In the first place, that's a cool thing that teachers were given the time during a regular day to meet and figure out who was at risk. Certainly, nothing like that happened at my previous school even though that school had a reputation (deserved, I think) as a good school. There's an unusually strong focus here on identifying kids who are at risk of failing and taking steps to keep that from happening.
But what I want to reflect on here is that the real bonus for me as a newbie teacher was the opportunity to see how other teachers - particularly more experienced ones - understood the strengths and weaknesses of students. I had a couple of "Aha" moments (at least) in which I listened to a teacher's take on an at-risk student and went to myself "Yes I should be looking at that aspect of a student's performance." Or that I should understand this aspect of learning in this or that particular light.
Categories of Strength/Weakness
Abstraction - How difficult is it for the student to deal with abstract material?One on One Attention - Does the student need an above average of one on one attention in order to understand what's going on?
Organization - an obvious one but particularly important for weaker students who don't need the extra challenge of trying to track miscellaneous bits of information and paper. Kids with organizational difficulties are obvious candidates for a learning strategies mini-course that Incredibly Amazing HS is going to run after Christmas.
Tolerance of routine change - Lots of kids are really sensitive to changes in their routine at school and at home. Sometimes they need to be able to chill out when they get hit with a change. It helps if you know a kid's in this category.
Information retention - how long can the student retain information that they've studied? Obviously, if this is aproblem for them, exams will be a challenge. The eye opener for me with this one was to conceive of a student's exam performance as being a function of the amount of time for which they could retain the information. It's productive to look at it in this light.
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