The Aspen Institute College Excellence Program (CEP) was looking to deepen engagement across its cohort of nine high-performing community colleges, The Frontier Set. It sought approaches to bolster virtual learning, problem solving, and network connections that supported campus leaders outside of traditional face-to-face institutes and meetings.

Working with CEP staff, Phase Two Advisory developed a virtual consultancy methodology that applied a traditional consultancy protocol to a virtual environment. The resulting methodology provides participating colleges the opportunity to share a “challenge of practice” with colleagues from across the cohort. Typically, this challenge is a thorny implementation issue for which the college would like collegial feedback or alternate viewpoints and potential solutions. After sharing their context and the challenge, colleagues from other institutions have the opportunity to ask probing questions and discuss the challenge amongst themselves. Virtual consultancies were deployed monthly, providing each campus with the chance to give and receive feedback and a regular cadence for building trusting relationships among cohort members.

The Virtual Consultancies were deployed for two semesters, with participants rating their usefulness highly. Campuses report gaining tactical ideas for expanding their implementation work and putting those ideas into practice. Phase Two has used the approach with other learning networks to equal success, and regularly integrates consultancies into a variety of Network curricula.