Identifying At-Risk Students
Orah Training Sessions with Kurt Meyer and Charlotte Barclay

See how to identify at-risk students, and how you can use Orah to take preventative & proactive action to protect students mental health
In this webinar, Kurt Meyer (Co-CEO & Head of Product) and Charlotte Barclay (Product Owner) share the latest Orah developments regarding Orah Nurture. You'll learn how to identify at-risk students (particularly those students who are less likely to speak up), and how you can use Orah to take both preventative & proactive action using 'Records of Concern'. Kurt and Charlotte give a demo of the Orah Nurture products, including Mood Checks, Conversational Surveys, Records of Concern, Orah Notes and the Wellness Library for students.

If you want to improve student well-being, you need to identify at-risk students, understand why they aren’t doing well and take appropriate actions.

But this can be difficult because the factors that contribute to a student’s mental health and their ability to articulate and share that with school staff are often limited.

How can you find out what factors contribute to low student moods? How do you discover what issues you need to focus on in your curriculum to improve student well-being? How do you benchmark student well-being at your school, and how does your school compare to others?

In a school environment, you have the advantage of being able to engage directly with students. But what about when students don’t speak up, are absent or their reasons are not clear?

At this webinar, you’ll discover

  • The link between wellbeing and attendance, and why it’s a particularly important area of focus for schools globally.
  • Three tools that are invaluable for finding out why some students are unhappy, and how you can address it.
  • How to identify at-risk students, and the a few key steps you can take to support them.

How to get started with Orah Nurture

Please go here and fill in the form to get a demo of Orah.

An Orah rep will meet with you to learn more about your school and recommend some next steps for you to get started with Orah.

Webinar Slides

Here are the slides from the webinar.

Webinar Transcript

Kurt Meyer: School's feel very reactive versus being able to take the initiative and intervene before things progress and get more serious. So that's been a big challenge. Also often the understanding of how a student is doing is anecdotal. So they rely on the memories of other staff members and they try to piece together how a student is doing.

But It's often patchy and inconsistent when you're trying to get a sense of how a student is doing. There's also a lack of data. So it's really hard to make data driven decisions and identify trends particularly around well being and behavior. So things like developing your well being program, it's really hard to, make cases for which areas, a school should focus on and what might have the biggest impact.

And another thing particularly with other school other tools like this is getting low engagement from students so it's really hard to get students to speak up sometimes, and often it's the quiet ones that might be struggling the most. So it's hard to get that information out of, from your students at scale. And so we put a lot of effort into trying to make our tool engaging for the students and to make sure that they get value from it as well. So those are the four main challenges that we generally come across.

So yeah, our approach is to help schools support their students before it's too late. So being more proactive, offering that proactive support where you can take initiative before a student has already reached a point where, they might be thinking about leaving the school. So one of the tools that we've developed is a Science based mood tracker. And this is something that students can use on an app.

So you can see the student app on the left hand side here. And as students log their moods, you'd collect a lot of valuable data around how students are doing. So I'll just give a quick demo on what that looks like. So this is your mood check dashboard.

You can filter by different time periods and different student groups. And this mood map here just gives you like a bird's eye view of how your students are feeling across the emotional this mood map here, which is based on energy and happiness. So we can see in the lower left hand corner, this is where you're low energy, low happiness. And this is where you get, a lot of those depressing sort of emotions.

Whereas on the High energy, low, happiness. You get a lot of those angry emotions frustration and things like that. Whereas on the right side, you get the, more happy, positive emotions. So it just gives you a good idea of, where students are sitting.

And you can zoom in to any of these and see which students have logged that. and you can open up that specific record as well, initiate conversations with other staff members. Easily tag them in to that conversation. You can also have conversations with students, and a complete history of everything that's gone on around that particular record.

And you can see more information about exactly what the student logged when they submitted that mood check. You can see some trends as well. So across those two main dimensions, energy and happiness, you can see how those are trending over time. And another key feature is the records of concern.

So you can set up criteria to flag students based on the emotion or the key words that they've logged. And then that can give you yeah, a list of records that you might need to do follow up on. You can also manage the status of these. So this one here has been marked as action needed.

And in this case, it's because the student has requested a stop follow up. And It's easy to identify which students you might need to engage with and once you've followed up and completed the follow up, you can leave a comment and then mark it as closed. So it gives you that really tight workflow to make sure that you're addressing and closing off any issues of concern. Access to student records is controlled on a per staff member basis.

So you could set up different user roles and, for example, you can say a teacher should only be able to access mood checks from their own students within their classrooms. Let's say a counselor might be able to access all student records. So there's a lot of customization in terms of access control to these records because, of course, they're highly sensitive. And just diving into the settings a little bit, I just want to show you what it looks like from a student's perspective.

So here's a little preview here of what they will see. So when they log a mood check, they're, they first are prompted to init to indicate their energy and happiness levels. So that gives them a chance to reflect on how they're feeling across those two dimensions before jumping straight to an emotion. So they might feel, low on the happiness scale but high energy and then based on that, we would suggest the emotions that fall within that category, and they can select the emotion from here and we'll give them a little description of what that emotion means.

