Student Attendance & Classroom Strategies

This blog post is from our friends in Student Services and is all about student attendance. Recently Parisaw, Angie, and Rolando attended a webinar on this issue and they wanted to share what they learned with all of us.

As educators, we know that when our students are in our classes, we can help them. We can teach them. When they aren’t in our classes, their academic achievement is directly, and negatively, affected. Additionally, students miss developing important life skills such as developing social relationships, like friendship, as well as resilience and dependability.

So what can we do?

First, let’s start with some terms to help us maintain a common vocabulary.

Truancy: missing school without permission (5-28% of missed days)

Chronic Absenteeism: missing more than 10% of school for any reason (excused, unexcused, or suspension)

School Refusal: emotion-based absenteeism

School Refusal Behavior: umbrella term used for children with emotion-based school refusal and/ or truancy. A continuum of behaviors from periodic absences, complaints about attending school, missed classes, to missing days, weeks, and months.

Now that we have a common language, let’s look at what some of the risk factors for attendance problems. Here is a list of some of the common risk factors that affect student attendance:

• low income families
• the transition from junior high to high school
• significant events/ time-related transitions such as:
• moving
• changing schools
• prolonged Illness
• beginning and end of school year
• vacations
• long weekends

Other barriers to regular student attendance include:

• medical conditions, including asthma
• pregnancy
• history of being bullied
• homelessness
• lack of or irregular access to transportation
• lack of parent involvement or parents not holding student accountable for attendance
• trauma
• poor student-self management skills

Now that we know what is causing our students to miss school, let’s talk about what’s not working.

Warnings, lectures, parent meetings, and truancy tickets are punitive and are not linked to helping students with long term truancy issues.

As teachers, we are naturally inclined to help our students. So what does work?

Here is a list of strategies that have been identified (source) as useful for facilitating students’ connection with the classroom and as a result, increasing attendance in at-risk students.

• At the start of the year, consider team-building activities during the first couple of weeks in order to foster student-teacher and student-student relationships and help build connections.
• Meet students at their level. Differentiation within the classroom helps provide good instructional matches between academic demands and a student’s ability.
• Along with differentiation, provide choices. Having some autonomy can help increase an individual’s investment in the work.
• Focus on the positive! Offer rewards and positive behavioral praise for good behavior.
• Promote connections between students’ lives and real-life events and classroom instruction.
• Promote participation in extracurriculars.
• Promote family involvement in learning. This can be accomplished not only through teachers contacting families, but also by creating structured activities for the students to share their work and progress in class with their families.
• Connect students with community-based service learning opportunities.  
• Identify risk factors (above mentioned) and address the class in order to prevent absences. For example, knowing that winter break is coming up, address it with the class by reminding them that it’s important to not take an extended break, their presence is important in class, etc. Your words are powerful.

It can be easy to forget the powerful effect that our positive relationships with students can have.  Time and time again, research suggests that focusing on preventive and proactive measures is the best way to address chronic absenteeism.

Click here to see the presentation from the previously mentioned webinar and contact your friendly student services colleague for more information!

What have you found works in your classroom? Do you have a story to share of how you aided in increasing a student’s attendance? Share below in the comments section so that we can all learn from each other!

Is there a topic you’d like to see on the blog? Give us some ideas and let’s get the conversation started!