Walk into most school classrooms during your twenty minutes of advisory and what will it look like? Announcements posted on the screen, students working silently on their homework, the teacher at their desk checking e-mails and counting down the minutes until the hour is done. The original intention of advisory was to create an intimate connection, a sacred space, a place where teachers know their students. However, the lack of a clear understanding of what the time is for renders it an easy twenty minutes to fill up with announcements, unfinished homework, and cell phone usage.
Advisory period leadership lessons can transform the tone and attitude of the class.
The Issue Is Not the Time; the Issue Is the Content of the Time Spent With Students
Any teacher who has been asked what they typically do during advisory would say something along the lines of, I just sort of do whatever it is we do during this time of day. Without a specific script to follow, advisory periods tend to become a generic catch-all period of announcements, make-up work, or cell phone usage. A leadership lesson gives students something to invest in and a reason to stay present in this all-too-easy-to-ignore part of the day.
This is what a leadership curriculum injects into your time with students: a reason to be present and something to invest in.
A structured leadership curriculum provides a specific, value-based conversation with a powerful image or story in a particular circumstance, and a discussion that utilizes peers’ diverse perspectives to help students think through their choices and decisions. It gives the teacher a reason to move away from the front of the room and around the room, circulating and guiding, not lecturing and demanding. That might sound like a lot of content to fit into twenty minutes; however, there are ways to make it happen.
When teaching students leadership, start with small group instruction. Six students meet in a circle with a discussion card and a scenario involving a choice they can relate to and a value that is important to them. This discussion uses a variety of discussion strategies to help students to explore and discuss their choices, their thinking, and their decision-making process. The teacher is freed up to move around the room and provide feedback in real-time. This simple switch from rows of passive learners to circles of active, values-driven leaders creates a dramatic shift in the energy of the entire learning environment.
A real-world example of this technique in action looks something like this: a group of seventh-graders sit in a circle at the beginning of an advisory period. One student reads a scenario to the group about a boy who is left out of a group of friends. Another student shares his thoughts on what he would do if this happened to him, and a third girl voices her opinion about how the group should respond. For fifteen minutes of advisory, the teacher does not talk at all; instead, she sits in on the conversations and offers guidance in the background. Leadership is influence, not position, and advisory period is where students first get to practice using theirs. The discussion covers a value-based choice during a scenario they can relate to and then offers a discussion that uses diverse perspectives to think through their decision.
There is power in repetition, and a little investment goes a surprisingly long way.
Each week of advisory can include one conversation like this. That is thirty of these valuable conversations per year for one student. That’s thirty opportunities for a student to think through a value-based choice and thirty opportunities for them to defend a belief or opinion while hearing someone else’s perspective about the same idea. At the end of the year, the student has practiced values and made real decisions thirty times over, more real-life decisions than they may even realize. Growing Leaders has seen this investment pay off in many different ways with several different populations of students.
The multiplication of time invested in teaching leadership looks different in other ways. We have seen this population of leaders grow to over two hundred thousand young people in Argentina, with this same basic script of conversations about values, choice, and decision-making. We’ve also seen just one principal invest this kind of time into 3,000 students in Kigali, Rwanda for an entire five years in a row.
If you’re looking to get started, here’s how you might want to begin.
If you have an advisory period right now that is pretty much generic filler time in your school day, your first step toward making it sacred space is choosing one value-based conversation to teach to your students this week. You could even ask them to facilitate it. Now watch what happens the next time you have this conversation with these students. Listen to the energy in the room as they react to what you have created. If this is working, you will see subtle shifts in behavior and attitude, both in general and in response to this new learning experience. This is how you begin to make the small changes that add up to big results in your advisory period leadership lessons. Once this conversation has become familiar to them, you might want to consider adding another conversation or an additional value to your next session.
Are you ready to make changes in the advisory period of your school today? Go to growingleaders.com to see what iLead curriculum can do for our middle school, high school, or elementary students and turn your twenty minutes of advisory into the most valuable twenty minutes of your students’ day.
