Co-curricular/extracurricular activities

linguist

I'm wondering how these are recognised and recorded in different schools.

Where I work, we have an excellent awards night which covers sporting and non-sporting, however I have come to the view that we need to look at bridging the gap between the narrow curriculum and the range of activities that significantly impact on students - and of course represent a huge effort on the part of teachers.

I am wondering if any schools (I'm post-primary) actually record students' extracurricular contribution on school reports. We all know that playing on a team or doing a non-sporting ECA sends an important message about how rounded a student is and these contributions are now highly valued by employers. I'm not talking about grading them. Surely there could be a section following the academic results/comments where you might see:

Science club: Danny has been coming to the Science club every Wednesday and is working hard on a Physics project for the Young Scientists exhibition.

I know that people will see this as extra work but I'm not trying to open up a debate around that. I'm simply wondering whether any schools have a formal reporting procedure like that because, personally, I always think it's a shame when students I mightn't have had in class have done a lot of work with me in an extracurricular area and it's not formally recorded anywhere. I don't mean to be provocative but if Science teacher A does no extracurricular and Science teacher B takes the young scientists - and they do well - why should the school report record only the contribution of A if that major achievement comes down to the commitment of B? By the way, I am not a Science teacher!

The second aspect to this refers to student references when they leave school. This is an area where the overall contribution to the school can really shine and yet I've never been asked to add anything to the file of an outgoing sixth year to make sure that their contribution to my area is recorded. I don't even know if it's 'possible'! It seems a lot for the Principal to have a full knowledge of thousands of past-pupils at a time. How is it anywhere else?

spurious

The JCSP folders have things like you mentioned in them.

evolving_doors

For us the subject teacher will be usually connected to the extra curricular. But ya if a science teacher doesn't know that some of their class are partaking in some type of science extra curricular then I think it should be incumbent on both teachers to liase, so then you can at least mention it in reports.

For us it's the year head who does the references. Also form tutors have to ask their group of any achievements occurring outside the school.

We had a student competing at international level before and never told anyone about it!!! The ma came in giving out that we never acknowledged his successes! So I think it's a thing that students should be told to 'not be shy about blowing their own trumpet'. It's a lesson in life too, your boss mightn't have a clue all the work you do but meanwhile a colleague is doing all the self promotion... Then when a better position becomes available who gets the job?

man_no_plan

The new JC is supposed to recognise other learning experiences like you mentioned.

There's a ncca consultation on reporting at the main on their website