About the Conference

34th Annual TASS Conference

March 17-20, 2024

 

Welcome to the 34th annual Teaching Academic Survival and Success (TASS) Conference, sponsored by Northern Essex Community College (NECC) and hosted by Broward College, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. 

This is a conference for the serious practitioner who is passionate about helping all students, especially those who are underprepared or underrepresented, to survive and thrive in college and beyond.  

 This conference offers a holistic approach to academic survival from the points of view of college faculty, learning assistance and student support professionals, administrators, and high school teachers. This is the forum where they share lessons learned from evidence-based decisions and real experiences in the classroom, as well as tutoring, mentoring, advising, or counseling sessions. 

 It is for faculty, teaching student success courses and General Education courses in a variety of disciplines, who want to demonstrate and adopt effective, inclusive pedagogical methods that help students of diverse backgrounds learn. 

 It is for tutors, mentors, student success coaches, navigators, counselors, and advisors who share and learn from others best strategies in building our students’ academic and life skills. 

 At a time when there is rightly a growing focus on college completion, not just access, TASS is for administrators who want to share and learn new successful initiatives enhancing student engagement, retention, and graduation rates. 

 This conference is for reformers who feel an urgency to meet students where they are and give them experiences they need to grow and succeed. 

 TASS offers networking opportunities to meet new, like-minded professionals, from all over the country in small settings where substantial discussions occur and friendships are made.  

Generally, there are 50 to 70 sessions, where presenters using a workshop approach describe methods they have used to help students succeed in various academic areas such as reading, critical thinking, writing, oral communication, learning strategies, ESL, as well as other content areas, including general education disciplines. Other foci of interest include assessment of student learning; diversity, equity, and inclusion; freshmen success; graduate student and new faculty perspectives; institutional strategy; learning assistance and student support; as well as the preparation of high school students for college.

The focus of TASS is best practices that are supported by solid research. However, we are not a research conference, but rather a practitioner conference. Conference evaluations have indicated that each participant can come away with a wealth of practical ideas, strategies, and materials to take back to their respective institutions.

We are a unique conference that provides a productive environment for dialogue between faculty and student services.  We go beyond student under-preparedness and student success in higher education as we are looking into student success beyond the academia and after graduation.