🎓 10th Grade College Success Course
Designing Early Postsecondary Readiness with Earlier Exposure
🔹 Overview
Organization: KIPP Atlanta Collegiate (KIPP Atlanta Schools)
Timeline: 2022–2023 Academic Year (Pilot Year)
Role: Inaugural Course Designer & Lead Instructor
Focus Areas: Postsecondary Access • Curriculum Development • Instructional Design • Student Engagement
Tools Used: Google Classroom • Naviance • YouScience • Google Slides • Excel • Surveys
🔹 The Challenge
While KIPP Atlanta had a strong focus on postsecondary planning for juniors and seniors, 10th grade remained a largely untapped opportunity. Many students lacked early exposure to college and career language, personal goal setting, and identity-driven planning. This left them underprepared to make informed choices by the time they reached upperclassman milestones.
There was no formal, credit-bearing system in place to guide 10th-grade students through self-discovery, postsecondary planning, and future-ready decision-making.
🔹 My Role and Contributions
As the inaugural course designer and instructor, I launched KIPP Atlanta Collegiate’s first-ever 10th Grade College Success Course, a semester-long, credit-bearing class designed to build identity awareness, academic ownership, and postsecondary readiness in early high school.
Key Responsibilities:
Curriculum Design: Created a comprehensive scope and sequence focused on identity, strengths assessments, transcript literacy, SMART goals, college research, career pathways, and financial aid literacy.
Instructional Leadership: Delivered weekly instruction to 75+ 10th-grade students using interactive lesson plans, discussion protocols, project-based learning, and digital tools like YouScience and Naviance.
Data & Progress Monitoring: Developed systems to track student reflection growth, engagement, and pathway knowledge via pre- and post-course surveys, grade-level transcript audits, and student conferences.
Cross-Team Collaboration: Aligned curriculum with academic counselors, advisory teams, and KIPP Forward postsecondary staff to ensure vertical alignment and long-term impact.
Student Voice Integration: Designed student feedback loops to adjust pacing, lesson content, and project rubrics in real time.
🔹 The Impact
✅ 91% of students completed a final Postsecondary Portfolio Project
✅ 100+ students gained early transcript literacy and pathway awareness
✅ 82% showed increased confidence in identifying their postsecondary goals
✅ Positive feedback from school leaders, counselors, and families
✅ The course is now a core elective for CCRPI readininess within KIPP Atlanta Collegiate
This course helped students articulate not just where they wanted to go, but why they wanted to go there, and how they could build a plan to get there.
🔹What I Learned
Designing and teaching this course reaffirmed my belief that postsecondary planning must start before students are asked to make high-stakes decisions.
I learned how to:
Build a standards-aligned curriculum rooted in real student experience
Combine strategy with storytelling to engage 10th graders in serious thinking
Use feedback, data, and instructional design principles to build something scalable
If I were to do it again, I’d push to embed more real-world experiences, such as in-class guest speakers, simulations, and community based projects or research for scholars to truly understand how all aspects of society affect their postsecondary plans.
🔹 Want to Replicate This?
If you're considering how to embed postsecondary readiness earlier in high school—or need help designing a course that blends identity, access, and systems—I’d love to help.
📩 workwithalexas@gmail.com