The Advisory Clinic: Improving and Sustaining Effective Advisory Programs—Part III
Guest Blogger: Denise Wolk
As I mentioned in the last blog entry, ESR works with schools nationwide and we’ve observed a pattern of problems in efforts to develop successful advisories. Here I offer another one of the pitfalls and strategies for climbing out of the pit for developing and sustaining successful advisories.
Advisory doesn’t feel authentic or worth the effort to faculty, students, parents, or administrators.
From a student: “This is really lame.”
From an advisor: “I just don’t see how this is benefiting our students. It’s a waste of time.”
Strategies: Students and teachers easily recognize when something feels artificial or empty. Academic advising should be a key focus of advisory, especially in high schools. Monitoring and tracking students’ academic progress, conferencing with students about their goals and grades, supporting students’ completion of grade level benchmarks, graduation requirements, and personal learning and post-secondary plans provide immediate legitimacy for advisory and link advisory directly to a school’s core academic mission and educational program. When advisors coach students to monitor and assess themselves, they are truly teaching learning to learn skills.
Remember, advisories that remain strong over time put relationships first, but those relationships must be built with a higher purpose in mind. These advisory groups respond to the needs and interests of advisees, while maintaining a strong focus on academic support.
For help with these and other advisory conundrums, attend my session for schools who are struggling with advisory implementation challenges at the NASSP Convention: The Advisory Clinic: Improving and Sustaining Effective Advisory Programs on Friday, February 27 from 11:30 a.m.–1:00 p.m.
Comments
"Schools to watch" is such an apt description of the kind of innovation and accountability initiative that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan described in his Senate confirmation hearings. STW implies that schools are working toward improvement, and that they have made promising progress. They are not necessarily "there" yet, wherever "there" might be, but they have embraced the expectation of accountability and are making necessary, and sometimes dramatic, strides toward meaningful improvement.
This, in itself, is the heart of contemporary school reform -- sharing promising practices, gathering evidence of substantial progress, and creating sustainable innovation in our nation's schools. Models of schools that have somehow gotten "there" are less useful than watching the progress of schools, perhaps like our own, who are just a few steps ahead of us on our a similar path to improvement. It's the difference between being coached by a grand master or someone who is just better enough to be an attainable model. Certainly, our "reach should always exceed our grasp," but if a model is so far above our current state that we can barely see it, we are likely to learn little from that distant view, no matter how perfect the model might be.
What all this comes down to is that the best information about school reform is, just like good professional development for teachers, peer-to-peer and imbedded in the work of school leadership. The real experts in this business are the principals who do the job every day -- the people who have taken some risks, gotten clobbered a time or two, and wound up smarter and more confident as a result. The sharing of advice, stories, problems and solutions among principals is facilitated by technologies from telephones to high speed Internet links...and by organizations of principals, like NASSP, that create forums that can be trusted to focus on the real needs of school-based professionals.
More than ever, your best professional development starts with your question, someone to ask, and a way to ask them. With this organization and this conference, you've come to the right place to do it all.
Posted by: Howard Johnston | February 4, 2009 08:43 PM