Page 10 - Priorities #48 2011-January/February

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in Advisory sessions were hit-or-miss, and also that Advisory sessions did not occur regularly enough to gain real traction. Students echoed these ideas, and also wanted more focus in sessions on grade-relevant matters and less of a one-size-fits-all approach.
In addition to the advising that takes place during the Advisory pro- gram itself, we recognized that Priory students experience rich guid- ance from a number of other campus sources. Our weekly chapel ser- vice regularly offers compelling messages from our speakers; outside speakers do the same in the various assemblies held across the year. Even our daily morning break gives students and faculty a regular, in- formal opportunity to chat about, really, anything. This led us to think not just about what Advisory sessions themselves looked like, but what our overall Advisory “footprint” was, and could be.
With this in mind, in 2009-2010 we embarked on evolving Advi- sory with a set of focused priorities. To support advisor effectiveness, we put in place a number of tools to allow advisors to better personal- ize their approach to advising, including to define their priorities, as well as elevate skills in areas like one-on-one meetings or tracking aca- demic progress. In order to create more momentum for Advisory, we put more Advisory sessions on the calendar, going from 8 sessions the previous year to 12.
We also chose to pilot a grade specific approach to Advisory with our freshmen class last year. It’s only stating the obvious that students at different levels have different guidance needs. With ’09-
‘10’s freshmen class, this was particularly true, being a larger class that included proportionally more students than usual from middle schools other than the Priory’s. This provided an excellent opportu- nity to use Advisory as a mechanism to accelerate all these students’ adjustment to high school, and many of them to the unique culture and environment here at the Priory. Advisory content intended to ac- complish this began during Freshmen Orientation. Across the year, freshmen discussed such topics as organization and study skills, planning their high school career, handling the “3rd quarter blues,” and what to know about courses sophomore year, to name a few.
A similarly new approach was taken with two other populations, including our transfer upperclassmen and senior class. Rather than im- mediately placing new upperclassmen in existing advisory groups, we created a group specifically for them to assist in their onboarding and orientation to the Priory. We also used Advisory to support seniors during the college application process. Spearheaded by College Coun- selor Betty Van Wagenen, she used these sessions to set milestones in the application process and to communicate efficiently and trouble shoot with seniors as they navigated these waters
In order to enhance the takeaways from many of our other sources of Advising—including assemblies, chapel services and the like—we designed Advisory sessions that specifically followed up on
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