And so it's also an educational tool for students to better understand the emotions that they're feeling and what the dimensions are that are causing them to feel that way. So that's a preview of what students would see, and it's all customizable as well, so you can customize the emotions that a student can see the wording as well. You can ask students about influences that are making them feel that way, and you can customize those. So yeah, there's a lot of customization involved with setting these up.

And you can also have different versions, like I, I have here for, say if you have different age groups. You might have less complex emotions for the younger age groups and more complex emotions for the older age groups and assign students to those. Different age groups. So there's a lot of control you have on that front.

Charlotte Barclay: Kurt, on the topic of customization, we've got some questions around the ability to have translation automatically for just the app in general when it comes to mood checks. So just pop that question up there. So it is working with Chinese schools, what level of translation do you have?

Kurt Meyer: Yeah. So we have translation on the student app itself. There's no translation on the staff side. But for the student side, we can translate the overall navigation of the student app.

And I'm not 100 percent sure if we translate the actual mood checker. So yeah, we can follow up on that question. Do you remember Charlotte?

Charlotte Barclay: Off the top of my head, no, but it would be something I can easily check.

Kurt Meyer: Thanks for that. So there's, that's just a quick preview of the mood checker. And there's a lot more to it, but I want to cover another tool that we have as well, which is the Survey Builder. So the mood checker is more, getting that day to day pulse on how students are feeling.

Whereas, we've got a Survey Builder as well, which might give you more of a structured Source of information that you might send out, once a term or like even twice a year, but it might be a bit more in depth. So with this survey builder you can set up different dimensions. And so say if you're measuring across, so this is the Flourish framework. And in the case of the Flourish framework, there's seven core tenants.

Security growth, contribution, fulfillment, engagement, independence, and relationships. And all of the questions are geared around those four tenets. And so overall for this survey, you get a score against the framework. And then for each tenet as well, you have a score.

So you can see which areas are stronger and weaker. You can also see that over time. So if I did the last 12 months. So for all the surveys that are being sent out.

We aggregate the results of those, and so over time you can see how these different dimensions are tracking. And if you wanted to just highlight one, you can do that quite easily. And then the individual surveys themselves would have a breakdown. And yeah, you'll be able to see which students which questions are included and the overall score for each of those questions.

And you can also get a breakdown of what students are saying and can filter that across different cohorts. So these are completely customizable and it's a really powerful tool for yeah, taking more advanced surveys. And you might, it might be a multi year approach where you'll Collecting the same data points, but being able to track them over time and show, consistent improvement in certain areas or help more with that strategic planning process around student well being. And, A sort of key element to the surveys as well as student engagement.

So the way that we've designed it, I'll try to bring up a preview. So we call it conversational surveys because it's interacting with a little chatbot when the student completes the survey. So it just makes it a bit more engaging for them, and it's not just like filling out a form. So we try to make it a little bit more engaging for the students when they're actually answering these questions, because that's quite an important part of it if students aren't, really answering the questions properly.

I might not dive into these features in detail, but just to show that they're there we also have a support a support page. For students, so you could give contact information of different staff members and give access, give that to students to reach out to. So that might be counselors or it might be deans and you can control which students have access to those different support staff members. We also have a wellness library as well, so you can set up different wellness articles that students are able to access within the app.

So that gives them a little bit of agency, as well as a bit of control from the school side in terms of, what sort of information you want students to have access to around well being, just making sure that it's something that aligns with the school's policies. And we also have 24 7 help contacts as well. In the case of out, outside of school hours, you can also put in. contact lines that students can reach out to if there's no staff members available.

And so that, that was an overview of the wellness side. And the other piece that I want to talk to is more around tracking behavior. And just, Collecting information from the staff members perspective. So I'll just do a demo of that.

We've got a behavior page here. And this is just a way for staff members to collect notes about students and how they're doing. So you can either log a note directly through the app. But our suggested way is using the browser extension.

So as a staff member, you can install this extension on your browser and, you can be on your LMS or any other tab and just quickly pop it open and you're able to, log a note about any student very quickly. And so it's just a really easy way for staff members to capture observations and notes about students from their perspective. That helps you build up that picture from the staff member's view as well. Again, within these notes, you can have conversations with other staff members.

So that allows you to, have a appropriate follow up process in case there's anything that needs to happen related to that record. And the other thing you can do is generate summaries of these notes as well. So I can say, for any given student, say, last 12 months. So I'm looking at Alexander over the last 12 months, and we've got a little summary here of all the behavioral records that he's collected.

So that he's collected. And using AI, you can give it a prompt to generate a summary. So I just want to get an over, an overview of his records in one or two paragraphs. And so that'll just generate a qualitative report of how that student's doing and it will also give you a reference to all the records that are related to that summary as well.

And once you save that, you can download it as a PDF or share it with other staff members directly. And that just creates a really nice format for you to share with other staff members, if you just need to create a snapshot or a quick overview of how this student's going. So that's a really powerful tool in terms of collecting behavior information from a staff member's perspective and quickly being able to summarize that. So that pretty much covers The main elements of our behavior and wellness modules.

