Subject: K12 student academic progress

Posted by Richard Turnock on 1/8/2010

Message:

I have recently been to meetings with teachers, VPs and the Principal for a four year high school of 1,400 students as a volunteer to help them look at things from a systems perspective.

As Tim Joy noted in his CLD and others have mentioned, as the gap increases, between basic skills needed and actual skills, this causes academic performance to decrease. This has also been identified as a current problem at the high school where I have been meeting with the staff.

They have added interventions to their processes. One intervention is to encourage students that need help to attend after school homework help sessions. This is limited to two days a week because of the bus schedule that only has late busses on those two days, they are thinking of adding more. These sessions have been popular with the students. They are staffed by paid teachers and there are students volunteering as tutors.

Another problem they have identified might be called work ethic or study habits. These two problems, basic skills and work ethic are related, right? Without good work ethic, a student doesn’t do homework and falls behind, lacks basic skills and the cycle continues as things get worse each year until they give up and drop out.

By taking a systems approach, they are adding processes where they can get the most leverage, gathering data more often than each grading period, and beginning to think about how to implement plan-do-study-act reinforcing feedback loops to the processes to get continuous improvement.

They are still working on defining the problem and causes, and they are continuing to ask themselves to define the top priorities and how to implement improvements.

So, I just wanted to anchor what you are talking about in the real world.

Richard

Follow Ups:

K12 student academic progress - Philip Abode 1/8/2010 
K12 student academic progress - Bill Braun 1/8/2010 
K12 student academic progress - Richard Turnock 1/8/2010
K12 student academic progress - Tim Joy 1/8/2010
K12 student academic progress - Lees N. Stuntz 1/8/2010
School as System - Richard Turnock 1/8/2010