Gloria Arpasi ManageBac Community Ambassador
When creating end of term reports, it is essential to manage the perspectives of all of our stakeholders: this includes administration, teachers, parents and students. The way that our end of term reports are viewed by our community reflects deeply on our entire school year, as well as our academic programs. We want these reports to be seen as helpful summative tools, while also being easy to use and thoughtful in the way they are communicated.
Having used ManageBac for over 10 years, I’ve learned how to make these reports the most effective they can be. In this article, I’m excited to share helpful tips and tricks which can streamline the process of creating reports with your teachers, as well as providing parents and students with the most effective information possible. I share this information with the educational community in good spirit, as we can all learn so much from each other and benefit from creative pro-tips and hacks.
Structuring, Proofing and Reviewing Reports Prior to Dissemination
I don’t know about you, but I want my end of term reports to be 100% error free. This is a difficult task, when considering that unique narrative comments may need to be created for hundreds of students in hundreds of classes. That can equate into thousands of comments to edit! An administrator who has to edit all of these comments will be faced with a gargantuan task. Here are a few suggestions of how to send unique comments, but also save time proofing and reviewing reports before they go out to parents and students.
First, develop templates and clear instructions for your teachers on how they can easily create class comments, while adding in unique information for each student. This helps comments look streamlined throughout all reports, as well as ensuring that teachers use IB friendly language and include helpful suggestions for student progress.
Secondly, make sure that teachers use a combination of copy and paste blanket comments which describe the events in their classroom, as well as a detailed comment specifically aimed at individual students for personalized communication and success messages.
ManageBac Community Tip:
Make use of the automated proofing and review tools that have been built into ManageBac – helping you to check for missing or incorrect names, grades, comments and more.
Using the above tips will help your reports look impressive and personalized. In turn, this helps families to feel confident in the programs you’re offering.
Ensuring Effective and Positive Parent Communication with Reports
We could create the most perfect end of term reports that ever existed, but if parents and students don’t read them and digest the information, then our efforts are pointless. Use the following pro-tips to help parents and students understand the information within the reports, therefore making them much more effective and helpful in their academic journey. This will ultimately make our academic programs more successful and supported by stakeholders.
First, be sure to distribute end of term reports one or two days prior to parent-teacher-student conferences. Insist that your teachers use progress reports or end of term reports as specific data points to discuss within the verbal conferences. This will make the data come alive and help families to feel more engaged in the partnership between school and family.
Next, it can be helpful to create an acknowledgement survey, which parents can fill out as soon as they receive their report from ManageBac. This allows them to acknowledge that they have received the report card, know how to access it and have read the information contained inside of it. Below is an example of a question that we include in our survey to help keep track of who has received their reports, and who has not! You can also ask families to enter questions if they have them. We include both questions in the survey we send out using the ManageBac parents association tab, immediately following the generation of the reports.
You can also use that survey to create a spreadsheet presenting all of the data from the parent acknowledgements, which you can share with teachers so that they see the effectiveness of the reports firsthand. Any questions that parents have submitted into the survey will be available for teachers to see and respond to immediately.
ManageBac Community Tip:
Communicate the release of Report Cards to Students & Parents via the Year Group Message board, or exclusively to Parents via the Parents Association.
Analyzing the Academic Data to Maximise Student Learning
After generating the reports, you can export a spreadsheet of the grades from ManageBac to create a breakdown of annual academic data. This will allow administration and teachers to track student progress from semester to semester and from year to year. This breakdown of academic data can include in-depth information on all facets of the academic results such as ATL skills and learner profile attributes exported from ManageBac. This allows the school to gauge the success of their various programmes and re-calibrate any areas that appear to have gaps or poor results.
An administrator can use the data within the academic breakdown spreadsheet to create data-driven graphs to track individual and group student data. Not only are these graphs visually helpful to staff as to the academic progress of the term, but sharing them with parents and other stakeholders will allow productive transparency on the success of the program.
Using the data from the end of term results to create honors lists for rewarding student achievement will raise morale and have students looking forward to end of term results, rather than dreading them. In turn, the same data can be used to contact families about any academic concerns and create success plans for students’ academic progress.
As educators, we work so hard all year to provide the best academic programming possible. End of term reports should reflect that hard work without being an insurmountable challenge. By using these tips and tricks, we can work smarter, not harder, and parents, students and teachers will look forward to end of term reports!
Do you have other ideas to share? Wish to connect with the author? Let us know! Reach out to us at community@managebac.com.
Disclaimer: Data presented in this article is for demonstration purposes only. Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.
About The Author
Gloria Arpasi
Current Head of Middle School, Whitby School
Former Director, Peter Gruber International Academy
Gloria Arpasi holds a Bachelors of Science in Marine Biology and holds a Masters of Education in Advanced Teaching and Educational Leadership. She is currently serving as the new Head of Middle School at Whitby School, an IB World School, in Greenwich, Connecticut. Prior to this, Gloria was the IB Director at Virgin Islands Montessori School and Peter Gruber International Academy, where she played an integral role in building their middle and high school from its infancy to its current level of excellence and success. Mrs. Arpasi enjoys the continual challenge and reward of leading change-making education, helping to create world class independent schools built on inclusion and international-mindedness. Throughout her career, Gloria has depended greatly on ManageBac as a powerful IB software tool, and is proud to have been named an exemplar user and Community Ambassador by Managebac.
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