Raise Your Voice: How We're Raising Self-Aware Self-Advocates

By Kara Combs, Middle School Head

Self-awareness and self-advocacy certainly encompass?risk-taking and advocating for justice, but they also promote?students to use their voices to advocate for what they need in and out of the classroom. Self-awareness and self-advocacy are rooted in an environment that nurtures connections and values relationships.?Help session is a time in Middle School when students are able to visit any teacher for extra help or clarification on the current lessons. This valuable time with advisors helps students work on their executive functioning skills, as well as short- and long-term planning of assignments. While this comes quickly to some students, most students need support at some point during their Middle School career to decipher how to study and how to prioritize multiple assignments. Most importantly, help session is an ongoing time for students to build individual relationships with their teachers. Once students feel safe, confident, and available to learn, their self-awareness and self-advocacy develop deeply and intuitively.

In 5th grade advisory, 5th graders are learning how and why to send emails to their teachers. They learn to anticipate absences and react to unexpected absences by emailing their teachers about their missed assignments. This critical skill is a foundation for building self-advocacy skills. Once students know?they can reach out to adults independently, they begin to value independence as they further anticipate other responsibilities (e.g., letting a coach know about missing a sports practice).

Self-awareness and self-advocacy are continuously prevalent during help session. A current 7th grader might be grappling with how to study for a quiz in science and shows her teacher her notes. The teacher and student engage in a meaningful conversation about how to break down her notes, highlight the main ideas, and create note cards for studying, if needed.

An 8th grader might visit his language arts teacher to talk about his ideas for a thesis essay for Jerry Spinelli’s?Stargirl.?The teacher is pleased with the student visit, and the duo shared a one-on-one conversation—a conversation that only enhanced the student’s confidence moving forward.

These are all examples of a student seeking out a teacher for individual time. Self-awareness and self-advocacy are present in every group lesson, as well. A 6th grade math student might observe a problem being taught in math class. She is clearly not understanding the problem and begins to look away from the teacher, feeling temporarily defeated. She quickly regroups, raises her hand, and respectfully asks if he can explain it in a different way. Two other students agree, and the teacher enthusiastically approaches the problem differently. This moment encompasses?risk taking by the student, but, more importantly, it demonstrates?self-awareness and self-advocacy at its best. ?