As you embark on the journey of AVID implementation in an Elementary School, there are many factors to consider. One of the beautiful features of AVID is that there is not a prescribed way to implement within your school community. There are however several items that should be thoughtfully reviewed prior to taking this giant leap into adopting AVID and committing to an enriched education for your students.
Develop the Why and Commit
Developing the Why is the most important piece of successfully implementing AVID in your school. It is critical to work with your staff and school community to understand where there are needs within your school, and then begin to learn how AVID strategies and belief systems can help support those needs. AVID must be looked at as a tool to support strong instructional strategies and beliefs within your school rather than being looked at as one more thing that we have to implement when our plates as educators already feel too full. In an elementary school, AVID becomes embedded in every part of the school day so it requires a commitment from all stakeholders.
Planning and Preparation
There are many opportunities to customize AVID to fit the needs of your elementary school. As you begin thinking about implementation there are several items that you can consider. Below are a few questions to review during your initial planning stages:
- What goals or essential questions will you set for implementation and how will you monitor success with these goals?
- How do you create or change your culture and climate?
- How do you utilize systems to support AVID?
- What grade level(s) do you want to begin with?
- How will you design and utilize your AVID Site Team?
- How do you involve stakeholders?
During our initial implementation year, we identified two critical questions specific to our goals. These questions helped guide our planning and professional development as we navigated AVID implementation. The first question we considered was, “How do we create an environment and culture that supports high academic achievement and increases parent and community involvement?” The second question was, “What impact does organization of material have on the depth of knowledge and retention of subject matter?”
Developing a culture and climate that is conducive to learning and high expectations is critical. Often in schools of poverty, an unintentional result of trying to meet the students where they are is lowering the bar rather than finding solutions to reach it. We used AVID to develop goal-setting, academic vocabulary, and intentional teaching strategies to increase the rigor at our school. We were clear with our expectations and this led to discussions about how to create systems that would meet the students’ needs. Along with this, we had a lot of fun! We changed the feel of the school by intentionally posting student work and goals, using college pennants, adopting colleges in each classroom, celebrating career week, having academic and future conversations, and much more. We made it a point to authentically celebrate academics and growth.
Systems can be used in a variety of ways to support AVID within your school. We developed some non-negotiables around components of AVID including, but not limited to, binders, organization, strategies, and planners. We created consistency between classrooms and grade levels while also allowing teachers to have autonomy with their teaching. These systems were also aligned with the junior high to create consistency for our students.
At my school, we decided to begin addressing the identified needs starting with our 5th and 6th grade students. We were having a difficult time with our intermediate students showing leadership and wanted to provide a bridge for the transition to junior high. We often teach students behavior expectations but forget to focus on what it means to be a learner. Our mission was to ensure that our students had the skills necessary to transition to junior high and beyond. We developed opportunities for student leadership with our AVID Student Ambassadors. The students gained leadership through modeling strategies for the younger students, mentoring students with binder checks, leading school-wide assemblies and pep rallies, and working with our parents and families during our family engagement events. We started to see a mindset that focused on growth and becoming an academic scholar.
There are several ways that you can develop your AVID Site Team. This team is a critical component of successful implementation. We started our team with 5th and 6th grade teachers and quickly expanded to include staff from all grade levels, classified staff, and parents. The team has crossover with our school leadership team (Guiding Coalition Team) to ensure that AVID remains a priority in all decisions that we make and stays the foundation or plate from which decisions are made for our students.
Including stakeholders in the implementation journey is critical. We had several concerns when we first started learning about AVID. We feared that our families would feel like we were pushing college on their children. We created many opportunities to involve our families in AVID at our school. One of the most successful strategies was redesigning our parent events. We incorporated opportunities to model and let parents and guardians try different AVID strategies with their children and gave activities to reinforce these strategies at home. Our parents and guardians quickly embraced AVID and helped support conversations with their children about the future.
Ongoing and Embedded Professional Development
AVID offers an extensive menu of professional development opportunities. My team had the opportunity to engage in Summer Institute along with attending several showcase events. These trainings allowed the team to learn about AVID and find a networking community to learn and grow with across the country. We borrowed ideas and catered them to meet the needs of our school community.
Along with AVID-provided training, our school made it a point to embed training opportunities within our work to ensure that AVID was a living and breathing program in our school. Our staff meetings were designed to model strategies that could be used and identified components of WICOR. We analyzed our current instructional practices to identify what was already working well and incorporated within WICOR and what was missing. The staff realized that many WICOR strategies were already being used but started using them with more intentionality. We used this information to plan professional development and collaborate around ways to track. One item we started during our initial implementation was a WICOR tracker. We created an awareness of how often components of WICOR were being used and intentionally planned to fill in the gaps.
Celebrate Successes and Failures
Creating a culture that is safe for making mistakes is a final key component to AVID implementation. The staff and students need an opportunity to take risks. When we started talking about the components of AVID, we worked together to design a matrix that aligned the components of AVID vertically across all grade levels. This gave staff a baseline of ideas to incorporate within their grade level and a starting point for trying instructional strategies.
Along with this concept we dedicated time each week to try something new. Thinking Thursdays was developed within each classroom to use an AVID strategy with a non-academic topic. Each teacher sets aside 30 minutes to try something new or master the structure of an activity. For example, a teacher may want to try out Socratic Seminars. They come up with a topic that will be engaging and exciting for students but doesn’t require much background knowledge. The focus is on the structure of the Socratic Seminar rather than the content. This allows the teachers a chance to try something new in a safe setting in order to master the structure rather than the content at that time. As simple as this seems, Thinking Thursdays encourage teachers to try new things without the fear of the lesson flopping. This has really encouraged staff to take risks with their teaching.
Because we agreed on the Why and knew that we were learning and growing together, this journey provided many opportunities to share our successes and failures. AVID does not have one right way to do things which allows room to adjust the methods to meet your needs. As you embrace this journey, remember to allow time to celebrate even the small wins and you will be amazed with the changes that you see within your school community.
Did you enjoy this article? Review AVID’s Site Leaders blog archive for more great content and advice from AVID Principals.
