Two years ago, our AVID Site Team set an ambitious goal of building transferable life skills in our 7th and 8th graders. As we went through the school year, this goal kept being put on the back burner. At every Site Team meeting, we would kick around ideas, but the truth was we didn’t know how to teach this or what really the goal was asking. The big task of junior high is to walk students with the help of their parents into a fledgling adulthood. This is a tall task for the students and often for their parents as well. We wanted to use transferable life skills to foster student agency. This is taking an abstract idea and teaching it to students who are just beginning to develop the ability to do abstract things. We were lost, but fortunately (or unfortunately), a once-in-a-generation pandemic gave us the focus we needed to take the abstract and focus it into an essential concrete skillset.
The Solution?
Limit the scope to increase the effect. We decided to just focus on self-advocacy rather than this whole bucket of transferable life skills. As an AVID Site Team, we felt like self-advocacy was an important step to Student Agency. We also felt that it was going to be imperative in the various ways that students would receive an education throughout the school year. The way we decided to teach self-advocacy was through clear action steps. Every other week we would have students rank and reflect on how they did simple things in their life. For example:
- Did I ask questions when I didn’t understand something in class?
- If someone is being mean to me in person or online, I talk to them or seek the assistance of an adult.
- If I am absent, I talk to or email the teacher about what I missed and how to catch up.
- When there is conflict in my friend group, we find a compromise that everyone can be happy with.
Students then rank on a scale of 1–10 with a 10 being, “In every situation this week, I made sure that I spoke up politely to make sure that my needs and the needs of those around me were met.”
Based on student feedback, we did mini-lessons throughout the year to support this goal. For example, we spent a lot of time on writing emails. It is a great way for students to get answers, but if they are not clear in their writing it is hard to support them through this mode.
A key part of this was bringing parents on board. We have a very active community and parent group. At times, this can be a boon for self-advocacy. Other times, it can be a burden. Sometimes parents can overstep their children’s voice in an effort to support them. In conversations with our parent group and constant messaging, we have gotten to the point where everyone understands that the student should speak up first. Additionally, parents asked us to add, “I communicate with my family when I need help or space to complete my work.” to our self-advocacy rubric.
Next Steps
Our goal was to build Student Agency in a student group who is struggling to find themselves in a myriad of ways. In order to do this, we had to make the lessons concrete and applicable to the students’ life as much as possible. With the help of our parents, we have been able to increase the methods and expectations of teaching self-advocacy to our students. We see this in little things like students emailing me to set up appointments to discuss issues at school. Just as important, we also saw a 50% reduction in missing work and students with multiple Ds and Fs on our campus. While we have next steps, like improving student talk time in Student-Teacher-Parent conferences (not the traditional parent-teacher conferences), we are happy with the results. If there is a student that reads this article and disagrees with my assessment, I have no doubt that they will politely contact me to state their opinion and, frankly, nothing would make me happier.
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