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An Advisory Advantage
At Bronx Lab School, solid relationships with educators help
students perform at the top of their game.
By Catherine Gewertz
New York
It was a simple elevator ride, really, just two floors up. But it rocked Dane Laing’s world.
When those double doors closed in 2005, he left behind one of this city’s worst high schools,
where he was unknown and uncertain. When they opened, he walked into a new small school,
where he would find a second family and a clear picture of his future.
The change in Mr. Laing’s school experience springs largely from the advisory system at the
heart of Bronx Lab School, where he is now a junior. Teachers are trained to be mentors,
counselors, and friends to a group of advisees, shepherding them through the term papers and
broken hearts of adolescence. Each advisory group of about a dozen students stays together, with
the same adviser, until graduation.
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Christine Bernard, center, leads an advisory group with students Juan Tejada, left, and D'Larys
Rivera.
—Photo by Emile Wamsteker
“She’s like my second mom,” Mr. Laing, a soft-spoken 17-year-old with a headful of beaded
braids, said about his adviser, English teacher Christine Bernard. “I can talk to her about college,
music, things with my girlfriend. I feel so attached to her. It helps me do everything I’ve got to
do.”
By creating that kind of culture, with promising indicators that it’s paying off academically,
Bronx Lab appears to be succeeding at something that has eluded many a high school: creating
effective advisories.
Some form of advisory has long been commonplace in private schools, where many students get
regular guidance and support from teachers who know them well. In the past few decades, public
middle and high schools have tried with limited success to provide similar supports. Often, they
end up being little more than a regularly scheduled study hall.
The small-schools movement, with its emphasis on personalization, took the idea of advisory as
a cornerstone. But experts say that even in those more intimate settings, the system often falls
short of its promise as staff members, overwhelmed with the demands of starting a new school,
find it impossible to procure the very substantial time and training necessary to make it
successful.
When Bronx Lab opened in September 2004, it was yet another small school determined to make
advisory work. It grabbed a bit of space inside the 2,600-student Evander Childs High School,
which was so disrupted by violence and high dropout rates that New York City had decided to
phase it out, leaving space for six small schools. Now in its third year in expanded digs on the
massive building’s fourth floor, Bronx Lab has 300 freshmen, sophomores, and juniors. It plans
to enroll students in grades 9-12 next year.
Math teacher Mike Ziolkowski, at right, evaluates a history presentation with La'Nae Richards,
left, and Daja Lake.
—Photo by Emile Wamsteker
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From the start, Bronx Lab used a school model that features “distributed counseling,” meaning
that all faculty and staff members, not just a handful of experts, are trained to advise and support
students on academic as well as personal issues. The approach was developed by the Institute for
Student Achievement, a Lake Success, N.Y.-based nonprofit organization that provides technical
support and training to 65 schools using the model in four states. All institute schools follow
seven common principles, including distributed counseling, continuous professional
development, and an extended-day, college-preparatory curriculum for all students.
Promising Signs
On several indicators, students attending the Bronx Lab School are faring better than those in
other New York City schools.
Passing Rates on Regents Exams
Bronx Lab (For the class of 2008, the school’s first entering class):
• English 75%
• Math A 88%
• Global History 74%
N.Y.C. High Schools (For the class of 2006; most recent data available):
• English 50%
• Math A 54%
• Global History 53%
Average Attendance 2004-05
• Bronx Lab 92%
• N.Y.C. 82.5%
Promotion, grade 9 to 10, 2005-06
• Bronx Lab 92%
• N.Y.C. 73%
Note: The Bronx Lab data are principal’s unaudited figures. Citywide data are from the New
York City Department of Education.
In the institute’s model, distributed counseling and advisory groups do not function in isolation.
They are integral parts of a relationship-driven, collaborative way of running a high school. That
means that relationships between students and adults can’t be just soft-and-fuzzy enhancements
to school life, but genuine bonds that enable students to perform at the top of their game.
“That leverage is at the heart of the distributed-counseling model,” N. Gerry House, the
institute’s president and chief executive officer, said in a sunny hallway during a recent visit to
Bronx Lab. “If you have trusting relationships, you can demand more of students academically,
because they know that in addition to the demands we are making, there is the support.”
