Areas of Impact
Age Group
Grades 6-12
Length
10-30 minutes
Frequency
As desired
Overview
Even if your school doesn’t have an official advisory structure in place, you may find it useful to incorporate informal meetings with students so kids can catch up on each other’s lives and loosen up a bit. Gateway High School physics teacher Tim Woolgar and colleagues have compiled tips, resources and links to make these meetings fun and useful. This document includes a wealth of links to party games appropriate for middle and high schoolers, along with suggestions about how best to adapt them for a Zoom meeting or video chat of your choice.
Context
Advisory groups have long been a key element of school culture at both Gateway High and Middle School. These small cohorts of students across all grades meet twice a week with a faculty member to build relationships, get academic advice, and develop social-emotional skills, staying with the same students and faculty member the entire time they’re at Gateway. This allows students to be well-known by students they may not meet otherwise, and have a faculty advocate who can get to know them outside the formal structure of a regular class. Recreating that dynamic online isn’t easy, but Gateway teachers are finding it key to getting in touch with otherwise hard-to-reach students.