Fresh off the heels of last week's "4 for the Fall" guide, NCAN is back with another useful resource for
the K-12 sector:
a 15-month calendar tracking major college and career readiness activities and offering the best resources for conducting them.
This calendar, which NCAN intends to update quarterly, will be refreshed with the very best resources related to topics like training and professional development, financial aid and FAFSA, data, and postsecondary advising, among others.
The release is the latest in a series of NCAN resources aimed at K-12 district and school leaders, school counselors, and other stakeholders, including community partners. It evolved out of lessons learned from NCAN’s To & Through Advising Challenge,
which over the past two academic years saw 20 school districts and community partners across the country implement plans to change their postsecondary advising practices.
As NCAN members know, advising for college and career readiness has many moving parts involving a number of different stakeholders. This calendar, which covers the academic year as well as the summers before and after it, will help those involved with
facilitating students’ postsecondary pathways stay organized, plan ahead, and get connected with best-in-class resources for improving their practice.
NCAN’s recently released “4 for the Fall” guide pairs well with the K-12 calendar. That guide advises district and school leaders on four key steps they can take this fall to help the class of 2021 stay on track for a postsecondary pathway. Those steps
include:
Understanding students’ postsecondary intentions and needs through survey data.
Obtaining and analyzing postsecondary outcomes data from the National Student Clearinghouse.
Increasing access to financial aid by improving Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) completion rates.
Examining current activities around fall milestones, and pivoting to virtual where possible.
There have been a bevy of excellent resources released recently focused on improving postsecondary advising outcomes at the high school level. For example:
The College Advising Corps’ Virtual Advising Guide, a must-read walkthrough about pivoting to virtual delivery.
The next step for NCAN’s latest resource, the K-12 calendar, is to adapt it to an online, interactive format that will allow users to customize their own calendar and filter categories of activities in and out. Stay tuned for more details.
Have questions, concerns, or want to learn more? Contact NCAN’s director of data and evaluation at debaunb@ncan.org.
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