Whether for your management team, faculty, or staff, College Matters designs and delivers customized professional development workshops that are transformational.

Team Building
Intentional team building accelerates the group process and provides quick results in changing a school’s management team from individual departmental leaders to the kind of collaborative cross-functional teams that are the heart of effective strategic management. College Matters works with your team to move quickly through conflict or dysfunctional team behaviors to develop and cultivate a dynamic, high functioning management team. The focus of team building is understanding and resolving conflict, overcoming dysfunctional team behaviors, creating high performance teams, and more.

Supervising People
Ideal for anyone who supervises others, this smorgasbord of workshops covers essential skills needed to effectively manage others. Designed for both new and seasoned leaders individual sessions include Understanding Self as Leader, Essential Communication Skills, Performance Coaching, Handling Difficult Employees, Problem Solving, Time Management, Managing Change, Personal Style Inventory, Core Competencies for Effective Leaders, and more.

Teaching Multiple Generations
Wondering how to reach today’s students? They seem so—different. And they are–wired from birth! Reaching today’s 18-30 year old (and older students, too) takes an understanding of their IAOs (interests, attitudes, opinions) of the different generations—psychographics. Today’s college faculty are overwhelming older than the majority of today’s college students, especially recent high school graduates. This presentation introduces faculty to the variety of learners from a generational viewpoint, discusses how they learn, and how best to reach them. Participants will discover ways to adapt content delivery to enhance the learning environment for today’s youngest learners (Generations Y and Z) and will have an opportunity to reflect on their individual teaching practice to discover opportunities to better meet the learning needs of today’s student population through an examination of psychographics

Reaching Unprepared Students
Based on concepts from Teaching Unprepared Students: Strategies for Promoting Success and Retention in Higher Education by Kathleen F. Gabriel. This faculty development event mirrors the following stated intention of Gabriel’s book: “to provide professors with teaching strategies and methods that will promote student engagement and improve performance for all the students in their classes, but especially for those who are at risk or unprepared, without sacrificing high standards or expectations.” Noting the potential for faculty resistance to a paradigm shift to a more interactive learning environment, the session will engage faculty in a lively academic debate designed to guide them through the stages of the change curve (denial, resistance, exploration, and commitment) and a highly interactive and engaging discussion of their insights/concerns about the concepts of Gabriel’s book, an examination of teaching and learning styles, a discussion of the role of the classroom experience in student retention, and a number of other activities designed to transform any teacher-centered classroom into a student-centered learning experience.