12. More on Advisory

More on Advisory

This we believe (NMSA, 2010).

*An adult advocate guides every student’s academic and personal development. Adult Advocate

This we believe (NMSA, 2010) provides sixteen characteristics of exemplary middle schools. This is the twelfth characteristic and falls under the category of Culture and Community.

When I was first teaching, in a middle school, we had an advisory program. I had no resources and had no idea what I was doing. I understood the need for my students to socialize and that they had needs beyond academics, but I was unsure how to establish an advisory. During a team meeting, I asked for help with advisory. One of my teammate’s shared, “You have a masters in middle level education; you should know how to do it.” That was my support. It was an uncomfortable moment for me; I have never forgotten the insensitivity of that comment.

One of our challenges is to find a way to support teachers as they take on advisory. Often it is a different mind-set: Middle school teachers must be more than masters of academia.

The purpose of advisory is to provide a group of students with an adult advocate. Those of us who work with young adolescents agree that this is an obvious need. Children have multiple characteristics: social, emotional, intellectual, physical, and moral. These needs shift during adolescence. No doubt, most of us can think back to our childhood and remember witnessing and experiencing this transition.

Research says, middle school bodies change at an alarming rate as we jettison into and through puberty.  A middle school must embrace a place to nurture and prepare young adolescents to be successful: Academics alone will not make it happen. But asking teachers to have a dual role: advocate and teacher, without any training, can be a challenge. At my school, we are starting the conversation.

I believe the biggest mistake we make as educators is to ask teachers to be advisors with little to no support or training. (I too made this mistake when I worked to create middle schools in the south. We had a definition of what an advisor is, but had no plan for implementing anything.) It was very uncomfortable for some teachers and others embraced the opportunity.

What I have found is that a collaborative approach, whole school and/or whole team, is necessary to supporting the social and emotional needs of young adolescents and that when the social and emotional needs are considered, there is enhanced student academic performance. Teachers need to work together to make it happen, and they must be guided and supported as they take on this new role. Becoming an advisory is not always a natural skill.

When I was talking to teachers yesterday, the majority were open to hearing about advisory, hearing about its purpose, and listening to how we could begin to work together to make Spartan Time more than an academic study hall and tutoring session. And while our students need extra time to do work, it is possible that we could be doing more to develop the social and emotional needs of our students.

One focus of advisory is to allow students time to be social. Several suggestions include: intramurals, clubs, project based learning (PBL), and career exploration. The most widely spread conversation was on initiating “clubs”. Some teachers had conducted clubs in previous settings, and our sister school is piloting clubs and intramurals this year.

Teachers shared clubs they had sponsored, and discussed how club time could allow our students who ride the bus to participate in traditional after-school programs such as Battle of the Books, and Science Olympiad. One teacher suggested having a partner on another team to share in the planning of a club. In some instances teachers were willing to use their Spartan Time to attempt club time several times in the next semester.

My colleague, John Niska, is a master in training teachers to be advisors. He shares that a year of preparation, should include a “design team,” whose responsibility is to help initiate the program. He agrees, it is necessary to prepare teachers and administrators; and important to have everyone’s buy-in. In his most recent work, he found that when advisors were mentored, they were much more likely to engage in student conversations, and felt much more comfortable conducting advisory sessions and activities.

So, we are beginning to move intentionally toward developing the whole child at our middle school. I believe clubs will allow teachers to address their own interests and while teaching personal interests, there is the chance to begin to develop students’ relationships and interests outside of academia. I was pleased with our conversations. Creating an exemplary middle school is challenging. My hope is that we will continue to embrace the challenge.

Advice

1)   Teachers must be willing to learn how to use advisory for the benefit of students. While we are starting slowly, we realize our district has a high drop out rate. We realize we must begin to look at other activities, and to explore different strategies for helping students stay in school.

2)   Teachers could pair up across teams to develop activities and share responsibilities.

3)   Grade level teams who embrace the experience and who collaborate provide much support for their students and work to meet their needs.

4)   Clubs are not a replacement to advisory; but it is a place to start, and I believe it is a good place to start.

CASEL (2005).Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. [website]. http://www.casel.org/

Powell, S. (2015). Introduction to middle school. (3ed.) Pearson: Boston, MA