Progress Report Resources

Best Practices

You play a significant role in helping our students navigate the university experience and realizing their academic and personal potentials. Through their experiences both in and out of the classrooms, students are learning how to:

• Initiate dialogue with faculty
• Be cognizant of their current academic standing
• Seek options and resources to further be successful in their courses
• Build rapport through healthy professional relationships with fellow students, staff, and faculty

Students may need some support in taking these steps. To encourage students to take action and to help us make the Early Alert Intervention process effective, we recommend that you introduce the progress reports at the beginning of the term. Here are some best practices we’ve found:

• Introduce progress reports within your syllabi. This is a great reference for students to understand faculty concern and open timely and meaningful dialogue about their course progress. See the box at the top of the page for an example.
• Generally talk about your progress report participation. Communicate in class meetings or via Canvas announcements about progress reports, and that students are welcome to bring concerns about their course progress to you during office hours.
• When completing the progress report, the grade and comments sections are optional. The information entered can only be seen by CPP staff who have access to CPP Connect. You are welcome to include information that may be useful for a student or advisor to know.

As a faculty member, students may visit you to ask for assistance with resources or guidance in meeting their goals. While we encourage you to include these students in your progress reports so that we can reach out to them, we also encourage you to share resources directly with students. We've linked some of them below.

Effective Communication Guide for How to Talk to Students About Progress Reports

The Early Alert Intervention Team strongly believes in a sense of connection between faculty and students. Building a connection between faculty and students helps cultivate a sense of belonging to the institution. Creating meaningful relationships establishes rapport and progressive conversations for students to navigate and understand their academic standing; especially conversations regarding academic progress reports. Here are a few guidelines for conversations with students about their progress reports. The Early Alert Intervention Team uses elements of effective communication from the organization NACADA.

• Emotional Intelligence. “Emotional intelligence is your ability to recognize and understand emotions in yourself and others, and your ability to use your awareness to manage your behavior and relationships. EQ in the ‘something’ in each of us that is a bit intangible. It affects how we manage behavior, navigate social complexities, and make personal decisions that achieve positive results.” – (Emotional Intelligence 2.0, 2009)
• Empathy. Having empathy is critical to building rapport and meaningful relationships. Empathy provides the ability to put yourself in someone else's situation. It helps develop the students you interact with, challenge others in a healthy manner to create understanding, gears towards constructive feedback, and creates an active listening environment.
• Social Skills.
  • Disarm. Build rapport and create a safe environment and utilize inclusive language.
  • Feedback. All student feedback looks differently, however, every student needs feedback for progressive productivity and validation.
    • (e.g. “That’s great!” “I am sorry you are going through ______, was I able to answer everything you had a question or concern about?”
    • Encourage students to make a follow-up and check-in appointments with yourself, an advisor or an Early Alert Specialist.
  • Discover. Every student has a story. Ask positive and productive questions for students to feel heard and validated.
  • Design. Explain procedures and technical information. Avoid using acronyms. You want to discuss pros and cons when presenting options to students.