Creating Study Periods in SIMS

[jmel27]

Hi All,

 

For our Sixth Form students, we currently have study periods attached to individual subjects (i.e. they have 4 lessons a week of Physics & 1 lesson a week labelled as Physics but in our 6th Form Study Room as a supervised study period).

All of their other periods, usually 10 periods a week, are "free" periods and are not labelled as anything in SIMs and so on their timetable, appears as a blank space.

 

Is there a way to implement a "study" period separate of lessons seeing as the students see their timetable and assume they can do whatever they like in that period when they should be studying? Would we have to create some sort of study course in Nova or is there an option to label any free periods as "study"?

 

Any ideas would be appreciated!

[Skelacia]

You could create that in Nova using Alternative Curriculum. You'd need a subject for "study" and then you can set it up to exist in every period so you can drop students into it in their free periods and can assign staff to supervise and a register exists for each period. It's a little fiddly to maintain but well worth it if you want to claim the study hours in Non Qual for census as you should be able to demonstrate that it is "planned, supervised and timetabled".

[jmel27]

Ideally we wouldn't want to assign a register to it because it would mean somebody would have to run around and find all the kids every period, creating a monumental amount more work for someone.

The basic idea I think is to have something appear on the kids timetables to remind them they should be doing work, not going home at 12 o clock because they've got nothing on for the rest of the day (not 100% sure I was just asked if we could put something on the timetable instead of a blank space).

 

We already have a decent amount of Non Qual hours through General Studies so that's not a huge issue.

 

Thanks for the suggestion though!

[bobsmith]

We timetabled it as a new subject "independent learning" - however we then employed someone to supervise it while also doing the 6th form administration - it's working brilliantly.

 

Even if you only timetable it, you don't HAVE to go round and chase the kids - you could leave the register blank....

 

Of course you are stretching a point if you're claiming it's supervised if it's not....

[jmel27]

That would be the most sensible option, but leaving the registers blank obviously affects their overall attendance and seeing as we put their attendance on reports and such, we'd get an uprising from the parents!

 

Thanks for the suggestion.

[bobsmith]

Depending on your attendance setup it might have no effect on attendance.

 

If you're reporting Session Attendance rather than Lesson Attendance then you should be fine. Also I thought most reports ignore the blank registers.

 

If the student isn't due in as their first lesson is a study period what are you doing for their attendance mark at present?

[jmel27]

We report both, but lesson attendance is one of the main things we put on their reports seeing as the students seem to be quite good at turning up for registration and then not going to lessons.

They ignore the blank register but it stays as a missing mark.

 

At present it's not listed as anything, you can't put a mark in for their 'free' periods seeing as there is nothing on their timetables currently.