Harvard Spring LGR

Harvard LGR is off to a good start for our semester. We started with 54 students, but almost immediately dropped down to 40 students at our courses. We’ve maintained attendance of between 35 and 40 students since, but attendance is definitely one of our weakest areas – how are other programs doing with keeping up attendance? We’re working on getting incentives for our students, and hopefully that will help.

We have some great coaches this semester. In addition to our returning 10 coaches, we have 5 new coaches, who are awesome. Our students seem to be responding well to their coaches. We have found that our higher scoring students have better attendance and are better about bringing things to class. We will have to think of ways to keep our lower scoring students excited about the program.

Jade has been organizing our college choice, and she’s doing a great job. Our students have gone over essays, college characteristics, and why to go to college thus far. We have 2 college visits planned, one next Saturday to Northeastern and the other in late April to another Boston school. We’d like to take them to a school outside of the city, but it’s already hard to get them to even come inside of Boston, so I think that for now I’d like to focus on getting as many people as possible to come into Boston for the tours. Jade has also arranged for Access to come speak to our students the week of April 3 and April 10.

Our biggest successes in my opinion thus far have been maintaining an environment where our coaches enjoy teaching and keep coming back and also creating an environment where our students are comfortable talking to us. Our biggest weakness is attendance, and getting our students to turn in assignments on time (or at all). We’d love to hear any strategies you guys have on improving either of these things.

Thanks for the great updates – for all you New Englanders I met last Sunday, it was great to meet you, and I hope you and everyone else are having great semesters!

-Dara