Kansas Student Success Conference

Promoting student success is a central goal for all institutions of higher learning and is arguably a more important concern now more than ever; with the global struggles and uncertainty our students are facing. Traditional approaches of identifying problems and trying to address them directly have shown limited success and fail to take in to account the full scope of strengths available to colleges through their communities, their workforce and their student bodies.

In this presentation, we will introduce a theoretical approach to organizational change and a goal of increasing student success in all aspects of the student’s life. This approach, called Positive Deviance, is based on the observation that in any collective there are individuals or groups that exhibit uncommon but successful behaviors that enable them to better overcome problems-despite facing similar challenges and having no extra resources or advantages than their peers.

Participants in this session will gain a deeper understanding of Positive Deviance, and how our organization plans to use it to recognize areas of excellence within our college and capitalize on successes by creating and applying proven strategies in other areas of the college.  Overall enhancing student supports while improving retention and completion rates.