Building Strong Advisories

Building on my last post, my Middle Level Organization class has now begun to study the benefits of advisory programs in middle schools.

My professor asked us the following question:

Based on the research and readings, what makes a strong advisory program?  What would this look like in practice.  

I think the most important part of an advisory program is that it is built in such a way that creates a caring and inclusive community, where all feel welcome. Advisories should be a place where each and every individual feels welcomed and connected to one another through both similarities and differences. This is includes the teachers, students, parents, and in some cases, even the outside members of the community. In order for an advisory to be successful, all parties involved need to be able to have an open and easy network of communication with one another. When parents have a question about their child, they need to have the ability call the child's advisor. The reverse is true as well. If the teacher has a question about something that may be going on at home, or if they want to report a students struggles or successes, they must have the ability to contact the students parents. Students need to have trust in their advisors and parents and ask either questions for help whenever may be necessary. It is essential that each party trusts one another when creating a successful advisory. The end goal of an advisory should be to create an environment that helps each student as much as possible whether that be academically, socially, emotionally, etc.

Teaming in a Middle School

As someone who is contemplating the idea of working at the Middle Level some day, it is important that I am able to recognize what makes these schools successful. The first aspect we are studying in my Middle Grades Organization course is Teaming.

My professor, had us reflect on the following question:

Teaming is the heart and soul of middle school organization.  What are you wondering about middle school teaming?  What ideas in the readings or class discussions have challenged your thinking?  What ah-ha's have you had thus far?

Growing up in my middle school, I always had teams of at least three teachers (6th grade). As I got older, these teams grew larger and larger, so that by the time I got to 8th grade, I had somewhere around 5 different teachers on my team. Because of this, I am very interested to see how a team of just two teachers works. What are the similarities going to be? The differences? It'll be especially interesting for me to explore this, as I will be working in an imitated version of a two person team in my class this semester. This excites me, as I know it will be a great learning process for me. Through the readings, as well as the discussions in class, I have come to realize that in order for teaming to work it needs to be done the right way. However, despite this, teaming can be done and manipulated to work in a variety of different ways. For example, my middle school I believe has a very successful approach to teaming, but despite this, my professor described teaming in her middle school in a very different manner, and it seems to work there too. It will be fascinating to study and explore all of the different approaches to teaming this semester, as well as to look at what manipulations can be made to the different systems in order to make it work appropriately for a given group of students.

My big "ah-ha" moment was when I learned about teams working together to teach multiple subjects simultaneously through some sort of similarity between the subjects. This was interesting to me because I can't think of very many times throughout my schooling where I was able to experience this myself. Through the readings, discussions, and just my general thought process, I can easily see the benefits of it already. This new idea makes me want to study this version of the teaming concept more.