What Can Schools do to Avoid ‘The Senior Slide’?

Sam Luby explains the different initiatives that international schools can put in place to keep university-bound students engaged and active during the G12 Spring Semester

In the U.S., they call it the “senior slide”, yet around the world senior high schools face the dreaded task of trying to keep their senior students, who have university offers in their hands, focused on their grades and classwork for the remaining four to eight months of the academic year. For students, they have finally realized a viable lifestyle different from their previous 12 years of education and find they are no longer motivated to continue their hard working habits.

The senior slide has many signs, including the following: late or missing homework, missing school or certain classes, not doing pre-assigned reading and work for class, not bringing materials to class, little participation in class discussions and/or projects, and overall clear ambiguity towards the teacher or taught material.

This impacts the students’ learning outcomes, yet also has far-reaching consequences for the school community. Teachers tend to rightfully get frustrated from their G12 classes and may let that influence their other courses. Younger students see the senior slide attitude from their G12 peers and intend to follow that culture once they get into that position. Most notably, these G12 students may perform poorly in their end of year examinations, which in turn potentially influences their university offers. Furthermore, once universities see these poor performances, it not only reflects badly on the student but also the school as a whole, further influencing the reputation of the school and impacting future admission offers in subsequent years. The cycle continues.

Schools, teachers, families, and students all suffer from the evitable senior slide, yet few schools have found viable, in-school solutions for their students in the final semester of their senior year. Previous studies [1] have found that outside school engagement via partnerships with businesses and government have facilitated many endeavours for students to experience practical work, including internship. While successful for these students, they are limited in scope and impact not only the small population of global schools, but a small population of the actual student body in that class. This is a minor solution for a unique but global problem.

Below are three actionable steps senior high schools can take to help curb the impact that the senior slide has on a school.

Most teachers find that their senior year students tend to lag in class towards the end of the year. This lack of effort comes in many forms, but is most commonly seen by students’ indifference to preparing and practicing in class. Tasked with preparing senior year activities and other academic initiatives for the other students, the administration and teachers tend to overlook these senior year student indifferences in the classroom and assign blame to the culture behind university admissions.

Instead, to curb this perspective and ensure that senior year students stay focused, the faculty and staff at secondary schools can create school policies that address these performance issues. One of the common ways to do this is simply to have teachers report the individual misbehaving senior year students to the administration for further discipline. In fact, this has been shown to be effective as students surprisingly can respond well to the threat of detention during the nice spring weather of their last semester.[2]

However, a more thorough discipline approach would involve the university counseling team in enforcing punishment via contacting the students’ universities they expect to enroll in. As noted above, it is imperative that a secondary school maintain a strong academic reputation with world-leading universities in order to demonstrate why their students should be admitted. If universities find that the school has a relaxed academic attitude towards the end of senior year, that reputation might reflect badly on the admissions results in future years.

The administration, university counseling office, and the senior year teachers need to coordinate a policy that involves consequences regarding students’ future university. Ideally the student gets a few chances to prove they can turn a corner before the university is contacted, but by involving the student’s university, we find that students feel compelled to revert to their previous outstanding academic self. In this way, the school maintains their reputation with universities and ensures their senior year students stay on track throughout the semester.

Applications for top universities around the world have increased every year for the past decade, making students more globally aware of other options and willing to pursue education away from home more than ever before. Yet, too often these students show up to their first classes, wholly unprepared and uninformed about the communities and cultures they are entering. Contributed by a clear example of culture shock, these students take a semester or a whole year to acclimate to not only university-level coursework, but also the societal fabric that exists in these universities and the cities they are located in.[3] 

To give students a motivational project that will keep them focused during their last academic months in high school, while also helping them prepare for the culture shock that comes from moving to a new country or city, secondary schools, can introduce a G12 Spring Semester project for students to research, analyze, and present about a topic related to their future university community. Meaning, students take the time to investigate the communities their future homes are in and identify a program, an organization, or an initiative they would like to contribute towards once they transition to that community. By analyzing these concepts, students get an understanding for what their future community is like and can start preparing for the transition to that new place. In addition, they will stay focused during class time of the spring semester and continue building the skills that schools value like research, communication, critical thinking, and problem-solving.

This activity can be run by the university counseling team or can be run through multiple departments that allow the project to have multiple academic angles.

Lastly, a solution that can help both teachers and the younger students is a “Flex Class” model for the G12 class. In this model, the usual G12 class times are “flexed” to either online, structured study halls, or the students simply move to other parts of campus. As they prepare for exams, most students find that they have their own preparation methods and trying to use valuable class time to herd all of them towards one model can be fruitless for both the teacher and the students. Instead, flip the initiative by allowing the G12 students to create their own learning, while also freeing up the G12 teachers to focus on their other classes.

In addition, this is a great time to add structured Peer Mentoring programs so that the G12 students can give back to the G11 and even younger students. Having G12 students host sessions or provide 1-1 support to G11 students regarding university applications, certain academic courses, and organizing events or organization, can be helpful to the entire school community. Using the “Flex Class” model to allow G12 students to prepare sessions or 1-1 experiences that they can implement at a later time can be a more useful experience and allow the students to grow their teaching, communication, and critical thinking skills.

All three of these solutions require whole-school coordination, but if it is implemented successfully the school will reap the benefits of a more focused G12 class each year. Additional research in this area and how it impacts the school culture as a whole would also help highlight why this issue needs to be corrected. We still want our G12 students to enjoy all the celebrations that come with the last semester, yet it is important that we keep them on-task and continue to cultivate themselves.

As educators, we need to continue to share successes and failures of trying to address the senior slide issue as we can learn from each other what the best approaches are to this global problem. Changing a school culture takes time, but taking the time to address it will provide fruitful returns in the long term.

[1] Glading, Randall R. Overcoming the Senior Slump: Meeting the Challenge with Internships. Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2008

[2] Kirst, M.. “Overcoming the High School Senior Slump: New Education Policies. Perspectives in Public Policy: Connecting Higher Education and the Public Schools.” 2001.

[3] Secuban, Mary Jane Sarador. “From High School to College: Factors Shaping the Collegiate Experience.” 2011.