For a long time I have been concerned about the number of students who go straight from high school to university and drop out in their first year.
At the start of the year it is always great to hear about your exstudents being accepted into university places and to hear about the courses they are going to do.
Some of them come back to school, pop in and say hi – usually before uni starts and after the school year has already commenced.
They are often bored by this time and don’t really know what to do so they come back to school to say hi and waste some time.
It is great to see them so enthusiastic at the start of the year, and then four or five months later, they are back again to say that they dropped out of uni.
When I would ask them why.... some of them would just shrug their shoulders and say ‘it wasn’t the right course Miss” or “ just wasn’t for me” , but a lot of them would say “ it just wasn’t what I expected”.
I began
to hear this again and again, so I started researching the subject and
found that, for a large percentage of students who drop out in their first
year, they expected uni to be a big high school.
They simply expect it to be an extension of their final high school year,
and of course it isn’t.
The more research and talking to students I undertook, the more I found common themes coming through.
Similar experiences were happening to a lot of students, the same challenges, the same problems.
The strange thing
was that when I looked at the "problems",
I couldn’t really work out why they were problems, they didn’t
seem to be big things to me.
I had to stop and remind myself that I had "been there and done that” and that I knew about the problems - high school students didn’t.
It occurs to me
that a large number of students in Year 12 are
"spoon fed" .
Schools hold their hands and guide them to, and through Year 12 and then really, as strange as it may sound, we don’t effectively prepare them for the demands of future study.
High school is the only study environment that these students have known , of course they will think that uni is the same, why wouldn’t they? They have nothing to compare it to.
Hence the need for "The Next Stage" DVD!
I saw little point in writing a booklet - I didn’t feel confident that students would read it, whereas if it's in a visual form, there is a better chance of maintaining their attention.
So the dvd concept was born. A script was developed, and the young actors were eager to become involved.
I was also very fortunate to have a very dear friend who helped and supported me enormously with this project, filling in a number of the gaps - but you will have to visit the team page to see who's who.