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High School Advisory Curriculum Handbook

Submitted by andrewstillman on Sun, 10/14/2007 - 5:43am.
Average: 3.4 (5 votes)
  • Essential Understandings, Skills, and Discipline-Specific Habits of Mind: How do you think knowledge is constructed in this discipline or subdiscipline? What skills and big picture ideas are requisite for expertise in this realm of knowledge?
    • The most important skills and habits of mind / character a young person can take away from a college/career preparatory advisory might include:
    • Resiliency: an ability to relate to life's inevitable disappointments as learning experiences, to identify and avoid the temptations of risky and self destructive behaviors, and to avert entrapment in depressive thought patterns corrosive to the development of one's own talents and dreams.
    • Self knowledge: An appreciation for the emotional and historical origins of one's own current behavioral patterns, and an awareness of the needs and limitations these create in one's relationship with the world and other people. With such knowledge of oneself comes a larger degree of power and choice over one's own actions and reactions within the world.
    • Self-advocacy: The ability to seek and take help from others, and to trust in their entitlement to access and assistance in pursuing life's opportunities.
    • Empathy: The patience and willingness to attempt to "try on" the subjective lens of another human being, in particular another whose circumstances and/or worldview is quite different than one's own.
    • Personal responsibility: A humility and respect for the consequences of breaking contracts and commitments between oneself and others, or with oneself. A willingness to assess one's own faults of judgment, learn from, and modify one's own behavior based on the outcomes of a situation.
    • Stewardship: An ownership and awareness of one's own role in preserving the well being of a whole system to which one belongs and upon which all depend. The whole, here, can represent both social and natural relationships.
    • The purpose of advisory could be defined as providing a crossover between students' academic and social/emotional development. Because of this bridging role, our view of "knowledge" needs to be unpacked a bit and distinguished from what are often called skills, content, or understanding in the academic setting. Empathy, for example, is not a discrete or easily measured quality, but is nevertheless an important goal as an educational outcome. Empathy can be "known" in the traditional sense of the word, but it is only when it is embraced as a value for guiding how one approaches understanding others that one is empathetic.
  • Pedagogical Stance:
    • How will this curriulum promote the development of the above skills, understandings, or habits? Advisory is an environment in which teachers have the ability to create conditions that develop students' social, psychological, and ethical self-awareness. Adolescents are most likely to accomplish these aspects of development when their support network of adults and peers combines a careful calibration of emotional safety and support with challenges that require students to assume authentic, adult responsibilities towards one another and the world. Group tensions are inevitable as teenagers go through a range of psychological changes, including a grappling with individuality and relationships with society at large, with the academic expectations of school and with the social demands of their peer group. The conditions that support the development of the skills and habits of mind described above make constructive use of these inevitable tensions, skillfully building in supports and informal and formal opportunities for reflection and teachable moments for building self-awareness.
    • What are the most common preconceptions specific to this subject matter that students bring into the learning process? Because popular culture (in the US atleast) has not quite moved beyond a view of the practices and norms of "therapy" as B.S., quackery, or undermining of one's privacy, many students carry this bias into advisory. In my experience, students can strongly resist rituals or protocols that evoke images of family therapy sessions, or which demand students to reveal their weaknesses before they are ready. Underneath this resistance is the fact that vulnerability to the ridicule of one's peers is in my experience the most powerful fear in the mind of the adolescent. The inhibitions and defenses that grow around this fear can be a veritable thicket of barbs, compensations, and fronts that can derail the most carefully imagined group-forming activity.  On the other hand, once students are enabled to feel a degree of safety and trust in the structures and norms of the group, teenagers display a tremendous urge to share and bond in the process of self-discovery.
    • How will this curriculum address these preconceptions?
    • What experiential resources might students possess that will aid the adoption of these new understandings? How will this curriculum utilize these?
  • Supporting Research:
    • What educational research supports the adoption of a curriculum that takes these pedagogical and/or epistemological approaches?
        • Learner Centered Classroom: Authentic pedagogy “emphasizes teaching that requires students to think, to develop in depth understanding, and to apply academic learning to important, realistic problems." Teachers focus on more challenging and exciting ways for students to construct, use, and generate their own knowledge.
        • Work-Based Learning: Workplace experiences can provide the setting for addressing authentic problems and a
          clear connection to “value outside the classroom.” Using the workplace to teach academic
          skills can also be a motivational tool for students, showing them how their academic skills
          can be used outside of the classroom.
        • Universal Foundation Skills: Students who will enter the workforce of the future will perform at higher levels when they have acquired the foundation skills. This set of skills is perceived as important for improving student performance and developing more positive attitudes and behaviors; deficits in the foundation skills are associated with poorer overall performance.
        • Changing Nature of Work: New forms of work organizations cause shifts in the types of skills re q u i red by their employees. These new skills are not occupation specific but are broader and more general, mainly involving interpersonal and problem solving capabilities as well as the need for teamwork among project-based groups.
        • Interactive Learning: Learning in which children and young people are involved in thinking about, writing about, and talking about their learning produces far more effective growth than instruction in which they are passive.
    • If limited research currently exists, describe an action research plan that will enable you and others to assess the value of this instructional methodology.
  • Common Unit Structure:
    • What patterns and rituals will punctuate and motivate the movement of learning in this curriculum? Is there a learning cycle? A project-driven structure? A skills/content-driven cycle?
  • Action Research Tools (optional): What measurement tools can educators use to quantify the relative success of this curriculum in their classrooms?