The idea of Advisory in schools is hardly new. I’m about to enter my 30th year in education, and the middle school where I did my student teaching had it, and it wasn’t new then. It’s a simple idea – create space where teachers and students can build a community and a sense of belonging that connects students to the school in meaningful ways.

There are a bunch of different ways to do it – some schools do a multi-age advisory with kids from every grade level in the same advisory to build a sense of mentoring and community across the age range. Other schools (like us) have grade level advisory so that the unique issues and challenges of each grade level can be given their full due. What most schools who take Advisory serious do is ensure that the group stays together year over year such that the relationships between teacher and student builds over time and provides a real sense of continuity for the student during their time in school.

The other thing that schools that do Advisory well do is give it real time. I don’t think Advisory can happen well if the class periods are shorter than 35-40 minutes long. I’ve seen schools that do them every day – we do it twice a week, and I’d think that’s the minimum it can be and still have it be meaningful.

Without the commitment of time – both in the school and longitudinally over the years – you don’t have Advisory, you have something called Advisory that’s really just homeroom. And that’s forever the challenge of any Advisory — keeping it from just regressing to “Homeroom,” a place where stuff gets done when there’s stuff to do, but the relationships – student to student, teacher to student, family to teacher – aren’t super-vital and the time in class isn’t much more than a glorified study-hall. It’s funny, I think about every school where I’ve seen Advisory done well, and in talking with the educators there, that’s always the fight. Regression to the mean with Advisory programs is so real. I know at SLA, we spend so much time in professional development working on Advisory and still, I worry that it’s the first thing to slip when we hit the dog days of the school year.

So why is that? Why does it remain so hard?

First, I think we have to recognize that there’s very little about teacher-prep that prepares teachers to be Advisors. Teachers are taught to be excellent subject-area teachers, and while many, many teacher programs teach the idea student-centered pedagogy, it’s almost in the context of the high school content areas. On one level, it makes sense — we need teachers who are awesome at teaching kids Math and English and Science. But it means, even in student-centered schools, teachers have to a) learn how to be really good Advisors and b) internalize being an Advisor as part of their professional identity. That’s a lot.

Second, and this is where I’m doing a lot of thinking right now, there are a number of different skill sets and responsibilities that come with being a good Advisor, and in many ways, they are not always things that we are all always good at. I see them falling into three basic buckets – and I’m probably scratching the surface of what each of these buckets require:

1. You have to have the social-emotional skills to be good at support and advocacy. This is probably the single most important part of being a good advisor. And that’s everything from knowing how to listen when a student is dealing with any of the myriad issues that come up during a student’s high school (or middle school) career. You also have to be smart enough to know when an issue is something that a supportive teacher can be a sounding board for and when something requires a counselor to get involved. You need to know how to be a mediator when a student is struggling with one of your colleagues or with another student. You need to be able to sit with a student and be a mentor when things aren’t going well. You have to help your student run parent conferences, so that students learn the self-advocacy and reflective skills to talk about their successes and challenges in school with their family. You’re going to have to help kids (and parents) choose what courses to take and even what colleges to apply to. And none of these are skills that folks come in the door with, so this all has to be part of a school’s professional development.
2. You’ve got to be good at building a community in your Advisory. Now, much of the time, that means running a thoughtful Advisory class where kids are talking about issues that matter to them, but schools can also use events like Advisory Pot-lucks at Back to School Night and Advisory Days to build community. But the class time is the most immediate and routine way to build that community, and – full disclosure- it’s where I struggled the most when I was an Advisor. (And I think that’s true for a lot of folks.) Getting good at structuring the kind of activities that allow folks to grow together and trust one another as a community is really hard – especially when a lot of the time, Advisory class is the last thing that people remember to plan for. There are good books that help (The Advisory Guide remains, for me, the gold standard), but I wasn’t always great at it, and I probably supplemented this by being good at the other two categories, and then being good at grabbing one of those “Book of Questions” type books, and having kids play with topics and get to know each other that way. Imperfect, at best, and again, helping teachers learn how to use Advisory time to build thoughtful communities without turning every Advisory class into group therapy (which kids *will* call you out on) is a challenge. It’s also something that can be co-planned with colleagues, but often, it’s hard for folks to co-plan this part and create something that feels unique to your group.
3. You’ve got to be good at the school-wide tasks that always fall under Advisory’s purview. That can mean tracking who has turned in their beginning of school paperwork, being a Senior Capstone mentor, making sure kids have their course selection done, doing whatever surveys kids are asked to do these days, etc… but it can also mean talking about school-wide norms, engaging in end of quarter reflections, helping the college counselor keep track of college admissions and acceptances, or creating space for discussion when events impact the school community. And again, there’s no guarantee that a teacher is good at all parts of this. (I was not always great at keeping track of paperwork — something I resented when I was a teacher, but then realized how much easier it made people’s lives when it was a shared task when I became a principal.) By the way, it can also be way too easy to shove so much procedural stuff into Advisory time that teachers lose the time they need to build a thoughtful community in their Advisory, because the kids are too busy taking care of the mandates. As a principal, I try to stay hyper-aware of this, but I’m pretty sure I’ve screwed this one up far too often.

And of course, these responsibilities overlap. And who doesn’t love a good Venn diagram? When I started thinking recently about how all this fits together, I came up with something like this:

It’s a lot. And if schools don’t dedicate a great deal of time to both help teachers get good at being Advisors and then have time to plan for and keep track of all these responsibilities, stuff will fall through the cracks. And the thing is, in schools with strong Advisory programs, it actually makes it even more important that you stay on top of how it’s going, because when it starts to feel diffuse or less effective, you feel it school-wide.

Does this mean that Advisory isn’t worth it? Absolutely not. When it is thoughtfully implemented, Advisory can be the absolute soul of a school. It is the scheduled manifestation of Nel Nodding’s Ethic of Care, and it is a lifeline for many, many students. At our school, there are kids who have kept in touch with their Advisors a decade or more after graduating, and we haven’t even touched on how important Advisory is for so many parents. I have thought for years — and continue to believe — that Advisory is an idea that, done well, must be at the core of any meaningful conversations around school reform and doing school better for kids and adults.

And…

We have to recognize that there’s a reason that so many schools have something called Advisory that ends up being a glorified homeroom… and why other schools have tried it and abandoned it. And why it remains a good idea that is too often left unrealized.

To do Advisory well is to remember what a multi-faceted set of skills it requires our teachers to have. It requires administrators who give time in professional development to helping Advisors get good at all facets of this, and it requires not letting Advisory time become the “catch all” so that your school loses the ability to look at Advisory as a vital time to build a community where everyone feels safer and more cared for because of the time we spend together.