Discipline Referral Workflow

Combine Google Forms with the formMule Add-On to automate office referrals and improve documentation. The workflow described in this post uses a single Google Form which:

• Teachers complete and submit the Form triggering an automatic email notification to school administration.
• Administrators document any action taken using an “Admin Only” section of the same Form which then automatically emails a summary back to the referring teacher.

As schools work to closely track students’ out of class time, having a simple system to record office referrals can save time and identify focus areas.

Video Tutorial

Step-by-Step Instructions

Click HERE to use a Google Forms template I’ve created which you can customize for your school. Be sure your Form has the following required components:

One Form – Two Sections

The Google Form must to have two sections. First, teachers complete the “Initial Staff Incident Report” when referring a student to the office. Next, administrators to fill out the “Administrative Response” after they have met with the student. This can be accomplished using Forms Branching. In the sample Form provided, the first question utilizes the “Go to page based on answer” feature in Forms to direct administration to a different section of the Form to document any action taken, notes, etc.

Referring Staff Email

Staff must enter their work email address in the Form so that they can receive an automated email update from administration. You cannot use the “collect respondent’s email” feature in Forms for this purpose because the same form submission will edited by the school administrator to any action taken. FormRanger Add-On could be used to generate a drop-down list of staff emails as an alternative to a short answer text field.

Administrator Password

Ensure staff do not unintentionally access and edit the “Administration Response” section of the Form, by adding a password. This can be done using data validation.

Using formMule to Automate Email Notifications

Use the FormMule Google Sheets Add-On and configure as follows:

• Log Edit URL must be enabled so that the Edit URL can be provided to the school administrator. This allows the school adminstrator to add any discipline action and notes to the same response/record that the teacher generated.
• Create 2 Unique Email templates, one to notify administrators when teachers fill out an office referral. The second to send a summary of the administrators action to teachers.
• Use Merge Tags to customize the email contents