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To achieve that in middle and high school would mirror practice that’s long been embedded in
elementary education, said Ms. House, a former superintendent of the Memphis, Tenn., schools
and high school English teacher. In the elementary grades, it’s a given that teachers facilitate
learning by building community in their classrooms, she said. But by high school, “it’s assumed
that it’s all about imparting content, and it gets separated from the students themselves. That’s an
erroneous road to go down.”
For high school teachers accustomed to a more traditional approach, taking on the added roles of
counselor and mentor can prove difficult.
“It’s a hard shift if you’re not used to this paradigm,” said Sarah Eustis, a former middle school
social studies teacher who is now Bronx Lab’s assistant principal (and, like most other adults at
the school, leads her own advisory group as well). “It’s another element, definitely, but it’s a
really important part of everything we do. We’re talking about casting a net to let all of us get
our arms around all of these kids.”
At Bronx Lab, advisories meet four times a week for 45 minutes. Two sessions are devoted to
silent reading, since many of the school’s students, nearly all of whom are from low-income
families, don’t typically curl up with books. Two other weekly sessions encompass a range of
activities from the academic to the personal.
In one of Ms. Bernard’s advisories recently, 11 teenagers sat in a circle. The teacher returned the
latest round in a letter correspondence she’s having with each of them about books they’re
reading, and how they relate to their own lives. The conversation turned for a moment to two of
the students and which courses they would choose for next term, and then to whether anyone in
the group might join the school’s summer trip to Ecuador.
The Ingredients of Successful Advisories
Education consultant Rachel A. Poliner, who helps schools across the nation set up advisory
programs, suggests things to keep in mind when considering such a system. “Too many schools
schedule advisories before they have consensus, a plan, and resources,” she says.
1. Plan
Take the planning process seriously. Set up a research-and-design team that reviews the research
on advisories and visits schools with effective advisory systems. Designate people to be in
charge of coordinating the design and the advisory program itself once it is set up.
2. Engage
Engage in extensive outreach to gather the suggestions and support of faculty members, students,
parents, and key district leaders. Start with goals, not scheduling. Be clear on what you want an
advisory to accomplish, and let those goals drive its design.
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3. Define
Clearly define advisers’ roles and responsibilities and the procedures for coordinating,
supervising, and assessing the system.
4. Train
Provide ongoing, on-the-job professional development to train and support staff members in
developing advisory skills.
5. Redesign
Advisories can’t be effective in a vacuum. They must be part of an overall school redesign that
facilitates strong relationships between students and adults and emphasizes personalized teaching
and learning.
6. Size Up
Size up the context in which you are operating. All the best planning and preparation can’t
guarantee a good advisory if regulations or attitudes in your community are inhospitable to the
idea.
SOURCE: Education Week
In other advisories along the hallway, students talked about how to have respectful differences of
opinion about a novel, or the humiliation of screwing up a recent family dinner. On other days,
topics have included balancing a checkbook, interesting events in the news, and what it might be
like to leave home for college.
Ms. Bernard said later that the advisory curriculum—and there is one—is deliberately broad and
flexible enough to mesh intellectual and emotional issues. “It’s riding it together, teaching them
what family is all about,” said Ms. Bernard, one of the school’s founding teachers and also its
director of instruction.
But to do that, you need teachers willing and able to get close to their students. Principal Marc S.
Sternberg said that in writing job descriptions and conducting interviews, he and his staff “filter
pretty heavily for people whose interpersonal skills aren’t strong.”
Then the training begins.
For each of its schools, the Institute for Student Achievement supplies advisory-skills training in
special sessions at its summer institutes and through a coach it assigns to work weekly with staff
members at each site. The coach, typically a former principal, also focuses on other issues, such
as designing a sound curriculum and creating a positive school culture. A second “content
coach” shows teachers in each subject how to strengthen their students’ critical-thinking skills.
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Sarah Eustis, left, the assistant vice principal, talks to student Kevin Bharrat during "history day"
at Bronx Lab School.
