This is the Virtual College Returner Coach training module.
Estimated time to complete is less than 30 minutes (including mastery assignment).

Program Updates

Hello! We are so thankful for every coach who is returning to help us serve 600 students through CollegePoint, along with an additional 100 students outside of CollegePoint’s criteria. This promises to be our most exciting year yet, and we can’t wait to continue to learn alongside coaches.

Thanks to our learnings from the 2017-18 program year, the 2018-19 year will look fairly similar. We’re making a few minor changes to our program that we’d like to highlight for you.

Coach Cohorts & Community Building

Piloting the cohort model taught us a lot about how we can best develop community between coaches. While we will no longer be pursuing cohorts as a mandated part of the program, we are excited to take the best practices we’ve learned this year, and exploring new strategies to build community including:

• Coach Connection Webinars: One thing we consistently heard was that coaches loved meeting one another in their initial cohort meetings. To support that, we will be hosting webinars moderated by staff early in the program, where coaches can meet one another, connect about their experience, and build their network.
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• 2018-19 Facebook Group: Similar to last year, we will be creating and maintaining a closed Facebook group for coaches to connect, support one another, and share resources. ScholarMatch will be taking a more active role to ensure the group is of value to coaches.
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• Coach Led Content: We have so many coaches who, based on their experience within the program and/or their background, have an incredible wealth of knowledge they’d like to share. Whether it be through coach led webinars, resource shares, or offering to be a point-of-contact on various content areas, we’re exploring additional ways for coaches to be involved. If you’d like to participate in this way, let us know ASAP!

Airtable Bases

Based on coach and student feedback, we will not be creating student Airtable bases this year. It was our hope that they could serve as a centralized location for students and coaches to collaborate; however, we found that students and coaches were already doing this in a variety of ways, and thus, didn’t feel the need to use their base.

We recommend coaches and students both utilize Google Drive, as it is a secure and user-friendly platform to house documents in and use to track progress. However, you should feel free to track information in whatever way is most convenient and useful for you. If you would like to use Airtable to track your students’ progress, we are more than happy to create bases for you!

Virtual College Coach Resource Page

We’re creating a centralized resource page for all things related to the virtual program! It will be a one-stop-shop for coaches, where you will be able to find resources on everything from college list building to scholarships, important dates and deadlines, Airtable forms and more.

The link will be shared with you once you are matched with students, similar to how the College Toolkit was shared with you last year during the matching process.

Mastery Check for Understanding

Now that you understand our program updates, please demonstrate your knowledge by completing a brief mastery assignment here.

*Note that this training is not considered complete until you have submitted this assignment.