Weekly Plan Implemented to Help Keep Students Accountable For Their Academic Commitments
This Best Practice was implemented to help students improve failing or low grades from the mid-term grading period to the end of the semester. A Grade Improvement Plan (GIP) template was designed to aid students and teachers in tailoring strategies for improvement to each student’s needs. In addition to keeping students accountable to these plans, a secondary goal was to facilitate greater weekly communication with parents, teachers, and other relevant parties, concerning what the student is doing to improve his/her grade(s). The Indiana Academy is a residential high school for juniors and seniors. Our students come from all over the state of Indiana and the parents are usually quite a distance away from their child, seeing them only on occasional weekends or holiday breaks. If a student has a failing grade (in our case, a D*) or other low grade (C-) in a class at the mid-term, the student is required to schedule an appointment with the teacher of the class(es) to fill out the Grade Improvement Plan (GIP), which is given to them in hard copy form. The teacher and student discuss what factors led to the poor grade(s) and the teacher(s) makes recommendations for interventions to help the student improve. The teacher(s) and the student sign the Plan(s) as an agreement, with the students pledging to use the indicated suggestions to improve their grades in the class(es). Students are required to turn these forms in to the Indiana Academy Guidance Office. Weekly appointments with the Assistant Director of Academic Guidance are arranged with these students, and discussion centers on how the student has met the expectations set forth in the GIP from week to week. All of our students are given a laptop to use by our school and so, as the discussion unfolds, the student documents his/her actions (or lack thereof) into a Word document of the GIP template. Week to week progress is kept in documented form and placed in the student’s file. The document is saved by the student and mailed from the student’s school email account to the parents, teachers, student life counselor, academic advisor, the student, and the Assistant Director of Academic Guidance. This creates a weekly record of activity for documentation purposes, and also allows teachers to respond in case the student has not reported information exactly like the teachers recall their interactions with the student. With the student filling out these reports, ownership is strengthend. Parents find the information helpful in giving them things to talk about with their child and encourage him/her during weekly (sometimes nightly) phone calls.
Challenges or Obstacles
- This Best Practice works best, and most simply, if the students have access to a laptop or tablet for writing into the Grade Improvement Plan (GIP) template and then emailing the document.
- Getting students to follow through in meeting with the teacher initially may be a challenge that requires diligence in getting the student to comply with the creation of the GIP’s.
Benefits and Successes:
- Accountability on the part of the student and the teacher for outcomes.
- Comparison of week to week progress in fulfilling goals and intervention completion.
- Helps students and parents become more aware of resources and interventions to help the student improve his/her grades.
- Provides written documentation/records for the Guidance Office of actions taken by the student and teacher in helping improve the student’s grades and study habits.
- The aforementioned records help document and define accountability, especially in cases of students with 504’s or IEP’s
- Keeps parents informed of what the student and school are doing to help the student improve.
- Students appear to be encouraged when they begin to see their grade(s) improve and realize the correlation between study skills, hard work, and greater academic success.
Additional Information:
Midterm-Grade-Improvement-Plan-2016
Email-Example-from-JS
Weekly-Report-from-JS
Submitted by: Michael D. McClure, The Indiana Academy for Science, Mathematics, and Humanities