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LEARNING PRACTICE PROGRAM
Tell My Story with STARR+™
You are already creating meaningful opportunities for students to develop skills and capabilities.
But experience alone does not ensure that students will recognize what they have learned, identify the capabilities their evidence demonstrates, or understand how those capabilities are developing.
Discover how Tell My Story With STARR+ gives institutions a structured learning practice for helping students surface and examine their evidence, articulate their learning, and consider how they can put that learning to work for what matters to them.
Help students turn their experiences into visible, usable learning and authentic stories for what's next.
HOW STARR+ WORKS
How STARR+ Supports the Learning Process
A meaningful experience can contain more learning than a student immediately recognizes.
STARR+ gives learners a structured way to slow that experience down, look closely at what happened, examine what their actions and decisions reveal, and make meaning from what they learned.
The process starts with something real — a project, a challenge, a responsibility, a setback, a leadership experience, a conversation, or another experience that mattered to the learner.
The familiar STAR framework — Situation, Task, Action, and Result — provides a useful foundation for describing an experience.
STARR+ builds on that foundation by extending what learners do throughout the experience and continuing beyond description, adding Reflection + to support meaning-making, capability recognition, articulation, and purposeful transfer.
As learners work through STARR+, they build a Story Core™ in their own words that they can return to rather than reconstructing the experience each time a new opportunity appears. Skills in Action™ helps them examine what their evidence may demonstrate about their capabilities, while Story Works™ helps them put that learning to work and continue building from it as new experiences, perspectives, and goals emerge.
The STARR+ process includes:
EXPERIENCE
The learner begins with something they actually did, navigated, contributed to, or learned from.
CAPABILITY RECOGNITION
The learner explores capability language against evidence of what they actually did.
REFLECTION
Guided questions help the learner examine the situation, their responsibilities, their actions, and what resulted.
ARTICULATION
The learner puts the experience, evidence, and learning into words they can genuinely support.
MEANING-MAKING
The learner interprets actions, decisions, results, difficulty, feedback, and other evidence.
TRANSFER
The learner considers how this learning may inform another situation, decision, role, or opportunity.
Tell My Story With STARR+ helps institutions make this kind of learning work more intentional across academic, experiential, career-connected, and co-curricular experiences.
WHAT STUDENTS DO AND WHAT THEY'LL GAIN
STARR+ empowers students to make meaning from their experiences and turn that learning into something they can recognize, communicate, and use.
Through repeated practice, students build confidence, deepen awareness of their capabilities, and strengthen their agency as they learn to:
Reflect on authentic experiences where they made decisions and took action
Recognize their learning, growth, and capabilities
Build STARR+ Story Cores™ using their own words
Connect their learning and capabilities to other contexts and future situations
Adapt their stories for opportunities that matter to them
Thank you B Optimal for bringing a practical and impactful approach to reflective learning and skill development.
— Dr. Melis Kural, Teaching & Creativity Center Coordinator
Monroe Community College
State University of New York
RELATED CONTENT
STARR+ brings decades of scholarship in learning, sociology, leadership, teamwork, and social systems together with deep experience across higher education.
Explore our blog to see how that foundation becomes a structured practice for making meaning from experience, recognizing capability, articulating learning, and carrying it forward across student learning, professional development, and lifelong learning.
From Practice
Starting From Strength: An Adult Learner's Story
A professional tutor meets a working parent beginning her first semester of a fully online program, carrying years of experience managing restaurants and supporting students in classrooms.
Using STARR+ as a conversational framework, their session moves from “Can I do college?” to “What have you already done that can be adapted to help you succeed here?”
Transfer is not simply moving a skill from one context to another. It begins when learners recognize that what they already know and can do has value in a new situation. Reflection helps make those connections visible.
AN INSTITUTIONAL OPPORTUNITY
One shared practice.
Multiple institutional applications.
STARR+ gives institutions a shared, adaptable practice for helping everyone to make meaning from experience, recognize evidence of their developing capabilities, articulate their learning, and consider how to carry it into new contexts.
Student Transition, Learning & Development
Learners make meaning from academic and co-curricular experiences, connect knowledge, actions, skills and results, recognize developing capabilities, and carry learning across contexts.
Academic & Career Readiness and Agility
Students learn to recognize what they bring, apply their capabilities intentionally, and use evidence from experience to navigate academic challenges, opportunities, transitions, and evolving career paths.
Professional & Leadership Development
Faculty, staff, and leaders examine experiences from their own work, recognize evidence of their growth and capabilities, and use that learning to strengthen future practice.
Institutional Learning & Storytelling
Learner's stories help institutions look beyond participation in learning opportunities to examine what students actually experienced, how they engaged with the conditions provided, what capabilities they developed or demonstrated, and what they can carry forward.
Faculty & Staff Practice
Faculty, advisors, coaches, career professionals, student affairs staff, and others gain a shared framework and language for helping students apply what they are learning as they navigate college with greater autonomy and purpose.
STARR+ in Everyday Practice
STARR+ shows up in everyday practices—across systems, departments, and roles.
As an advisor helping a student connect past experience to a new goal, a tutor helping someone recognize how they approached a challenge, a faculty member guiding reflection after an assignment, a career professional helping a student prepare for an interview, or a supervisor helping a student understand what they developed through work, leadership, or experiential learning.
The roles and settings differ. The learner can encounter the same recognizable practice across them.
Two ways to bring STARR+ into use.
1
Tell My Story with STARR+™
Full Program
Choose the Full Program when you also want to develop practitioner capability and support coordinated implementation around the learner experience.
The Full Program combines the complete learner-facing STARR+ environment with professional learning, the Staff Hub, Practice Guides, facilitation resources, planning support, and resources for supporting intentional use across the settings where faculty and staff already work with students.
2
STARR+ Learner Pack
Choose the Learner Pack when you want the complete learner-facing STARR+ environment without the broader practitioner-development and coordinated-implementation components of the Full Program.
Students receive the Student Hub, STARR+, Story Core™, Skills in Action™, Story Works™, connected learner resources, and launch and student onboarding guidance.
EXPLORE STARR+ FOR YOUR STUDENTS
Ready to explore how STARR+ can strengthen the learning already happening across your institution?
Together, we can identify natural opportunities to integrate STARR+ into academic, experiential, career-connected, co-curricular, and professional learning.
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