Page 239 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 8
Mutual expectation management
Teachers do not know what universities expect from rst-year students (Chapter 6). First-year university lecturers may also have no clear view of what happens in the last years of secondary school, not only regarding content knowledge and skills, but also regarding the promotion of learning skills and academic attitude. Without having a clear idea of what is happening on the other side, it is hard to take students’ educational future or history into account when teaching, which hinders schoolteachers from adequately preparing their students and makes it di cult for university lecturers to build e ectively on previous knowledge and skills. e guidance counsellor at secondary school can play a role in making sure teachers remain updated on the university environment. He or she could, for example, give yearly presentations about relevant changes at university, such as developments regarding the binding study advice and matching procedures; but also about changes in the o er of degree programmes, e.g., the merging of separate language and culture programmes into a broader European languages and cultures programme, or altogether new degree programmes. Ideally, the guidance counsellor also systematically evaluates how former students are doing in university by collecting data regarding the number of students who drop out or switch programmes. If these numbers are relatively high, speci c university preparation practices can be intensi ed. Moreover, schools could assign the role of information broker to one teacher in every discipline. He or she can actively seek information about rst-year programmes in that eld, keep up regular contact with university lecturers about their expectations, and stay in touch with some former students who are pursuing a degree in that eld. He or she can then share this information with the other teachers in the same eld on a regular basis. From Chapter 6 it can be concluded that there are de nitely teachers who are intrinsically motivated to take on this kind of role – some already do. Universities also facilitate this: In the Netherlands, the University of Groningen, for example, has professional learning communities (called ‘DOTs’, i.e., teacher development teams) of both secondary school teachers and university teachers and researchers that meet frequently to discuss and share educational developments and materials. e transition from secondary to university education is one of the focus points of these communities (Netwerk Noord, 2017). Furthermore, teachers can be encouraged to visit information days at universities, in particular teachers for whom it has been a long time since they attended university themselves. Visiting such a day once a year may already decrease teachers’ feelings of being completely
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