End-of-year stress? Simplify the school year from start to finish

The end of the school year is a very stressful time for a school's teaching and administrative teams. It's a time when deadlines pile up, sometimes against the clock, for final assessments of activities, exams and the presentation of results.  

As well as dealing with the anxieties of pupils and parents, school leaders try to manage the natural exhaustion of their teams at this time of year, in order to ensure good school results, but also to meet the many pedagogical, administrative and financial demands. 

Measure, evaluate and resolve 

As the year comes to an end, a new phase of work begins: student, subject, year and course reports. Records of attendance, incidents, absences and their summaries.  Final evaluations that integrate the psychosocial and knowledge dimensions, reflecting pre-defined weights for each parameter, tool and evaluation method.   

Interdisciplinary projects require reports and perhaps some further meetings to ensure the individualisation of results that reflect the different perspectives of a working group. 

The teams try to value the records of extracurricular activities accumulated in notebooks and digital media.  

Assignments, tests, exercises and quizzes scattered across different platforms and media require teams to carry out lengthy checks and validations.   

But there's more. How were the support activities carried out,with what kind of follow-up, observations and records?  Families are anxious about the results and we have to show evidence of individualised work. An individualisation that must also be shown to the competent authorities with their immense and majestic mountain of bureaucracy.  

And let's not forget the tests and exams, which place even greater demands on schools. How have they been prepared and what has been done to prevent failure? 

e-Schooling: Putting an end to the end-of-year rush   

When the work of teaching and administrative teams is integrated, fluid and simplified, it becomes faster, more efficient and more motivating. It becomes smoother, more intuitive and no longer accumulates in complex and intimidating processes.  

At this point, it's easy to see that the only way to put an end to this tedious routine is to rethink the way we work and the tools we use.   

e-Schooling is designed to overcome processes and procedures that exhaust teams and don't help them to fulfil their mission. It allows you to think about and implement methods and ways of working throughout the year that decompress the traditional peaks of work.  

Here are five ways in which the vision of e-Schooling can profoundly change the day-to-day running of schools, putting a definitive end to the exhausting and often chaotic end of the school year.   

1 - The teacher plans, creates materials, communicates, monitors each student, receives work and assesses on the same platform. All the data from this work and the links are in one place, intelligently available to teams and management. The cross-referencing of information makes it possible to understand and monitor the fulfilment of challenges throughout the year. Establish relationships between planning, materials and results, enabling dynamic interpretation of the multiple dimensions of assessment and continuous improvement according to indicators.   

2- Teachers can record and assess student performance in real time in the context of a lesson or activity. With a few clicks, observations and perceptions that would otherwise be lost or scattered can be stored. Data that allows interpretation and analysis or automation of repetitive processes, speeding up assessment, weighting and presentation of results.   

3 - Teams can easily create and personalise indicators to diagnose levels of learning or satisfaction. Results are accumulated throughout the year and provide a real-time view of teaching and learning, allowing critical cases to be identified. 

4 - At any time when the teams post their scores, the records are displayed in the various parameters and dimensions, so that the scores can be weighted free of charge, without the need for extra tables and tedious formulae.   

5 - The teaching team or school management can monitor trends in results at any time, without having to wait for class meetings, plan for extra help or catch-up, and communicate with parents at the right time. 

It's like saying: if all goes well, it can only end well.