consensus on a rating, but regardless, this visualization can be a useful way to celebrate strengths and visualize areas of opportunity, as well as mark progress through the topics.

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.


These are long, jam-packed sessions, and a visualization of the work involved and the progress toward the end can be useful—the wheel can provide this, but so could a journey map with a “we are here” button you can move along.

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.


You can use the priority matrix—one of the sense-making posters—to start to organize ideas about what actions to take.

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.

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:

  • What story do the ITA outputs tell about student success at your institution?
  • What is the most important thing to focus on that would have significant impact on student success?
  • What are the 3-5 most impactful actions we might take next?


These are great questions to include in the wrap-up with your group. And when you enter them in Qualtrics you’ll receive a formatted PDF with the ITA results on the wheel plus your answers; this is a great piece to send out to the team after the meeting.

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