By Rachel A. Poliner and Carol Miller Lieber
School leaders agree that advisory is a core structure for personalizing schooling for adolescents. The challenge is crafting the best program for your students and faculty. The Advisory Guide helps secondary educators design and implement an advisory program tailored to their school’s needs and goals whether in large or small, independent, or charter schools. In this comprehensive guide, the design chapters present snapshots of various advisory models, and help planning teams think through nine major issues that should be addressed in order for the program and faculty advisors to get off to a good start.
The implementation chapters offer facilitation tips, suggestions for using 15 different formats, and over 130 sample activities organized around ten advisory themes, including student orientation, community building, tools for school and learning, goal-setting and assessment, life skills, and career exploration. Perfect for large and small schools, independent and public, The Advisory Guide is a must-have resource for anyone involved in advisory from study groups and committees thinking through implementation to the advisors in the classroom.
Secondary Schools | 336 pages | ESR | ISBN 9780942349016
Reviews:
"Advisories are a key ingredient of schools that work. But they can flounder when teachers are reluctant, unsupported, or uncertain of how to develop a nurturing climate and structure the time. The Advisory Guide closes that gap. Offering practical strategies for facilitating groups and a large sampling of activities by theme, it shows advisors exactly how to foster positive advisor-advisee relationships while supporting the advisory group academically, socially, and emotionally."
--Harvey Daniels, co-founder, Best Practice High School, Chicago, and author of Rethinking High School: Best Practice in Teaching, Learning and Leadership
"The Advisory Guide is, simply put, far and away the most thorough and practitioner-friendly guide to starting and sustaining a high-quality advisory program available today. The authors' insider sense of process and their attention to often-overlooked components such as a public engagement strategy, on-going support for advisors, and dealing with thorny issues raised by students, make this guide a 'bible' for those beginning or trying to improve this complicated yet important work. They provide a fabulous road map, one that covers the required bases but leaves the necessary room for teachers and administrators to make it their own. I will be recommending it to everyone I work with in building more personalized high schools."
--Larry Myatt, founder and former headmaster, Fenway High School, Boston, and Director, Greater Boston Principal Residency Network
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