Introduction
Challenge – An Environment That Encourages Attendance
The Green has embraced digital technology as part of school improvement since before covid. The Athena Tracker was a natural extension of this, moving teachers from individual tracking spreadsheets to a centralised system. A Senior Management staff member showed Des the full potential of the software.
“The school developed the One Good Teacher program for mentoring children, and his rationale when presenting it to the staff was around evidence. Research indicates that setting expectations and recognising improvements is an essential component to validating the child in school.”
As a result of this conversation, students were assigned to a teacher who would check in with them across the year and see how they were getting on. But while everybody had good intentions, teachers couldn’t always follow through due to time constraints and competing responsibilities.
The solution they came up with was to support this through the Athena Tracker. For many people, a performance tracker might sound like the opposite of encouragement, but for Des, it was a route into a challenging conversation.
“We could use Athena for this because you’re showing the student their own profile of achievement. This creates a non-challenging objective questioning and a much more holistic conversation. You’re validating them. The Tracker was brilliant for that because as that one good teacher what you are reinforcing is that “I see you, I hear you,” and they’re getting that from a significant adult right throughout the year.”
Solution – In-House Training and a Trial Run
Using a relatively unfamiliar software to run a new sort of student mentoring meant facing two challenges at once.
Fortunately, staff at The Green had developed a culture well-suited to improving their own skills. Following advice from Oide, they’d embraced in-house training, with staff using their expertise to upskill each other through video tutorials and staff meetings. By setting time aside for this, they were able to spread skills quickly through the school, skills that included how to use the Athena Tracker and to run student-teacher meetings.
“Be sure to embrace the expertise that you have in situ, and don’t underestimate the enthusiasm that you might be able to tap into.”
To see whether the initiative would work, Des set up a trial project.
“We used Athena to develop an earlier initiative where we were getting students to take responsibility for their own learning, where they’d record their results in a school journal. We used Athena to digitise this and record notes in the teacher profile there. We used it for an experiment that we rolled out in fifth year, which was our kind of research and development department.”
Six teachers used the system to show individual students their past performance and agree realistic targets. They then recorded a plan the student was going to put in place, with the teacher’s advice, to help them reach their goals. The Athena Tracker helped the teachers structure the conversations.
They also used the system to directly empower students, giving them an overview of the Athena Tracker and supervision in how to use their student logins. While the trial ran, they surveyed students throughout the year to see how they were getting on.
Results – Better Attendance from a Positive Learning Environment
All six teachers in the trial saw very positive results.
“There was a clear consensus that this was worthwhile, because it was initiating a new type of conversation. It was a conversation based around the student’s own aspirations, his own lived experience in a subject, and that was very productive.”
Student logins also proved popular. They let students see their own records and set their own targets, increasing their sense of empowerment.
That sense of being heard and of controlling their own education helps students feel good about learning. Together with setting appropriate expectations and recognising improvements, it creates a positive learning environment, one that keeps students in school.
It’s hard to measure the impact on attendance of any single initiative, but for Des it’s clear that the Athena Tracker helped at The Green.
“We have a breakfast club, we have extracurricular activities, we have a pastoral care team, they’re the more significant pillars fighting against poor school attendance, and we have a student welfare officer who’s brilliant with both parents and students. But as an addition to it, the Athena Tracker was very supportive.”
The pressure that comes from measuring performance is often seen as one of the dispiriting sides of education. But as the initiative at CBS The Green shows, by empowering students to focus on their own strengths, and set their own targets from that; the Athena Tracker can turn a source of stress into a positive learning environment.
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We would like to thank Sinéad Noonan for her insight.
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