The Whole/Holistic Picture
In the few quick minutes before an after-school meeting the other day, two of my colleagues were complaining about their kids. Both of them have high-school aged children, and the discussion I was eavesdropping on was all about how they can’t squeeze even the tiniest detail about school from their kids these days. My friend Jen laughed about the single-word responses she gets from her son when she inquires about the school day: “Fine! Good! That’s all I ever get!” Tim agreed, adding about his own daughter, “I know she’s getting good grades because of her quarter one report card. But I want to know how she’s doing. Not just her grades, but, you know: how she’s really doing.”
I teach 10th-12th graders, and I’m right now in the midst of writing up progress reports for students who are in my advisory. I’m dutifully counting up the number of assignments they’ve completed this past month, and copying the numbers carefully onto the official form that tells families how much closer their students are to meeting the graduation requirement of 25 total credits. I’m writing personal notes at the bottom of each half-slip, saying encouraging things like, “What an awesome month you’ve had! Keep up the hard work!” These progress reports will be mailed out to homes next week, just as they are at the beginning of every new month. Moms and dads, aunts and uncles, grandparents or siblings (whoever is in charge of my students where they live) will peer at the numbers on this green half-slip of paper and take in the information I’m sending home. I can hear them ask their student how things are going; of course, the student replies, “Fine.” It’s the same scenario that probably plays out every time I send these progress reports, and I’ve never given it a second thought. But after listening to my coworkers, I find myself embarrassed at the information, or rather at the lack of information, I’m providing to families. I bet they’re wondering how their kids are doing — not about their academic credit, but how they’re really doing.
This past summer, my coworker, Mary, and I started working on what we call the “Holistic Progress Tracker.” Our work sparked from conversations about our school’s vision and mission last spring. Through discussing our goals and objectives, it was very clear that our staff values whole-child education — working to grow and support students in all areas of development, not just academic skill-building. Because we’re an alternative school, we often enroll students who are simply not ready (and therefore unable) to focus on academics. When this happens, their academic credit stays stagnant. On a traditional progress report or report card, it might look like that student is completely disengaged and unsuccessful at school, but that’s not what’s actually going on. Students who aren’t ready to engage in academics are almost always working on acclimating to the community here, or working on personal goals like recognizing and advocating their needs. While that growth isn’t captured through academic credits, the progress those students make is often life-changing for them (and almost always rapidly leads to engagement in academics).
With our Holistic Growth Tracker, we’re able to place value on the less tangible areas of growth, showing students that forward movement isn’t solely about academic credits — in the visual we’ve created, academics holds a place that is equal to areas like citizenship, future planning, and emotional wellness. Even better, the Holistic Tracker allows us to engage students around goal-setting in a variety of aspects of their lives, asking them to identify the areas of growth they want to tackle. When they receive the monthly Holistic Growth Tracker, it is our hope that families see how their student feels about their own progress and the ways they want to move forward.
While we’ve had this Holistic Growth Tracker built for a while, we’re still not ready to adopt it exclusively. We first need to roll it out to our staff, making sure everyone is committed to using it as a tool to confer with students (rather than filling it out themselves, as we’ve done with traditional progress reports). We also have to take time to teach students about each element we’ll be tracking: what does citizenship look like here at PPA and in the broader community, for example? The plan is to start goal-setting with students as November begins, and our principal has told us she may be comfortable replacing our traditional progress reports by February if all goes well. My hope is that we’ll hear positive feedback from students, that staff will feel good about better aligning our practices to our mission and vision for our school, and that we’ll ultimately be able to provide families with a more full and complete picture of how their student is doing at school — not just with academic credits, but how they’re really doing.
