Students dropping out always has been and probably always will be a systemic problem that educational institutions face. When students are no longer legally required to attend their place of learning, and as life as a young adult begins to become a distraction, more and more begin to decide that they are done with being taught and that they want to try their hands elsewhere in the world instead. There’s nothing wrong with young people doing this, as it is their lives and their futures at the end of the day, but it can never hurt for them to stick out their education a little while longer.
That’s where you, as a teacher, lecturer or principal, come into it. You should be doing all you can to decrease the likelihood of students dropping out and leaving your educational institute — to see what you need to do to go about achieving this, make sure to read on.
Make sure your students know the reality of dropping out
The best way to tackle any student dropout crises that you face (and each individual case of it is crises) is to make your students painstakingly aware of what their reality will be like going forward if they do decide to up and leave. If you have some real-life examples to draw on due to past experiences that you’ve had, then, by all means, bring them up to any current student of yours that is contemplating seeking pastures new away from education. If you do not have any personal experiences to fall back on, then blind your potential dropouts with facts and stats — it is known that high school graduates earn £9,245 on average more than their dropout counterparts, and you should definitely be bringing such a statistic up in conversation.
Make your education institute as positive a place as can be
Not all dropout cases are brought about by a student’s inability to get to grips with the curriculum being taught or because they’ve had enough with education as a whole. Sometimes, the students that will drop out of your classes will do so because they have become disillusioned by your educational institute as a whole. To combat this, you have to make it as positive a place to come to as possible. This means keeping student-teacher engagement high, putting on tailored events and offering more field trip and internship opportunities.
Monitor your at-risk students at all times
You can’t set about decreasing your dropout rates if you don’t know how many at-risk students there are in your educational institute. What this means is that you need to monitor the number of students who seem to be struggling at all times, from the first day of the academic year right up until the last. To do this, you should use student retention software, as through the use of its predictive persistence models, it will be able to help you to identify at-risk students, and knowing who these individuals are then provides you with a chance of getting to them before they make the decision to leave.
Dropping out, as systemic an issue as it may be, need not necessarily be something that your particular educational institution should worry about. Whether you’re a principal, a teacher, or even a parent that is worried about a student or a set of students dropping out of school, by taking the advice above, you will surely see a decrease in the likelihood of this happening.
