As I consider the fact that it's difficult to give every child the personal attention they deserve in school, I wonder again about instituting elementary advisories.
Here's how that would work.
First you would figure out the number of available staff in a school.
Next you would figure out how many staff-student advisories you could have. For example, perhaps you could find the staffing including assistants, educators, specialists to staff one staff member - eight students advisories.
After that you would figure out when advisories would meet and what they would do. I think a good focus of advisories would be to combine it with read aloud, writing/composing, and social skills. For example each advisory might meet every morning to focus on a social skill/issue by playing a game, doing an activity, or simply talking about it and then they would also spend some time reading a good book and writing/composing in online or offline journals.
These advisories could potentially empower our students and schools.
Further if you wanted to make more use of the limited staff most schools have, the younger children could have advisories in the morning and the older students could have them in the afternoon. In this way, many specialists could potentially serve on two advisory groups each day, possibly advisories that also help them meet their service plans for specific students.
What do you think of this idea? I think it holds great potential.
