Stepping back to reflect is an important part of the College Unbound educational experience. Our use of the “Big Picture Learning” design is part of why we constantly ask students to look at what they’ve accomplished … what they’re interested in … what they can do better the next time. The staff at our headquarters also follows 16 years of Big Picture Learning tradition when they write a “TGIF” reflection every Friday and then share these thoughts about the past week with colleagues. We clearly try to practice what we preach.
In this part of our new College Unbound website, we look forward to sharing with you some of the reflections that come out of our growing community of learners, leaders, and volunteers.
Our first reflection is an especially timely one, then:
Launching this website wasn’t easy, even though we kept our aspirations small and our design simple. That’s because, in true College Unbound fashion, we challenged ourselves by building the site through a learning process that pulled in many different students and staff with had a wide range of experience and skills.
Therefore, just the fact that this text is up on a totally-new website means that it’s clearly time to say “Thanks!” to a number of different people:
To our on-site experts/teachers–Brian Mills and Rodney Davis–thank you for your coaching, patient explanations, and for finally building the site and getting us live.
To the College Unbound students who helped us focus on needs, content and, design–Jennifer Green, Mike McCarthy, and now Dennis Driscoll—thank you for your expertise, creativity and ideas.
To Professor Charlie Rosner and his marketing communications students in New York City—thank you for guiding our thinking, questioning, and re-branding.
To those back in Providence who focused on images and storytelling—thank you to Chandelle Wilson, Tara Hagopian, Talia Lundy, and Erin Sheehan for your photography and video work.
And to other program leaders and staff who chipped in on various parts of the brainstorming, drafting, and review process—thank you to Dennis Littky, Jamie Scurry, MR Brezler, Beth Sheehan, Adam Bush, Frank Romanelli, and Anna Haas.
Back to the work, and to building off it our new reflections for you in the months to come.
–The College Unbound Community
