We know what we are good at, we know what our weaknesses are and we also know that it takes a while for a new student to be effective in an environment contrary to anything he or she has experienced.  The ability to hide behind in a group or with a certain attitude is not available at TLE.  We also know that returning students have been cleansed from this kind of programming but a new student not willing to be part of our culture can create a lot of strife, that will slow down the process for all.  Therefore, our assessment is rather extensive and can be divided into:

Initial talk with review of transcripts and discipline records

Our focus in this meeting is to assess student's openness to where he or she is and to hear if he or she has any desire for the future.  Another focus is to evaluate how the student interacts with parents and other students. We are looking at the child's ability to show respect for authority and for other students.  The last topic, is to get a cursory evaluation of the learning style (using the DISC battery) and to what extent the student is a Visual-Spatial student.  All these observations together will give us a picture of the feasibility of a win/win situation.

Assessment by Lori Moore (TLE External Consultant)

This is a one to one and a half hour meeting.  Lori More assess all our students.  She will use a whole battery of tools to assess cognitive processes, IQ, etc etc.  She will also evaluate any IEP documents and assessments in detail.  Lori Moore will provide her assessment of what tools we need to incorporate, if accepted, to assist the students fill any possible gaps.  

Final assessment prior to acceptance

The leadership team will evaluate all assessments prior to offering a straight acceptance or an acceptance with stipulations.  Such stipulations can be that a student will have to address any short coming and attitude changes prior to beginning of school.

Assessment First and Last week of School year

All students will go through an on-line standardized testing to assess where each student is compared to national average.  This assessment also will show us short coming.  Although this assessment may give a certain recommendation, we will not always follow this recommendation as we need to look at the whole person's picture.  It will however always help us to modify the teaching with additional tools and expectations for student performance.

Quarterly Assessments

Lori Moore will spend one day the last week of every quarter to assess the progress of each student.  Immediately after this day, Lori Moore will meet with the leadership team and at this time any modifications to a student's class schedule, team assignment ,as well as additional tools will be discussed and implemented.

Ongoing Assessment

Every person learns differently but often we don’t know how we learn.  People often compensate for their learning barriers simply by ignoring them.  At TLE Christian Academy, we want each student to understand how he or she thinks – how their brain works.

 

For example, are their memory problems?  Maybe it is related to mental energy or to focus issues. We work with each student ‘demystifying’ the way his or her brain works.  There is no more important time to understand this than during middle and high school years.

Many of these findings are discussed with the student during the One on One Biweekly meetings