Student retention is a primary concern for all post-secondary institutions. In a study conducted by the Research Department of the Minnesota House of Representatives on community college retention, 55% of new, entering students drop out of college by their second year of enrollment (Finc & Lehnertz, 1991). To address this [...]
Supportive Environment is the amount to which friends, family, teachers and others around us value high achievement and positively encourage people in their goals. A supportive environment is a critical factor in the MTSS process. Multi-Tiered System of Supports, or MTSS, is a term used to describe an evidence-based model [...]
For many years, we at The Conover Company have grouped sales orientation with leadership. The two are fundamentally the same. Leadership is the ability to clearly express to others your vision or ideas about how to do something, get them to accept and do it on their own. Sales orientation [...]
Assessing independent living skills is a crucial process in our educational system because it can help prepare individuals with disabilities for their post-secondary settings. Rather than just hoping to place them in the community when they turn 22 years of age (in some states, 26), you can better prepare individuals [...]
Empathy is the fourth building block on our social/emotional pyramid that is measured by the Success Profiler’s Personal Skills Map. Empathy is one of the more critical characteristics in our social/emotional pyramid. Without empathy, emotional intelligence is simply not possible. Empathy is also a critical skill needed in MTSS. Multi-Tiered [...]
From the very beginning, we knew our Personal Skills Map would go far, but it has actually exceeded our greatest expectations. There are now 120 masters and doctoral-level dissertations, papers and books published on this popular instrument. Not only that, but the Personal Skills Map now has over 8,500,000 (8.5 [...]
If there were a smarter way to do something would you do it? Let’s take the invention of cars for example. Someone thought, “Wouldn't it be great if we didn't have to walk everywhere?” We could travel longer distances in a shorter time period. Great solution, right? I think people [...]
There are two critical resources that we all have: 1) time, and 2) money. For the vast majority of us, these two are linked. We go to our jobs every day and trade our time for money so we can buy the things we need. In education, the formula is [...]
Everyone thinks they know what they want, but if you really think about it, we only know what we don’t want, based on what we don’t like. This can be dangerous, because if we don't know what we want, we don't have an end goal and we end up losing [...]
It’s been said that the first step in solving a problem is recognizing that there’s a problem. One of the biggest problems I hear from school districts all over the country is that they don’t have enough time to properly administer, score, interpret, and catalog assessment results that are required [...]