Students with learning differences can succeed in college!
Once a student enrolls in the Achieve Program, our Achieve staff and faculty assess that student’s needs. The Director of Achieve, the Program Coordinator, the Career Readiness Specialist, the Learning Coach, Interns, and faculty members work together to create an individualized pathway to provide students resources to help overcome their challenges and meet their goals.
When these individualized pathways are paired with the program’s assistive technology and a proven team approach, students with learning differences are seeing higher levels of success at Villa than national averages.
Achieve students have exclusive access to staff trained to work with students with learning differences. In addition to building sessions directly into a student’s schedule to facilitate planning, Achieve staff checks in with their students throughout the semester to discuss progress, areas of improvement needed, and accommodation needs. Weekly sessions are built into the students’ schedules and focus on academic skills such as note-taking, reading comprehension, study strategies, and executive function skills such as self-advocacy, working memory, and task initiation.
The Achieve Program also offers resources that assists students in overcoming common obstacles, like time management, flexibility, and organization.
Villa’s Achieve Program trains its students to master assistive technology that help ease the transition from the high school classroom to the college classroom. Achieve students have unlimited access to Microsoft Read Aloud and Dictate, Read and Write, Glean, Livescribe Pens and Notebooks, and other tools they’ll need to complete classwork and prepare for exams. The use of these tools can increase students’ self-confidence in their academic, personal, and professional lives. These software programs mimic real-world applications and technology that students will most likely use in the workplace.
Achieve students have exclusive access to all of these facilities any time the campus is open. Students commonly use the Achieve Center to study between classes and learning sessions.
Villa’s Achieve Program is headquartered on the Ground Floor of the College’s brand new Scott Bieler Center for Academic Excellence. Learn more about the Bieler Center at www.villa.edu/bielercenter.
The space consists of quiet workspaces, a student lounge, and a sensory-inclusive space.
”"I have a unique perspective that I am both here as a professional tutor, and as a mom. My daughter’s in her third year here in the Graphic Design program. She recently completed her first internship and is looking for her senior one. And, just seeing the growth in her, I believe that if she didn’t have this program, I don’t think that she would be as successful as she has been, or that I would have seen the growth that she’s had because of the one-on-one that she gets through the Achieve Program. It’s my philosophy that anybody can get that college degree if that’s their dream to do it, if they have the correct supports. It’s a phrase I’ve always said because my children also have learning disabilities, is that there’s no disability when you notice ability."
Mary DugganAchieve Tutor