Equipping Students for Success: Building Academic Maturity at One Schoolhouse

One of our Academic Program’s school-wide competencies is building academic maturity. When Academic Leaders enroll students in our online courses, students don’t just get the course content–they learn a suite of skills and strategies that they’ll use in high school, college, and beyond. It's not just about equipping students with the ability to navigate complex environments, manage their time effectively, and become self-directed learners–it's about giving them the preparation they need for the autonomy that college demands.

College preparedness is one of the essential promises that independent schools make to students and families. We see that in the vast majority of our students, who are high achievers who often “do school” very well. However, the strategies they’ve learned to use are often inefficient. Dr. Lisa Damour describes students who “relentlessly grind, determined to leave no room for error. [They] don’t stop until they’ve polished each assignment to a high shine and rewritten their notes with color-coded precision.” When students see filling their time as the only way to boost achievement, they’ll fill their time relentlessly, often at the expense of balance and wellness.

The Academic Program teaches students a different way to work. We want our students to manage their time efficiently and nimbly, so we encourage them to schedule work in advance and prioritize tasks, tackling the most important or challenging tasks first. We ask them to build in slack time each week. At first, this seems counterintuitive to students, but it’s a source of relief when that extra hour on Thursday afternoon becomes a lifesaver for completing assignments or consulting with their online teacher. 

Teaching students to anticipate challenges, whether they are skills-induced or schedule-induced, and building in time that allows them to seek help before it’s too late is essential. We give students their work plan at the start of each week to help students build in that slack time. When students encounter a challenging concept, we teach them help-seeking behaviors and communication skills. 

We often have the same advice that teachers on campus do: a well-crafted question and a ten-minute conversation can be an extremely efficient use of time. The teacher can pinpoint the problem and guide the student to a solution, resolving the issue at hand and teaching students to use their resources effectively to solve problems. Year after year, Academic Program students tell us that the autonomy they build in their online course has a positive impact on their academic performance in on-campus courses.

How do we know? We survey our students four times a year so we can measure what we value. Because building academic maturity is at the core of our pedagogy, we ask questions about goal-setting, organization, resilience, and help-seeking. What we learn by comparing robust data across time is that 90% of our students tell us they’ve built academic maturity skills in our courses over the course of the academic year. That’s why independent schools across the country and around the world partner with the Academic Program at One Schoolhouse:  we challenge students to build their academic maturity, and we support them in reaching that goal.

Students come to their Academic Program courses at all levels of academic maturity. We’ve designed our systems to support students no matter where they are in their process. Our Student Success Team checks in with our teachers every week to gather information about students who need additional support. We proactively communicate with the student and their face-to-face school to ensure that students are engaged in their coursework and progressing appropriately, have the appropriate on-campus resources, and know the steps they need to take if they need to improve their performance.
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As an Academic Leader, you witness what Dr. Damour and other researchers have described as the "stress Olympics" of today's adolescents. Building academic maturity within an online course equips high-achieving students to better navigate these pressures and offers a valuable perspective: stress doesn't have to be an all-consuming competition.The Academic Program at One Schoolhouse is your essential partner in giving students the perspective and the skills they need to succeed: in high school, in college, and beyond.