In August GreeneDesk attended the YMCA’s Aquatic forum.
At the forum GreeneDesk’s business development manager Lane Harrison presented on SwimDesk “best practices” providing attendees ideas on useful strategies for maximising the benefit they generate from Swim Desk.
With SwimDesk established in over 20 YMCA Victoria facilities the session reviewed how centres can maximise their results from using SwimDesk by following a number of best practices.
These best practices are summarised below.
1. Monitor assessment volume
The first part of our SwimDesk best practices is to set an assessment target and to measure our achievement of this target. A nice target to have is to assess every student once every term. This would mean that on average, each student in your program would be assessed 4 times per year.
By aiming to assess students once each term we can ensure parents feel their child is receiving plenty of attention. Each term we should measure the number of assessments we have completed as a total and also as a percentage of enrollments.
For example, if you know in term 2 you assessed 1707 students and this is 82% of your student base, you then know that 18% of your student base have not been assessed and therefore parents have not received feedback.
It is also advisable to review your assessment numbers each month to ensure the centre is keeping pace with a reasonable number of assessments to prevent falling behind and leaving the bulk of work to be done in the last few weeks of term.
2. Identify students who have missed assessments
The next best practice step is to then identify students who have missed assessments from the previous term. This can be achieved by reviewing the non assessment report. The non assessment report allows you to generate a list of students who have not been assessed in a given time period. We recommend that you use the “days since last assessment” filter so you can order the priority of your non assessed students. The non assessment list should be used at the end of a term to “identify” missed students from the assessment blitz throughout the term.
It should also be used at the start of a term to identify any additional left overs. By leveraging the power of the non assessment report you can ensure no students slip through the cracks and that parents receive regular feedback.
3. Monitor progression performance of in pool teachers
Quality teaching is the best way to proactively maximise progression results and therefore customer satisfaction. To maximise the quality of your centres teaching it is helpful to get some feedback about the progression performance of your in pool teachers.
This information can be found within the progression report and by using the teacher/instructor teacher filter.
By reviewing the progression performance of your teachers you can identify teachers who may need assistance with their teaching methodology and provide the required assistance.
4. Identify students struggling to progress
As student retention is closely linked to progression you want to ensure your students are progressing to the next level within a reasonable amount of time. To identify students who are struggling to progress you can use the non progression report. The non progression report allows you to choose a time period in weeks which will list students who have non moved up a level within a time or longer.
We recommend using 20, 25 and 30 weeks as ideal time periods to review.
5. Welcome email
With our goal to provide parents with more feedback about their child’s progress it is useful to set the expectation of what’s to come and your centres commitment to maintain ongoing feedback. This can be achieved by setting up a welcome email which will be delivered automatically to parents of new students. The welcome letter helps sets the expectation and build anticipation for the ongoing communication to come.
The welcome letter can also include parent portal information, allowing parents to log in and review the skills that their child will be learning throughout the lessons.
