Training and Support

College Summit provides educators with training and professional development to support them. Training begins during the summer at the College Summit Institute and continues into the school year. College Summit also provides local staff who continue to support educators throughout the year.

Training

College Summit is committed to the following professional development principles:

  • Connect professional development to educator knowledge and experience.
  • Provide opportunities for active reflection on the application and implementation of new learning.
  • Engage educators in learning that develops their diversity awareness and cultural competency. 
  • Foster learning communities to support on-going professional growth and program innovation.
  • Utilize a variety of proven adult learning approaches and relevant, evidence-baed content.
  • Promote collaborative problem solving to address shared challenges
  • Evaluate professional development on an on-going basis and use evaluation data for future planning and continuous improvement.

 Support

Many partner schools tell us that having our staff available for on-site, ongoing support truly brings our tools to life. Additional support is provided by dedicated College Summit staff who regularly visit your classroom to offer tips, best practices and their assistance.

A member of the College Summit staff, the High School Coordinator works closely with counselors and teachers to ensure they have what they need for their students to succeed. High School Coordinators typically have a background in school and teacher support. On the ground in your schools every few weeks, High School Coordinators deliver on-site technical assistance and help teachers and counselors troubleshoot challenges as they arise.

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The Students' Own Words
In Their Words is a collection of some of the best student essays from our first ten years.

The College Summit strategy was born from a desire to stop expecting first-generation and low-income students to do what middle-class students can’t do: manage their own way through the college admissions process alone.

"It seemed to me that it took two kinds of adults to help students enroll in college: the expert resource person, usually the school counselor; and the college-experienced adult who manages each student through the process face-to-face, usually a college-experienced parent. With few college-experienced parents available, counselors are asked to take on the impossible task of providing expert resources, and directly managing the process for hundreds of students. Schools serving significant numbers of low-income first-generation students faced an enormous challenge: without someone to manage the process along with the student, how could they expect to send more students to college?"

J.B. Schramm, College Summit Founder and CEO