FAQs

Like last year, the summer institute will take place online using Zoom.

You should have some experience planning and beginning to implement guided pathways or similar reforms, preferably for at least 8–12 months. For example, your college may have undertaken efforts to transform the student experience through improved program design and alignment; teaching, advising, and program onboarding; or partnerships with K-12 schools, universities, and employers. Institute content will be scaffolded to support your learning, but a basic familiarity with guided pathways is assumed.

We understand that colleges may have unique ways of describing their reform efforts. As long as your work is compatible with the guided pathways framework, we welcome your application.

We suggest that teams include at least one person who works directly with institutional data on a regular basis. This person does not need to be an institutional researcher specifically. Part of the institute entails completing straightforward, practical exercises using your college’s student enrollment data to examine disaggregated program enrollments and completions and first-term coursetaking patterns. To participate, you will need someone to perform these analyses and ideally someone who can orient the other team members to the data. Prior to the institute, CCRC will support participating colleges and the people who work with institutional data to complete the prework.

We will use Zoom for synchronous activities and a Canvas course site to house all instructional materials and resources. We hope that these platforms will be easily accessible to participants, and we will provide technical support as needed.

For the best experience, we recommend that each team member join from their individual Zoom account. The institute includes breakout sessions and cross-team collaboration, and it is easiest to join these sessions from individual accounts.

Yes! There will be within-team and cross-team activities for the college teams that participate in each session, and all teams will be invited to participate in post-institute activities in fall 2022.

While many community colleges are implementing whole-college reforms following the guided pathways model, most are not and have not received technical assistance from any national or state organization. Many of these are rural colleges or others without the organizational capacity and resources needed to undertake guided pathways reforms on their own. CCRC is making efforts to reach institutions that, for whatever reason, have been left out of the guided pathways movement. However, we also recognize that some colleges in states with guided pathways initiatives haven’t been able to fully take advantage of these opportunities. If your college is located in a state that has led a guided pathways initiative, but you think this institute would support your work, please include a rationale in your application.

Attendees who participate in all or nearly all institute activities will receive a certificate of participation from CCRC. Attendees will not earn Teachers College credits or continuing education units and will not receive a transcript or grade for participating.