Parents and students should take advantage of governmental stay at home policies and implement rigorous academic development processes for their students. The processes should include:
1. Assessment
Parents should lead and assess their student’s core academic skills, leadership traits, leadership competencies, and technological skills. There are multiple web-based tools and systems that can be used to assess your student’s capabilities. The goal is to obtain an objective understanding of your student’s capability. Begin this process immediately, involving your student in the process.
2. Vision and Goal Setting
Parents should collaborate with their student(s) to establish a vision statement for the student. This statement should leverage objective assessment data obtained during the assessment process. The vision statement includes a description and guide of what the parents hope their child or student will become in the future. This document includes detailed academic, character, leadership, and technological skills, goals and objectives.
3. Strategy and Execution Plan
Parents and students are expected to collaborate and establish detailed strategy and execution plans that will enable students to realize targeted goals as defined in the vision statement. Included in the strategy and execution plan are academic development activities and coaching and tutoring schedules. Plans must include regularly scheduled status review sessions between parents and students. It is imperative for status review sessions to be driven by formal agendas and objective performance metrics.
4. Communication and Measurement
Parents must take every opportunity to establish and reinforce the significance and importance of education and performance excellence. Education must be the top priority, especially within the African American community. African American students are the poorest performing students within the US. The importance of education is expressed in a quote by the late Bishop B.A. Gibert: “Education first or risk becoming a slave, servant, or consumer.” Parents should adopt a communication and measurement narrative that establishes education and performance excellence as the top priority.
5. Study Skills
We discovered that students lack formal and rigorous study skills; this is especially true among African American students and in poor-performing school districts. Enhanced study skills have a greater impact on student academic performance than tutoring. Parents and students should use this time to complete formal training while enhancing study skills. t.Lab has a ten-hour web-enabled proprietary study skills course. As well, there are several study skills courses on YouTube and the Internet.
Now is the time for all parents and students, especially African American parents and students, to reprioritize efforts while focusing on academic excellence. Leveraging the new bank of time generated by the governmental stay at home policies can and should enable parents and students to implement rigorous academic development processes for their students. We at t.Lab anticipate that all students, especially African American students who deploy such systems and processes, will enhance themselves academically while realizing enhanced outcomes as measured by ACT scores, college debt levels, academic college scholarships, pursuit of STEM disciplines, and income.
t.Lab is a high-performance learning laboratory for students in grades K through Undergraduate. t.Lab is a recognized leader in transforming students, especially African American students, to realize academic excellence. t.Lab’s median ACT score was 30.7 in FY 2019. t.Lab and its National Advisory Board has launched a nationwide initiative within the US to increase the median ACT score of African Americans by 2025. The initiative, “The Drive to 25” is targeting 250,000 African American students to participate in its rigorous academic enhancement programs while realizing a composite median ACT score of 25. For more information on “The Drive to 25”, please visit www.TheDriveto25.com.
