Teacher Recommendations

Modified on Tue, Feb 27 at 3:16 PM

Introduction

Genesis allows teachers to create a course recommendations for the next school year inside of the Genesis Gradebook.

Using the recommendation functionality, a request can be automatically created based on the teachers recommendation, or the recommendation can just be used as a helpful tool for the counselor when creating requests for the student.

This is all configurable by your school so that you can use this feature to best serve your needs.

Quick Steps on Enabling Teacher Recs:

Verify students have a next year assignment (next school and grade)
Go to Next Year Scheduling>Process Control>Recommendation Setup and select "Allow teachers to make recommendations" in the "Recommendation Screen Setup" dropdown. Click save.
Check off the departments you would like to have this access. Click save.

Setup

The Teacher Recommendation functionality is controlled under Next Year Scheduling > Process Control > Recommendation Setup.

This screen features all pre-scheduling functionality, including Teacher Recommendations, for the school that you are currently in.

The Teacher Recommendations section features fields that will be addressed here.

Field	Description
Recommendation Screen Setup	This field simply turns on and off the recommendation features inside of the teacher's Gradebook. Options: Allow Teachers to Make Recommendations, Read Only Access, and No Access to Recommendations Screen.
Number of recommendations a teacher can make per student	This dictates the number of recommendations a teacher may give to a student.
Automatically create requests based on teachers recommendations	The field will allow a request to be made for any recommendation inputted by the teacher. The request and the teacher recommendation can be viewed under >. If this field is set to No, then the recommendations can be viewed on the same screen
Create request for student's first recommendation only
Only allow recommendations for courses setup for student's next grade level	If set to Yes, only courses setup for the student's next grade level or courses with NO grade levels selected will be displayed in the recommendation dropdown.
Department - Can Make Recommendations	This field dictates which departments can post recommendations for there students. If a department is checked, then any course for that department can post recommendations. If a department is not checked, then any courses within the unchecked department will not have the ability to post recommendations
Department - Allow Recs by Subject	By default, the course drop down on the gradebook's recommendation screen will only contain courses within the department of the gradebook. By checking this, the dropdown will be expanded to other courses that have the same primary subject.
Limit Recs to 'Academic' Courses	If checked, teachers will only be able to choose courses marked as 'Academic' on the Curriculum Course in the given department. Course drop down on the gradebook's recommendation screen will only contain courses marked as 'Academic' courses.

Automatic Request Creation FYI:

If your school has enabled requests to be automatically created when a recommendation is made, it is important to note how this will work. If a teacher creates a request, and no other user has altered that request, then any changes the teacher makes to it will automatically update the existing request. However, if a teacher changes her recommendation/request and another user (ie. Counselor) has changed the original values, then the original request will not be altered. Instead, a new request will be created with the teachers new recommendation/request.

Inputting the Recommendations in Gradebook

The Teacher Recommendations are created inside of the gradebook under the Class Roster tab.

If Recommendations have been opened in the school, two radio buttons will appear on the top left hand side of the screen.

If the user clicks on the 'View Recommendations' button, then the recommendations will appear for the courses roster.

The screen features a drop down of courses that the teacher can choose from.

The drop down is populated by courses set up in the next year schools curriculum.

The list is filtered by department based on the current courses department (see note below).

What courses can be accessed

The course drop down list is filtered by department based on the current courses department. However, schools do have the ability to expand the list of courses in the list to other courses that have the same primary subject. This is very useful for special ed courses where the department is special ed, but you want the list to include all english courses. In order to do this, go to the Next Year Scheduling>Process Control>Recommendation Setup screen. Click on the department that you would like to allow teachers to recommend by subject and then check off the "Recs by Subj." column.

Additionally, you can link individual courses of different subjects and departments together using Next Year Scheduling>Setup>Linkages>Recommendation Linkages screen

The teacher can choose a course from the drop down and then move on to the next student.

A common occurrence for teachers is that most students in the class will be moving into the same course for the next school year.

To facilitate this process, the teacher can select the course for the first student in the class, and then click on the 'Update All' link in the column heading.

This will update every student in the class with the same recommendation.

Once the teacher has finished choosing the courses, they should hit they Save button on the bottom of the screen.

Recommendations under Student Requests screen

Under the Student Data > Modify Student > Next Year Requests > Make Request screen, you can view all the recommendations created by the teachers for a particular student.

If you are allowing the creation of a request upon the creation of a recommendation, you will also see the requests that have been automatically generated.

Any request that has been created from a recommendation can be identified by the check box in the Recommended column of the student Next Year Requests.

You can view the actual recommendations inputted by the teachers under the requests.

For easy viewing of the requests linked to recommendations, you can click on the recommendation and the linked request will be highlighted in green.

If no request has been created by the recommendation, then a Create Request Icon is shown on the right hand side of the Teacher Recommendation section.

By clicking this icon, a request is automatically created and tied to the recommendation.

Reports

We have Report # 14168 - Teacher Recommendation Status Report