So, you have a college night coming up and you have to talk to parents about the ACT. The pressure is on because this is an important topic and they are looking to you for answers. In this post, you will get four talking points to share with parents, to educate them and put them on a path to success.
1. Reduce the Pressure
There's a tremendous amount of pressure on parents and students around the ACT, it's insane. I think it's your job in these kinds of meetings to try your best to reduce that. A couple of years ago we were doing an ACT professional development with teachers, as we often do at TorchPrep.
One of the things that we do is have teachers take the ACT. After we did one of those experiences, one of the teachers came out and she was in tears. She said, "It has nothing to do with my classroom, it's about my son. A few years ago, I put a tremendous amount of pressure on him around the ACT. I was constantly nagging him, telling him to take it and retake it, and honestly, I was pretty open about my disappointment in his score. And I realize that it was incredibly unproductive, when I sat down and took the test." And it's true.! Make sure your parents are seeing themselves as advocates for their students, meaning that they're there, positive, supportive, helping their students, and not adding to the pressure that students are already feeling.
2. Old Story vs. New Story
Back in the day it was kind of like you take the ACT once, you get what you get, you move on. It's not like that anymore and parents need to be told that. They need to be told that that was the old story and even though we're talking about the same test, there is a new story with it. Now there is more weight put on this test by colleges and universities, the return on investment for raising your ACT score has never been higher, and the amount of time and energy and resources that families and students put into getting a high ACT score has just gone through the roof. So having that context is a really helpful thing for parents in understanding what to do with the ACT.
3. Understanding their score
Parents need to know how to understand their ACT score. I think a great starting point is just the College and Career Readiness Benchmark. You can get those from the national level or even how they're defined at the state level, but make sure they have those benchmarks as a starting point, to start interpreting their student's score.
Parents need to see practical applications of their students ACT score. A great way to do that is go to some colleges around your high school, get on their websites, look at their scholarship pages and look at those merit-based scholarships. Take some screenshots, put those in your slides for the night. Parents will love it! They'll have their cellphones out taking pictures of every single slide. They really love to see that practical application. I've also done a video of how much your ACT score's worth, where I did a case study on 13 different colleges and universities. Use that to wow your parents without investing all of your time to research.
4. Qualify Resources
Parents need a specific plan for the ACT. So many school leaders want to just aggregate every single possible option that's out there, they want to get every tutor, every program, every group training, every book, put it all in a big spreadsheet and just throw it at their parents and say, "You do all this research, you look at all this information and make the decision that works for you." That's not what parents want! Parents want you, as the expert that they trust, to research some options and make informed recommendations for them.
I can tell you that every school that works with TorchPrep, they look at our results, they interview students after our trainings to get their experiences, they vet us out, so that they feel comfortable recommending us to parents as an option. So make sure you look at those options out there and think about what's best for your families, and give them a specific plan.
That's it, those are my four recommendations. Again, they are...
- Reduce the pressure
- Talk about the old story and the new story
- Create context for ACT scores
- Qualify your resources
If you do those four things and you use the resources I have below, I promise you, you're going to hit a home run and your parents will thank you for it!
Resources:
What's my ACT Score Worth? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KgUt-Vvsl8&t=4s
College and Career Readiness - http://www.act.org/content/act/en/college-and-career-readiness/standards.html
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