And we work with over 300 schools around the world and constantly getting feedback from them around, how to improve our product and how to better address these problems. And yeah, we'd love to work with, any of our current customers who want to provide more feedback or any new schools who are interested in what we're doing. So if you're interested in having a look at Orah, then if you go to orah. com forward slash demo and fill out that form, we can reach out to you and give you feedback.

More of an in depth tour of how it all works and have a better conversation around the, the more specific challenges that you might be having and how Orah might be able to help you meet those needs. Okay, so that's the end of the deck that I've prepared, but I think we can jump into some questions if we have any. Yes,

Charlotte Barclay: there was actually one good one around mood checks in terms of the information that we can export that we've collected from students on the staff app side that I thought I'd leave to the end because it's something that I think is quite powerful and very good to demo.

Kurt Meyer: Yep, sure. So for mood checks you're able to get all of those records in one place and you can easily Filter by different criteria, so if you just wanted to see all the concerns, for example, you can bring that up and you're able to easily export that as a CSV file. Thanks for that question.

Charlotte Barclay: No worries. And then another one is, what can we do to increase or ensure students are engaging with the mood checks often?

Kurt Meyer: Yeah, that's a great question. So one thing that we do within the app itself is a little bit of a gamification. Let's see if I can actually bring up an example of it. So this is what it looks like from the student's perspective.

And it's the exact same on the mobile app as well. But we do things like we give them awards and badges that they can earn from consistent usage. And we give them an overview of, like the streaks that they're. Using, so we encourage them within the app to stay engaged and try to, give them some positive reinforcement.

I'll just step through an actual mood check as well from the student's perspective real quick, because there's something that we do at the end that I think helps with engagement as well. And you can see here that the responses that we're giving the student are very personalized. So if the student says that they're elated, we'll respond with. It's great to hear you feeling elated, or it's wonderful to hear that your family has brought you such joy.

So we're responding, being more engaging with what the student is putting in, so it doesn't feel like they're just, it's not just going to a black hole, there's a little bit more feedback for what they're putting in. So at the end of the mood check, we give them a summary of their streaks, any new awards that they've earned. As well as a count of how many other mood checks have been completed within their own country. So that normalizes it a little bit and just, lets them know that there's other people out there who are also doing this and making it more normalized.

So that's within the student experience and that's what we do to try to help with engagement. From the school side, there's also the ability to set up reminders. So you can set up automated reminders to go out to students or you can send manual reminders. So here we can see reminders have been sent already but, if you haven't heard from a student in a while you can send a reminder or you could just check in with them manually.

And I think in terms of getting a gauge of how students are doing, the mood checks are a really important piece and they give you this, the student voice, but we think the best results come from piecing together, the survey information as well as the behavior information that staff members are saving so that you've got, a few different data sets and you're covering different bases to help you keep track of how students are feeling.

Charlotte Barclay: Awesome. And then the next question is around the sensitivity of this type of data. So the question is, how do we overcome parents who may have questions around how Orah uses the data or the school's use of the data as well?

Kurt Meyer: Yeah, that's a great question. So I'll just jump to our website and I'll go to our security page and this covers all the practices that Orah takes in order to ensure that this information is kept secure. So under security here this is a really good resource to share with parents or, with your IT team or compliance team. It shows all of our certifications and which regulations that we're compliant with.

So the big one is ISO 27,001 and 27,018. So these are globally recognized security and privacy standards and we're audited against them every year. And so that shows that we have a high level of, internal and technical security and privacy practices in place. We also have a lot of documentation here in terms of how we meet those requirements.

We also have a privacy policy, which is on our legal page on our website under legal center here. We've got our privacy policy, which covers exactly how we use student information and yeah our practices around that, as well as all of our other white papers. So that's a really good resource to share with anyone who has concerns about this information. And within the product itself.

As I mentioned before, we have a lot of controls in terms of who can actually access this data. So I'll just give a quick example. So you can set up different user roles, and let's say we're talking about a teacher and what a teacher can do. So underneath student care, you can say, okay, teachers only have access to their academic groups or their advisories.

And so when looking at the MooChick dashboard, Or any sort of behavioral well being records within the system. This user role would only have access to those students. So there's a lot of control around who can access information as well within the backend. Was there any other questions, Charlotte?

Charlotte Barclay: No, that would appear to be all of them. Just double check. Yep, that was

Kurt Meyer: all. Perfect. I just see one here. Is this in addition to the student app?

Or another app that students have to install. So this is in addition to the student app, so there's no other app that students have to install for that. Was there anything you think I missed, Charlotte, that I should cover, perhaps?

Charlotte Barclay: No, I think you've covered everything wonderfully.

Kurt Meyer: All right, again, if you're interested in learning more about how Nurture works you could email me directly at kurt@orah.com or go to orah.com/demo and fill out the form and we'll reach out to you to set up a time to better understand your particular challenges and how, or might be able to help. So on that note, I think we can leave it there.

And thank you everyone so much for joining in and yeah, we hope to hear from you soon.

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