Happy New Year, Happy New Semester!
Well hello there!
Happy New Year!
With a new year comes a new (almost) semester for high school students. There are a few weeks remaining to get life organized and get ready for summative assessments, so let’s get started with some solutions that will help.
Check and confirm that all required assessments are completed and have been submitted.
Determine what type of summative assessment is going to be assigned for each class.
Prepare for each summative in a way that works for your learner and the assessment type.
Individually, these strategies might seem redundant; after all, on its own each one makes sense. For our adult brains they do.
What we adults need to keep in mind is that individually – and most importantly, collectively, – these strategies are not necessarily self-evident to adolescent brains. For neurodivergent adolescent brains, they may be even more vague.
The adolescent brain is geared toward group dynamics. You may have noticed that your teenager seems to assign less value to your advice and more to what their friends think, say, or do. This is standard operating procedure for brains at this age + stage.
The collective behaviours and thought patterns are common at this point, and the search for specific details, like those associated with organization, planning, and acting on those plans, are less top of mind (in large part because that part of the brain is not fully developed yet).
School life provides a chance for adolescent brains to learn these executive functioning skills, but it’s not always obvious to our learners. We can make it evident by providing detailed steps for each strategy, and by giving our teenagers a clear rationale for performing each action.
Here’s some strategies for each:
1. Check and confirm:
All high school courses have assignments that are must-dos. In order for students to even have the option of gaining the course credit, they need to complete a specified number of the assigned tasks. Missing any single one can result in them not receiving the credit despite their current grade, and who wants to have put in all that effort to receive nothing in the end?
Checking that all assignments are handed in is easy these days since most teachers use Google Classroom or some other educational tool that has an assignment download feature.
Step A:
Choose one day and time for each course.
It will likely take 15 minutes to complete the check for each, so if your learner works best in short stints, stick to the one course per day checking timeline.
If your learner would rather get the whole job done in a sitting, this is a task that lends itself to this approach: they can get the whole check and confirm it finished in about an hour.
Step B:
Any work that is NOT finished should be found (assuming it’s been started), checked for completion, and either handed in or finished and then submitted.
Work that needs to be done should also be chunked.
Depending on the size of the task and the current level of completion, break each assignment into sections that feel doable – creating small victories like this will help build your learner’s intrinsic motivation as they see each one as a success that boosts their confidence.
Step C:
Any work that has yet to be started and is worth more than 5% of the overall grade needs to be discussed with the subject teacher. There may be an option for modification of the assignment, or a redistribution of marks over other work. It’s always worth asking about.
2. Determine summatives:
Typically, teachers provide at least introductory information about the 30% summative assessments prior to the December holiday break. So, your learner will likely have an email in their inbox, or a post in the Classroom page, giving them an idea of what to expect when they return to class in January.
Step A:
The first step, then, is to check emails and Classroom posts.
Step B:
Then, double-check the course outline shared at the start of the semester. It will, at minimum, let your learner know whether they can expect an assignment, an exam, or some combination of the two.
Step C:
If nothing has been shared yet, then this is an excellent opportunity for your learner to build their professional communication skills by drafting an email to each subject teacher.
The more professionally written the emails, the shorter the response time is a general rule that seems to depend entirely on human nature.
The emails will be similar in nature and wording, but since the teachers are individuals, sending single messages to each instead of a group message will reap greater reward. Again: human nature.
A useful template can go something like this:
Hi Ms/Mr [teacher name]
I hope your holiday has been restful.
I’ve been thinking about the summatives coming up, and wonder if you can tell me more detail about what to expect in [name of course]. Knowing a bit more about the type of work and any due dates ahead of time will help me.
Thank you!
[student first and last name unless they are well known to each other]
3. Prepare for each summative:
This preparation will depend on whether the summative assessment is an assignment, an exam, or some combination of the two.
Exams:
Exams are generally best prepared for by planning a weekly, and then daily, review schedule (I call it a Plan of Attack).
Some students prefer to work backward from current content, and others prefer to start at the beginning and move forward on the timeline. As long as it’s broken down into manageable chunks of content and time, the PoA will work in your learner’s favour.
Assignments:
Assignments for summatives are meant to be completed during class time, not at home.
As such, preparation for these tends to be substantially different from exam prep.
There is still chunking of the work, with active participation slated for class time.
Creating skeletons, and the creative process in general, can happen outside of class time – students can mock-up and collect information for research at home or during spares. Making a PoA for this will look different from that for exams, but will serve a similar purpose.
Feel free to reach out for more specifics about each strategy. It’s fun to tailor them to individual student learning profiles, and once your student sees how well it works, they’ll pick up the reins and more independently get themselves ready to wrap up the semester with success.
Yours in learning,
L