All of The Graduate Institute's offerings are conducted within cohort learning communities. Students come together as "colleagues" to form a cooperative and collaborative environment. The learning community protects learners from isolation and improves retention rates. The cohort design connects coursework within programs and integrates curriculum content to provide continuity and understanding.

Why Learn in Cohort Communities?

• The cohort design is structurally flexible and encourages colleagues to form the cohort according to individual needs.
   
• Cohorts enable learning that offers meaningful dialogue and humanizes the learning process.
   
• Cohorts mandate that learning occurs in social, intellectual, and aesthetic dialogue structures. Members help to evolve thinking processes and challenge assumptions.
   
• Cohort communities create consistent context to provide reference points for thought, expression and behavior. Free-choice context generates meaning in concert with community values.

 

What are the Advantages of Cohort Learning?

• Cohorts create context
  Significant and continuously productive discussions arise in cohort learning communities. Discussion is 1) pivotal to the development of language, 2) central to in-depth explorations of ideas, and 3) useful in stabilizing confidence in thinking processes. As ideas are unveiled in cohort context, the energy of dialogue confirms validity and understanding.   
   
• Cohorts promote dialogue
  A whole idea is more easily observed by many than by one individual. Cohorts provide more voices and vision, offering greater opportunities for knowing that illuminate diverse perspectives and raise levels of consciousness New patterns of thought are revealed to students, and benefit both active and silent participants.
   
• Cohorts expand perspective
  Sometimes, even persistent learners run out of energy. Individual learners are energized by the flow of energy within cohorts, and keep individuals engaged in thinking. Cognitive Dissonance leads to discovery, encourages patience and inhibits fatigue.
   
• Cohorts generate momentum
  Solitude has the greatest impact when there is also an option for community. Private study, crucial for learning and sound thinking, is improved by interchanges that take place in community.
   
• Cohorts promote camaraderie
  Ideas are born of conversation within common experiences where insights are shared. Cohorts focus on personal interaction where diverse voices and experiences join to produce new and unpredictable and stimulating ideas.
   
• Cohorts engender achievement
  Cohort learning communities are unique in their influence on providing learners with specific learning outcomes. A quantitative design may measure success of the cohort as a learning community. Indicators are: