Advisory by: Spencer Hill

From 1:00 to 4:00 today I was in my county’s advisory planning meeting. Advisory is just my county’s version of homeroom, where the school passes out forms and performs any other administrative roles. However, in the free time, it’s designed to be a rapport-building tool. In my school, an extracurricular exists where students create activities for the classrooms that are designed to build rapport within an advisory classroom (which consists of about 25 students). The students meet up every couple of months to choose key topics to make activities about. When discussing the optimization of these magical twenty-five minutes of morning with other students and teachers, the conclusion of our discussion was that the most challenging aspect of this rapport-building mini-period was the lack of engagement from the teacher and the students.


These two issues go hand in hand and were by far the most concerning issue to anyone I had talked to. Teachers were unenthusiastic due to disengaged students and students weren’t looking forward to it because the teachers didn’t care. It was an endless cycle that I had seen firsthand. Although my advisory teacher was usually very good at keeping the classroom motivated, sometimes, the students weren’t interested in the topic at hand. Throughout the course of that 25 minutes, my fellow students got more wired up and harder to control until my teacher decided that they weren’t going to deal with us on that day. It was sad to me, on the advisory team, to see an activity that someone had worked hard on, go to waste. Students definitely can be hard to work with at times, but there are ways to end this cycle. Teachers often have to take the first step towards ending the cycle though. Although it seems like it should be a student’s responsibility to take it upon themselves and learn, ultimately, a teacher’s job is to break the ice and provide students with an environment they’re comfortable participating in.

In the group that I broke into during the meeting, we discussed various methods that we could use early in the school year to break the ice and make more engaging activities. What we came up with was to use the highest caliber activities during the first week to set expectations, use simple games and competitions like Kahoot (a custom quizzing website), and to let students decide what activity topics they’d like to see in the future.


Although front stacking lessons might sound like cheating, it can be an effective tactic. The first week of a class is a massive sway in how a student will act in a class for the foreseeable future. Having very strong, well-thought-out lessons that exemplify the values of what you want to teach can set a student up for success throughout the rest of the year. Online quizzes are extremely effective, especially during the first week, at getting students hyped up during class or an activity. The students that at know love trivia and have a flair for competition, so a simple online quiz can be a fantastic and versatile way to get students involved in any subject. The last method is more helpful with a situation like advisory, which is short and can be about many subjects. Allowing students to deem which content is good for them to learn can help them build confidence coming into the new year.

The first of school is intimidating for both teachers and students but focusing on icebreakers and making sure everyone is comfortable first can ease the transition from summer into the school year.