A Conversation with Don Fraser on Helping Kids Succeed

I recently had the pleasure to meet Don Fraser, Director of College Access and Transition at the MET, an innovative public school system in Rhode Island based on the idea that a person’s deepest learnings come from authentic experiences. The MET's curriculum is focused on blending school-based learning with outside experiences to heighten student's interests and create relevancy, personalizing their instruction and making parents true partners in their education.

Don had an interesting and thought provoking perspective on how the system needs to be transformed to help students succeed. Here are three takeaways from our conversation:

1. Students are not good consumers with regard to their education. Finding the right student-institution fit is critical to ensuring academic success, yet most students make this important decision based on incomplete and relatively superficial information, such as school brochures, location, major and a campus visits. We need to help them expand the criteria they use to find the right school for them to include more predictive success factors such as graduation rate and campus climate.

2. Dropping out of school is often attributed to a student’s lack of “college readiness,” but is more often a result of student's vulnerability to feeling lost, isolated and overwhelmed by the academic, social, and institutional challenges they face. It is rare for a student to ask for help, and so we must look out for at-risk signs. When a student has at least one trusted adult on campus that genuinely cares about them, the likelihood of overcoming challenges multiplies. Our task is twofold: We need to help students become better self-advocates and also create an environment where students feel comfortable to ask for help.

3. The summer between High School and college presents an underutilized, yet excellent opportunity to help bridge student’s transition into college. Traditional orientation programs are typically held at the beginning of the school year, which makes it difficult for students to fully internalize the plethora of information presented amongst the whirlwind of change and stimulus during the first week of school. Don recommends a longer orientation at the beginning of the summer along with a guided debrief of their experience as an effective means for helping students prepare for the challenges ahead.

Many thanks to Don for sharing his thoughts with our team.