Student attendance is crucial for their academic performance, providing access to in-depth knowledge of their subjects, enjoying their time with school friends, learning moral values, having fun, and maintaining school life balance.
Regular attendance not only enhances learning but also helps prevent students from dropping out. Both teachers and parents play important roles in ensuring students remain engaged and motivated to attend school consistently.
Importance of Student Attendance in School
Attendance is important because it gives students access to resources, connections, and background information that enhance their learning.
Consistent absence from class is a sign that a student may be on the verge of dropping out of school, according to Higher Education alerts.
So if your child is frequently absent in class, parents need to figure out the reason for the same.
Kids generally have an unimaginable amount of energy for which they easily get distracted. It is up to the teachers to capture their attention and keep them engaged in the class.
Thus, teachers need concrete strategies when they are dealing with students, from montessori school to high school, and also innovative teaching ways to capture the students’ interests.
However, it’s not completely up to the teachers to make sure the students pay their complete attention in the classroom. Parents can also help by ensuring that kids are excited to go to school, where they can learn new things, make friends, and learn moral values and kindness.
How to Improve Students’ Attendance in School?
Here are a few tried-and-tested tactics to get students interested and show up to class, and we’ve organised them into three levels of effectiveness.
1. Take Child’s Interests into Consideration and Provide Valuable Feedback
Teachers must know what kind of activities are carried out in the class and should provide valuable feedback to parents on a regular basis as it will help them discuss strategies to improve their attention in the class.
Also knowing their interests and what they like and do not like will help you to figure out the right approach or educational activities for them. In schools in Tokyo, interaction and play is used to help young children stay engaged.
2. Teachers Should Try and Test Different Schedules
Following a regular timetable is boring for kids, in order to keep it fresh teachers should prepare an exciting schedule that will help them to understand children’s attentiveness and interest.
Change in schedule excites children and makes them curious to know what they will be taught today. So try and test different schedules and activity sessions between the regular subject classes.
Make the activities simple, easy and interesting as challenging activities or themes are the reason for distraction at times. Parents must share valuable feedback with teachers on study materials and teaching methods that are working better for their kids.
3. Organise Examinations and Quizzes for Students
In order to motivate students to enhance their knowledge and abilities with complete confidence, create quick assessments after every topic or session, quizzes and interactive activities, etc. This is one of the most popular ways to improve student attendance.
4. Timely Breaks are Important
Kids easily get bored if they are pushed to do repetitive work for a long period of time. Moreover, if they are assigned highly challenging tasks, it makes them frustrated and lose patience.
In schools in Tokyo, teachers give a reasonable amount of break between studies which helps students to concentrate on the lessons. Teachers make sure that their teaching method is interesting and more engaging for the kids.
5. Appreciating Their Efforts Regularly
Parents should give their children a pat on the back or welcome them with great food when they reach home after attending the school.
Even teachers should provide them rewards for task completion, star or stickers on the assignment done in order to motivate the kids’ severalfold. Simple gestures like this will improve a child’s confidence and motivate them to attend the class.
6. Involve the Parents More
More than anything else, parental participation will have the greatest influence. In order to reduce the number of preventable absences, keep parents informed by email and SMS about absences, grades, and disciplinary concerns.
7. Checklists
Teachers should provide children with a checklist after completion of the class because sometimes without a checklist, it is difficult for students to know what they are supposed to do. Checklists for particular activities can help them and give them an idea what should be done before attending the next class. For eg:-
● Revise the notes of their current class
● Read a particular topic, or chapter
● Watch a particular video
● Write notes, or doubts to discuss in the next class
It becomes easy for students to perform a task and check it off, giving them a representation of their task getting done which improves their confidence as they have accomplished the task.
Advice to Parents
Teachers frequently complain that students often chat with their friends during the class, showing laziness. Thus, here are a few pieces of advice parents must follow when their kid is going to attend the school.
● Parents must maintain their child’s privacy as this will help them get creative and have a learning space.
● Parents have to make sure their child gets ready on time and should enter school 15 minutes before the gate gets close as this will help them learn the importance of time.
● Parents should make sure that their child gets their 8 hours of sleep so they won’t get sleepy in the class.
● Parents should ask their child to maintain classroom etiquette by using simple phrases like “I’m sorry,” “Excuse me, Ma’am, “I didn’t understand it”, etc, as and when necessary.
Also Read: Teach Your Child About Cyber Security While Attending Online School?
Conclusion
Improving student attendance requires a collaborative effort between teachers and parents. Student engagement is a skill that every teacher must master. They must learn to focus on every child and create detailed reports about their strengths and weaknesses. Accordingly, they have to create personalised study plans for students.
Schools in Tokyo ensure that the teachers are competent to handle kids in classes. By understanding students’ interests, providing valuable feedback, implementing dynamic schedules, organizing quizzes, allowing breaks, appreciating efforts, involving parents, and utilizing checklists, schools can create an environment where students are eager to learn and thrive. Together, these strategies help foster a positive and engaging educational experience.
Kids always overflow with energy and can easily get distracted by a disturbing environment. Hence, it’s the parent’s job to control such events by creating a positive attitude towards school, establishing a routine, regularly communicating with teachers and setting goals and rewards for their performance.
