Dear TRIO Colleagues: Welcome home to TRIO!
The RTR Training Team wants to personally invite you to attend one of the Year 2000 Retention Through Resiliency Professional Development Trainings. We have designed a purposeful, interactive, and challenging training that will assist you to improve the retention and graduation strategies at your institution or agency. We put the emphasis on you in our two and a half day training event; your input, your questions, your networking needs, and your skills and abilities. Our trainers/facilitators have much information to impart but, more importantly, they want to work in concert with you to make sure your training needs are met.
Take a close look at our website, browse through the information on Boston, Austin, and Long Beach, read about our training team, and then register. Don't put it off, as we are limiting attendance at each training site to 50 participants in order to ensure an optimal trainer/participant ratio.
If you have any questions, please call me or Rob Montalbano at (307)755-5530 or email us at lynn@aspire-training.org. Thanks & we'll see you this spring!
The Retention Through Resiliency (RTR) training is designed to provide training participants with innovative retention strategies. You will come away from this training with ideas, resources, new knowledge, and most importantly, new contacts to help you foster a resiliency-building environment in your TRIO project. What is resiliency? It’s defined as the ability to spring back from and successfully adapt to adversity, and persevere to reach one’s goals. Almost every TRIO educator can cite an example of a student or client who has an incredible number of risk factors in his/her life, but succeeds in becoming a competent, caring and confident individual. Research from the fields of psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and education is demonstrating that youth, adults, families and communities can recover from adversity and be successful if there are specific “protective factors” in their lives. These protective factors are made up of characteristics within the individual and the environment that mitigate the negative impact of stressful situations.
RTR training participants, guided by the members of the RTR training team, will address such questions as:
Using the Resiliency Wheel as a tool, you will evaluate the level to which your project identifies and builds resiliency in your TRIO project participants.
Some of the specific topics that will be addressed at this training include:
All TRIO project personnel are eligible to attend the RTR training. Those with a particular interest in retention and graduation strategies are encouraged to attend. There is one requirement; each training participant will complete a Dissemination Activity Plan at the training site, and will be expected to conduct a dissemination activity in the six months following the training. You will decide on your own dissemination activity, your team leaders will assist you, and creativity is encouraged. The idea is to have you pass along the information you learn to at least one other group, so that the chain of learning can continue long after you complete the training.
The RTR training project is designed to be more than a one-time-only event. The goal is to develop a “learning community” with interested participants becoming involved in a dialogue about resiliency and retention issues that will continue after you have left the training site. To this end the following components have been incorporated into the RTR training design:
Prior to the training, registered participants will receive a packet of information from the RTR Training Team that will include introductory information on resiliency, expectations of training participants, site-specific information, biographies of the training team, and a training agenda. This packet will give you a head start on planning for attendance at the training, and help you get mentally prepared for the work ahead. Upon registration you will be given the option of signing up to the RTR listserv so you can monitor and participate in the discussion about retention and resiliency.
An RTR newsletter will be available to you as a RTR “graduate.” This newsletter will include information about resiliency and retention, direct you to additional resources, and - most importantly - highlight the dissemination activities of RTR participants.
For additional questions about the "Retention Through Resiliency: A Framework for TRIO Educators" Professional Development Training, please contact: