This high school I previously worked at is a very rural high school with a low percentage of college-going high school graduates. The principal made this idea one of his goals for the year and communicated to his staff and communicated why this was an important goal for the students.
I don't have all the information I gathered from this session, but it was one of the best professional development sessions I have attended. I will tell you some of the ideas we did at our school.
Some of the ideas that we took from the session and implemented in the first year were:
1. College Talk - Talk to teachers/staff about your goal to create a college-going culture. This idea is being sure to talk about college in their classrooms, hallways, advisories. The idea can be as small as talking about where the teacher went to college to talking about how what they are learning will help them in college to college majors.
2. College Corner - The principal asked all teachers to create a "College Corner" in their classrooms where they display any college related materials in this area. Previously, very few teachers displayed college materials in their classrooms. Teachers went all out in their displays. They displayed information about their alma-maters, any college materials they could get their hands on, information about college majors, and information about how their class related to college majors.
3. College/Major of the Week - One of the ideas was to present a College of the Week on a bulletin board in the commons area. To go along with it, we would present one of the majors from the college as the "Major of the Week". We used materials that colleges sent to us and displayed them on the bulletin boards and printed out information relating to the major from the college's website. The best part is we would see students reading information from the bulletin board.
4. College Week - The principal decided on certain weeks that he would give free "Jeans Days" to teachers ONLY if they wore college shirts or sweatshirts. The idea of this was to get students and teachers talking about the colleges.
5. College Pennants -We contacted every possible college we could think of and asked them to send us one of their pennants to display in our school. We received so many pennants. During evening or weekend events, you could hear people talking about the pennants and how they were looking for a certain college. It was pretty cool to hear people talk about them.
6. We've Been Accepted Board - We created a board with the title We've Been Accepted and used Panther Paws (mascot) with the student's name and the college where they have been accepted. Eventually, students would come to the our office and ask where their Paw was as soon as they were accepted. It was exciting to see the students take pride in their post-secondary plan. We were sure to update the board for graduation day.
The second year we implemented some of our own ideas. I will post in another blog about these ideas.
