A LEARNING PRACTICE COMPANY
Helping colleges strengthen the practices through which students learn.
Every day, faculty, advisors, coaches, tutors, mentors, and other learning practitioners influence how students learn. Their conversations, questions, feedback, and guidance shape the learning practices students develop across courses, experiences, and challenges.
Yet many of the learning practices that matter most remain invisible—making them difficult for students to recognize, for practitioners to strengthen, and for institutions to support consistently.
B Optimal partners with two-year and four-year colleges to strengthen learning through Learning Practice Programs that develop practitioner capability, support students, and build more consistent learning practices across the institution.
Who We Partner With
Our tools and professional learning are designed to support the people and systems that help students learn.
-
Faculty & Teaching Centers
-
Academic Advising & Success Coaching
-
Tutoring & Learning Centers
-
Career Services & Experiential Learning
-
First-Year Experience & Student Success
-
Academic Affairs & Learning Innovation
LEARNING PRACTICES
Learning Practices We Build & Strengthen
Learning happens every day through hundreds of small decisions, actions, and interactions. We work with colleges to strengthen the learning practices that help students understand their learning, improve their performance, and carry what they learn from one experience to the next.
THE COMMON CHALLENGE
The learning practices that matter most often remain invisible.
Students learn across classrooms, advising appointments, tutoring sessions, coaching conversations, career experiences, student employment, internships, and countless other interactions. Every one of these experiences offers an opportunity to strengthen how students learn.
Yet many of the learning practices that determine success remain difficult to see, name, discuss, and intentionally strengthen.
As a result, students often struggle to understand what is helping them succeed. Practitioners struggle to identify where support is actually needed. Institutions struggle to build consistent approaches to supporting learning across classrooms, advising, tutoring, coaching, and experiential learning.
LEARNING PRACTICE PROGRAMS
A practical way to strengthen learning across your college.
A B Optimal Learning Practice Program combines professional learning, learner-facing tools, practitioner resources, implementation guidance, and supporting resources into one coordinated approach for strengthening specific areas of learning practice.
Faculty, advisors, tutors, coaches, and other support professionals develop the capability to support learning more intentionally and consistently, while students encounter shared approaches that strengthen learning practices across academic, career, and personal contexts.
Colleges can begin with the program that best aligns with their current priorities and expand implementation over time. Because every Learning Practice Program builds on the same Learning Practice Framework, Learning Practice Architecture, shared language, and practical approach, each new program extends and reinforces the work already in place.
FEATURED LEARNING PRACTICE PROGRAM
Tell My Story with STARR+
Students have meaningful learning experiences every day, yet many struggle to recognize what they have learned, explain how they have grown, or communicate their capabilities beyond a single assignment, course, or experience.
Tell My Story with STARR+ professional development experience helps practitioners facilitate structured reflection that enables students to recognize learning from experience, make meaning from it, and communicate that learning across academic, career, and personal contexts.
Participants consistently identified immediate applications across advising, coaching, tutoring, classroom activities, reflection assignments, career development, student employment, and student leadership.
Participants also reported feeling prepared to use STARR+ with students and highlighted its ability to strengthen learning conversations, connect actions with outcomes, and make learning more visible for both students and practitioners.
BUILDING SOMETHING LARGER
Learning Practice Infrastructure
Learning Practice Programs do more than develop individual practitioners. Together, they help colleges build a shared and more coordinated approach to strengthening learning across the institution.
B Optimal calls this Learning Practice Infrastructure.
As institutions adopt additional Learning Practice Programs, practitioners develop greater consistency across classrooms, advising, tutoring, coaching, career development, and other learning environments.
The result is stronger continuity across roles, more productive learning conversations, and a more consistent approach to supporting student learning.
THE SYSTEM BEHIND THE PROGRAMS
The Metacognitive Moves System
Every B Optimal Learning Practice Program is built on the Metacognitive Moves System.
The Metacognitive Moves System provides the shared design principles, learning frameworks, and practical tools that allow each Learning Practice Program to build on the last.
As institutions adopt additional programs, practitioners develop shared language, shared frameworks, and more consistent approaches to supporting learning while continuing to build on a common foundation.
Because every Learning Practice Program shares the same design foundation, institutions can expand their learning practice over time without replacing what they have already built.