Teaching Self Advocacy: Speak Up

At most family-student-teacher conferences this year, I encouraged students to speak up or email me if they needed more information or had ideas for the classroom. I mentioned the positivity of such self advocacy. I also recommended that families create family GMail accounts so that if they allow a young child to email his/her teacher, it comes from the family account so there's good oversight and collaboration with the effort. The more students learn to self advocate from an early age, the better they will do. A big focus of the work I do to teach well is to teach students how to be responsible, independent learners and decision makers, and self advocacy is a big part of that. What would you add to this conversation?