Retention
Retention is hard work we have so many factors that come into play when dealing with retention. Money,employment,first time away from home. older students that have been out of school for a long time, then you have students that don't want to follow the rules and there out come is dismissed from school. But with the right teaching and coaching we can help with most of these hurdles and teach the ones that want to learn.
Sounds like a problem. How do you handle that with students? Is there some way to address the behavior of the other instructors?
If you have several groups of students that have come from another instructors class that has not been following the rules, you will be able to see the lack of structure in students. And can tell that they are in the habit of do things that the should not be doing.
What do you do when a group of students complain because you are adhering to a policy that other instructors have ignored? ... "Mr. Jones didn't make us stay until the end of the period." "Ms. Smith didn't care if I handed in the homework late."
how do you identify instructors who don't enforce the rules? if you are an instructor,
you shouldn't be able to identify them at all!
assuming you are in your own classroom the givin
amount of time, how would you be able to pass
judgement on someone if you didn't witness what
they were doing, i'm assuming you are a good instructor, and this statement does not apply!
sometimes we have to let management do their job
How do you identify the instructors who don't enforce the rules? If these instructors are known, why isn't any action taken about this shortcoming during their performance review?
I think you are right about students that do not want to follow the rules being an issue. A major part of our problem weather we like to admit it or not is consistency. The students are started off with the propper expectations on the rules, and are held to them. Not all of the instructors want to enforce all of the rules though. So the rule breakers eventually outnumber the quality students, making class more difficult to teach for the instructor, and harder to learn for the students. This can lead to good students dropping out, or becoming bad students. The lack of consistency also keeps us from correcting the actions of the bad students, turning them into good students. If everyone would do their job in rule enforcement, it would be the first step in retention. Once everyone is the same... We can make small changes everywhere at the same time to try to aid retention.
What do we do about those who don't care?
One of the most important factors we as instructors can do is truly care about our students and their situations. Insturctors that do care are willing to put in the hard work.
