Breakaway Learners Quotes

“If children are not exposed to opportunity, it is hard for them to know it is there.”
― Karen Gross, Breakaway Learners: Strategies for Post-Secondary Success with At-Risk Students

“The current Parent PLUS Loan product is too expensive (including interest rates) and too keyed to credit worthiness.”
― Karen Gross, Breakaway Learners: Strategies for Post-Secondary Success with At-Risk Students

“In short, these professionals need to understand money’s language and be able to speak it to help breakaway students find pathways to higher education and solutions for their financial and family obligations.”
― Karen Gross, Breakaway Learners: Strategies for Post-Secondary Success with At-Risk Students

“Lasticity is at once an outcome, a process, a goal, a trait, a characteristic, a construct, and an architecture to facilitate and foster breakaway student success. But those descriptors do not do justice to lasticity’s meaning, because it is also a catalyst for culture change.”
― Karen Gross, Breakaway Learners: Strategies for Post-Secondary Success with At-Risk Students

“We know that on a campus, you can do 98% of things “right,” but one nasty comment or misunderstood encounter can make a breakaway student unsettled or worse.”
― Karen Gross, Breakaway Learners: Strategies for Post-Secondary Success with At-Risk Students

“In other words, professionals within the institution assume that the absence of uptake is evidence of a lack of interest, lack of commitment, lack of effort.”
― Karen Gross, Breakaway Learners: Strategies for Post-Secondary Success with At-Risk Students

“We underestimate the depth of the behaviors of hypervigilant people because we do not actually see them.”
― Karen Gross, Breakaway Learners: Strategies for Post-Secondary Success with At-Risk Students

“Deescalate and defuse, not ramp up and sanction.”
― Karen Gross, Breakaway Learners: Strategies for Post-Secondary Success with At-Risk Students

“Teachers and faculty are remarkably focused on self and interpret student action (or inaction) as a personal affront. Really? Not everything is personal and focused on faculty.”
― Karen Gross, Breakaway Learners: Strategies for Post-Secondary Success with At-Risk Students

“Stated in its simplest form, lasticity describes the set of express conditions (related to qualities, processes, approaches, values, and interconnectivity) that, if met and satisfied, operate to facilitate breakaway student success across the educational pipeline.”
― Karen Gross, Breakaway Learners: Strategies for Post-Secondary Success with At-Risk Students

“The majority of the current student-focused attention is targeted at those who have failed and what we need to add to their tool box of skills. We employ a deficiency model.”
― Karen Gross, Breakaway Learners: Strategies for Post-Secondary Success with At-Risk Students

“It makes little sense to focus on the end point—graduation and graduation rates—if you can’t get the beginning right.”
― Karen Gross, Breakaway Learners: Strategies for Post-Secondary Success with At-Risk Students

“Breakaway students are moving (actually often wrenching themselves) away from where they were to where they can be. Some succeed. Others do not.”
― Karen Gross, Breakaway Learners: Strategies for Post-Secondary Success with At-Risk Students