Blog

The Game-Changer Tool For School Counsellors To Track Student Progress Effectively

31st May 2023

Research reveals that it is recommended for school counselors to spend at least 80% of their time working directly and indirectly with the students.

In today's rapidly evolving educational landscape, it is crucial to empower school counselors with innovative tools to effectively support students' academic success. One such tool that has emerged as a game-changer is "Pathways."

Pathways is a comprehensive platform designed to streamline the process of tracking graduation pathways, empowering school counselors, and ultimately enhancing student achievement. Read on to learn how you can help your students make informed decisions about their future.

What are Pathways?

Pathways is an advanced technology-driven platform that serves as an all-in-one solution for tracking graduation pathways in educational institutions. It is a cloud-based platform allowing counselors and administrators to track, create and analyze graduation pathways to ensure all the students are on track to graduate on time.  

It is specifically developed to provide a holistic view of students' academic progress and assist counselors in guiding them toward achieving their educational goals. The main aim of Pathways is to empower students with multiple means to align and individualize their journey toward graduation with their individual post-secondary goals. With this students are also able to select options in high school that will lead them towards future success.

Additionally, it offers a centralized hub where counselors can efficiently manage and monitor individual student progress, creating a personalized roadmap to success. School counselors can offer personalized guidance for each student and track their progress accordingly through their academic journeys and help them set SMART postsecondary goals.

How does Pathways work?

Pathways integrate with various educational systems to gather and consolidate student data, including academic records, course selections, standardized test scores, and extracurricular activities. It collects data on the students from the Student Information Systems (SIS) and compares them to state requirements for graduation. School counselors at this stage can help students make informed decisions by recommending the correct course work based on their future goals and objectives. 
 

Source: www.educationnext.org 

Pathways enable counselors to create customized graduation plans, taking into account prerequisites, course availability, and credit requirements. This feature ensures that students are aware of the necessary steps to achieve their desired outcomes. It also allows counselors to organize all data so that each completed requirement is indicated within a checkbox and a different color. The specific data points can be explored by clicking on various links throughout the sheet and the sheet includes various diploma types, post-secondary readiness requirements, and employability skills.

Making use of the robust reporting features counselors can monitor students' progress in real-time. Furthermore, administrators can make course catalog and staffing decisions and inform state reports with this single tool.

Benefits of Pathways:
 

Source: www.educationnext.org

Some of the core advantages of Pathways for counselors and administrators include:
 

• Centralized Data Repository

It automatically aggregates all the data in one place thus reducing chances of human error and offering only a single source of truth. It also prevents counselors from relying on other people to access their students' progress data.

Pathways minimize your time on data management and allow you to access the information you need to offer effective counseling. 
 

• Data Visualization

It eliminates the need to manually create separate spreadsheets to track student progress in meeting graduation requirements. Moreover, it presents data in an easy-to-digest manner thus making it easy to understand.

With pathways, you can easily identify specific groups of students that require focused attention and you can filter student data by cohorts and groups to identify trends and patterns.
 

• Graduation Requirement Reporting

Pathways eliminate the need to audit transcripts manually and makes it easily accessible to obtain student information without going through the process of data mining or relying on others to generate information.

It empowers counselors by offering direct access to student data and it automatically identifies students with missing credits required to graduate.
 

• NCAA Calculation

With this tool, you can easily verify the NCAA eligibility for students and provide instant results thus preventing the need for manual verification. It also standardizes the process of eligibility verification ensuring accuracy and consistency.

Furthermore, you can gain insight into which courses are eligible for NCAA and guide students to take the right courses. This allows you to be able to better advise tour students on the planning and course selection.
 

Approach Graduation With Innovation

Pathways is a comprehensive and innovative solution to support post-secondary and graduation planning. It is designed for K-12 public school counselors to be able to provide the best possible guidance for their students. However, your first step towards guiding students would be to pursue Counselling courses for teachers in Malaysia and help them reach their career goals and achieve their full potential.