Dr. Collier believes that effective consulting must begin with listening to what the client is trying to accomplish. Only after he is clear about your vision for your project, will he apply his experiences and expertise to help you realize your goals. Dr. Peter J. Collier Consulting can support you in the following areas:
| Mentoring Program Design and Training |
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A well designed mentoring program is the key to student success. The first step is that you need to be able to connect what mentoring can realistically accomplish with the identified adjustment issues of the students you are trying to serve. With Dr. Collier's support, you will be able to successfully conduct needs assessments for your targeted groups of students. Once you have identified students' needs that can appropriately be addressed through mentoring, you can turn your attention to program design. Program design is the glue that holds all of the pieces of your peer-mentoring program together. Program design encompasses all of the planning and structural aspects of your program including locating funding, budgeting, staffing, establishing the program location, making decisions about mode of delivery and program content, putting a system of data collection and storage in place, determining the numbers of mentees and mentors, hiring mentors, recruiting and orienting mentees, deciding upon program content, along with developing job descriptions, program policies and forms. The guidance you receive from Dr. Collier will allow you to thoughtfully consider design choices and the implications of those choices. Mentor training is an underappreciated yet critical element of successful mentoring programs. Dr. Collier can help you establish clear connections between training content and delivered mentee services, as well as a mentor training evaluation plan that supports your claim that any observed positive effects of your program are due to service provided rather than coincidental effects associated with other factors.
Dr. Collier has extensive experience in designing college student peer mentoring programs, specifically those designed to serve first-generation, international, and graduate students. He has conducted program design and training workshops for the National Association of Foreign Student Advisers (Region 1), Oregon Campus Compact, Minnesota Campus compact, and the American Association of Colleges and Universities Summer Institute. He also shared his research and program design efforts in a Consortium for Student Retention Data Exchange-sponsored national webinar, “Expertise-development mentoring: A case study of an intervention to improve first generation college freshmen's academic performance and retention.”
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| Program Evaluation |
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The strength of your evaluation will determine whether others, particularly funders and administrators, view your program as successful. Effective program evaluation requires planning and forethought. Dr. Collier can help you put together an evaluation plan, operationalize your program goals so that they are clear and measurable, identify the types of data you need to collect, develop appropriate data collection tools, coordinate data collection and analysis, and present your evaluation data in ways that support your claims that your program impacts student success.
Dr. Collier has designed and implemented evaluation plans for mentoring projects funded by the U.S. Department of Education, Federal Improvement in Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE) and the National Academic Advising Association (NACADA) Research Grant Programs. In addition, he has conducted workshops on evaluation design and student outcomes assessment in higher education at St. Mary's College (Moraga, CA), California State University, Monterey Bay, Clark College (Vancouver, WA), Portland Community College, and Portland State University. |
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