Back to school: Dealing with academic stress

As some education boards have released the dates for Board exams, parents, students and teachers are anxious about preparation. Almost all the boards have crunched the portion and eliminated some topics from the syllabus to account for the Covid-induced learning loss.

Many schools have also conducted assessments online. However, educators have realised that in the absence of robust online proctoring tools the assessment results are not reliable. While several pedagogical and technological strategies have been adopted to fill academic gaps, providing both academic and emotional support to students is crucial during preparation for Board exams.

Student engagement

In case schools are continuing with online classes, weekly virtual sessions with individual students can be a powerful way of connecting with them to provide personalised emotional support and mentoring. Building a personal bond with students is critical to ensure high student engagement and participation during online classes.

Carefully crafted small group sessions based on students' level of understanding of specific topics can be a great way to meet individual student as well as group learning needs. Strategies such as peer-mentoring and mentor-teacher pairing with students who need additional support in specific subjects can also be deployed to provide focused and targeted interventions for Board exam preparation. An individualised student development plan can be created for each student that encourages each student to set subject-specific goals for oneself and monitor the same against pre-Board assessment results.

Teachers and the school leadership need to regularly review these results for each student against the set targets and provide timely and necessary interventions to fill learning gaps. Parents need to be actively engaged and involved in the process of their child’s goal setting and performance evaluation process.

Online parent-teacher conference can now become an effective single platform wherein all subject teachers meet individual student and parent to set individualised academic and socio-emotional goals.

This new format of conducting parent-teacher conference helps all stakeholders review each child’s holistic performance across subjects and chart out a targeted individual student development plan for each student that addresses not only the academic learning gaps but also socio-emotional needs. Counselling sessions can be planned as part of the school timetable. This helps students identify their emotions and provide useful strategies that they can use to deal with them positively.

Parents need to actively participate in their child’s academic and socio-emotional developmental journey. The importance of healthy meals and nutritious diet cannot be overemphasised. Parents need to constantly keep communicating with students to understand their emotional needs and practise responsive parenting. Encouraging children to maintain a fixed study schedule is a good way to bring in the much-needed structure to student’s daily routine and will help them balance academic and extra-curricular routines. Finally, nothing can be more powerful than being physically and emotionally available for our children in times of high anxiety and uncertainty.

Back to school

While schools are re-opening in a phased manner, it is important that students and parents also start preparing themselves for the new schooling experience. Self-regulation and discipline are key to ensure students resume back to school safely and productively.

Students need to develop early night sleeping schedules, healthy meals and fixed study routines. Strict adherence to safety and social distancing protocols is something that all students will need to follow once schools reopen. Parents and school authorities need to educate students to take ownership and responsibility of one’s own safety and that of others around. Clearly, it is time to make parents and students allies in the school resumption process.

Most schools are still deliberating on decisions regarding whether to conduct face-to-face or online pre-board and board examinations. While such uncertainties linger, as educators and parents, we need to continue to look for innovative and creative solutions to mentor and support our students’ academic as well as socio-emotional well-being both within and beyond the classroom.

(The author is Head-School Development at an international school)