In about three hours, most of the families of Science Leadership Academy’s inaugural class will come to The Franklin Institute to talk about SLA. They’ll meet the faculy, hear about all the amazing stuff we’ve been working on for a few months, and hopefully, walk away feeling really excited that they’ve made this choice. We’ve got a 30 page curriculum book for them to peruse. (I’ll post it as a PDF file in the next few days, I promise.)

Tonight is one of those nights that really serves as a signpost in our development as a school. We’ve got our faculty… we’ve got our students… this is the first time we’re all in the same place as a school community. Unlike our barbeque, I did remember the camera this time. Now I just have to remember to use it.

We get very real tonight.

[This is a long piece I wrote on our moodle planning site… it was in response to a post with many ideas about our advisory curriculum. I thought it was appropriate for the blog because I really do see Advisory as essential to what SLA will be, and because it is something I wish more schools did and did well.]

I wanted to address [faculty member’s] questions and thoughts about advisory – here are my thoughts that hopefully clarify how I see advisory. I encourage everyone to add their thoughts as well.

Purpose: Advisory should be about much more than just a place to disseminate information, although that does invariably happen there too. At its core, (and this gets touchy-feely) Advisory should be the course that gives our school its soul. It’s a non-academic class where students can learn how to figure out how to be themselves / express themselves / find their voice in a place with an adult in the room. Again, advisory becomes the curricular manifestation of our desire to educate the whole child. Here’s the paragraph about Advisory from the mission statement:

Leadership can take many forms. At SLA, we want all students to discover their capacity to lead. In order to find that voice, students need a supportive community around them. To that end, students will participate in a four-year advisory program that will support their growth, both as a student and as a person. In addition, students will be encouraged to take leadership in many facets of school life.

So yes, we should with things like teaching good organizational skills, easing the transition to high school, learning good interpersonal skills, etc… but we should also remember that this is space for students to grow. We’re going to ask a lot academically from our students, and Advisory can be a great pressure valve for kids where they can feel safe and listened to and cared about… and those values will hopefully translate into our academic classes as well.

And [faculty member] wrote:

I see the advisory program as a place where students can partake in all of the above (and more), but more importantly, an opportunity for students to work closely with a caring adult (advocate), who is going to get to know them well and guide them into making sound decisions for both their academic and personal growth. In addition to this, the advisory program can be utilized as a platform to build a strong school community, a sense of belonging, and development of school pride and culture, which is missing as a result of our unique situation of being a new school.

I’d like to echo those thoughts, and my only quibble is that I think we have the chance this coming year to develop a unique sense of school pride and culture because we a new school. These first year students should almost feel more pride because of their unique status as first-years.

And it is important to remember that advisors will be meeting with parents and students for Parent-Advisor conferences, so that is another very important part of the relationships we form through Advisory.

Organization: The program is a four-year program, so that students and advisors will stay together as a group all four years. We have to finalize the entire schedule, but I think the class will meet twice a week for around 30-35 minutes. It takes the time that we save by not having homeroom. Advisories will have between 15-20 students in them. And we have to talk to SDP folks to see if and how we can give students credit. In an ideal world, Advisory is a Pass / No Credit class – probably only worth half a credit – that students have to pass to graduate. And support systems – the program has administrative support (obviously) so we will spend some of our PD time on developing our skill as advisors, plus our counselor will provide support. (And vice versa, as advisors can and should enable counselors to be that much more effective.)

Content: This is perhaps the toughest piece, because the heart of advisory is about the relationships that are formed between teachers and students (and between the students themselves.) There are some great curriculum guides out there that do address that very idea. I recommend “The Advisory Guide” published by the Educators for Social Responsibility as one such text. Also, we do want to use Advisory to do the kind of work that we can’t fit into “academic” courses… so we will tackle topics like: Transition to High School, Time Management, Good Study Skills, but we should also give folks space to have the kinds of conversations that don’t fit into the school day unless we give them space. If we, as advisors, are supposed to be our advisees’ advocate, we have to make sure we create the time and space and atmosphere where we can get to know them as people, not just as students in our academic classes.

I do like the idea of monthly themes [mentioned in the faculty member’s previous entry], as that probably gives us the space to deal with the themes while still having classes where advisors give space for the students to talk about the things they need to talk about. As for the core values… that might be implicit… although I could see times where advisors talk about what those values mean… how students see them playing out in their classes… and I also think that those values can be used in Advisory curriculum planning as well. In fact, inquiry, collaboration and reflection are at the heart of a good Advisory program, I think.

Assessment: This is the hardest piece, because often (I believe) that the effect of Advisory can be hard to measure in the classroom itself. In fact, one of the best ways to measure the effect of Advisory is to go to schools that don’t have them. Advisory classes can be frustrating some times, because the curriculum is – and should be – so dependant on our relationships and on the ideas and topics we all – students and teachers – bring to the table. It requires us to give of ourselves, often out of the comfort zone of our subject areas, and there are days (even weeks) where we will all question if it is “working.” I want us to be aware of that, and I think we all need to be o.k. with that.

The proof that advisory is working will come at that parent-student-advisory conference junior year where you are able to point out a trend in a student’s performance… or when a student in your advisory feels comfortable enough to open up about something important… or when they get into a college that you helped them pick out because you knew them so well… or when they graduate and the whole family comes up to you after the ceremony and you realize how important they have been in your life for the past four years.

That being said, there are ways to include students in the feedback mechanism for Advisory. We should be asking them what topics they want covered. We should be asking them what advisory means for them. We can develop surveys for students to let us know what they are thinking. Of course, we should probably do that in other classes as well.

The notion of the essential question is that they should guide us as we write our curriculum, and the essential questions should at the heart of our idea of having a unified, thematic curriculum. The students should be able to interact with these questions across the disciplines, so that they use these questions as the jumping off point for inquity and exploration in English, History, Science, Advisory, Foreign Language… and maybe even Math.

We have reached the point where we have defined our essential questions that will be the foundation of our inquiry next year. We built these questions starting with the "micro to macro" lens for our Integrated Biochemistry science class next year. We looked at that lens and then asked ourselves, what does "micro to macro" mean across all the discplines, which is what led us to these questions:

1) Who am I?
2) What influences my identity?
3) How do I interact with the world?

What is so exciting is that, as a faculty, we can see how these questions can lead us to studies of topics such as genetics, cellular biology, chemical reactions (through the study of the how the body works, for example) and other topics in science… it leads to issues of personal history, oral history and the effect of history on our world and our selves today. In English, it gives us the ability to study texts that follow characters through their own personal self-discovery and ask ourselves about what those experiences can tell us about our own. Texts as diverse as "Hamlet" and "Kindred" make sense in that curriculum.

And the beauty of it is that these questions will give our students the chance to look at different subjects through the same lens. I do believe that students will draw powerful connections to the content, to their lives and to the way they learn through this thematic inquiry. I believe that the content can come alive when we dare kids to care about it… to make it relevant.