—Photo by Emile Wamsteker
To mesh well with the relationship-based advisory model, Bronx Lab staffers seek to make
teaching more of a joint inquiry than a handing-down of information. One recent afternoon found
students in 9th grade Integrated Math and Science on their knees in the hallway, chatting as they
used yardsticks to measure a stretch of the floor. They’d learned the formula for velocity, and
had calculated their own walking speeds. Now they would use that knowledge to project how
much time it would take to cover the allotted distance.
Leadership, too, takes a collaborative form at Bronx Lab. To Mr. Sternberg, it doesn’t make
sense to ground learning in close adult-student relationships and then give his staff little role in
running the school. To his way of thinking, those adults are the ones who know the students, so
they should share in making decisions.
That philosophy was evident at a weekly school-based support-team meeting last month. The
school’s assistant principal, staff social worker, special education coordinator, college-placement
director, parent coordinator, and student-life director crammed themselves around a table in a
tiny room with Mr. Sternberg. Over the sounds of barking dogs and car alarms outside, they
hashed out a range of topics: supporting one junior behind on his credits, improving procedures
for midyear transfer students, and developing a new protocol for holding academic-problem
conferences with students and families. On each topic, Mr. Sternberg asked questions and guided
conversation, but gave the issue back to the staff to resolve.
“It can be a frustrating way of doing things, for me and for others,” he said later. “There are
easier ways to make decisions. But then they’re not always good ones.”
Even regular training in the Institute for Student Achievement’s model can’t cover all situations.
And Bronx Lab staff members freely admit they are learning as they go. They’re still defining
the roles and responsibilities of advisers, for instance.
Preliminary Findings
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These comparisons are highlights from the first year of a six-year study of five New York City
schools using the Institute for Student Achievement’s model. Conducted for the institute by the
Washington-based Academy for Educational Development, the study examined indicators for
students in 9th and 10th grades.
Attendance*
• ISA schools: 89.7 percent
• Other N.Y.C. schools: 84.9 percent
Stability*
(percent of students who remain in school annually)
• ISA schools: 96.2 percent
• Other N.Y.C. schools: 92.9 percent
Suspension rates*
• ISA schools: 48.3 per 1,000 students
• Other N.Y.C. schools: 68.8 per 1,000 students
Promotion rate**
(portion of 9th graders in 2003-04 who were promoted to 10th grade)
• ISA schools = 98 percent
• Other N.Y.C. schools = 70 percent
Average 9th grade credit accumulation**
• ISA schools = 13
• Other N.Y.C. schools = 9.7
* These findings use 2003-04 school-level report card data from the New York City Department
of Education to compare six ISA high schools with high schools operating in the city that year,
controlling for differences in 8th grade achievement and family-income level. The ISA schools
had lower rates of 8th grade reading and mathematics proficiency and higher rates of poverty
than the comparison schools.
** These findings use individual student-achievement data from the city education department to
compare 9th graders in three ISA schools with demographically similar students in non-ISA high
schools of 750 students or more. Promotion figures include only students who remained in the
same school for 2003-04 and 2004-05.
SOURCE: Academy for Educational Development
Each adviser is a student’s initial point of contact for a problem. The adviser can call on other
staff members for more expertise. Personal-life help can come from social worker Ray Godwin.
College issues can be addressed during a chat with Amy Christie, the college-placement director.
Perhaps a meeting should be brokered with the social studies teacher, since the student’s grades
are falling there. But if an adviser initiates all these meetings, what is a teacher’s role?
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“One of the dangers of distributed counseling can be, ‘Oh, it’s someone else’s responsibility,’ ”
said Ms. Eustis, the assistant principal. “We wanted to make sure that teachers didn’t abdicate
their responsibility because they figured the adviser would handle it. So we’re figuring out how
to deal with that.”
Likewise, the advisory curriculum has needed periodic tweaking. Staff members realized, for
example, that they couldn’t do the same safe-sex presentation for 9th graders as for 11th graders,
nor could college conversations take the same route with younger and older students. So new
content is being developed as part of a four-year toolkit for advisers.
The advisory system has changed school for Dane Laing, and not just because of the support he
gets in advisory-group meetings. It’s because so many adults know and guide him here that he
draws such a sharp contrast between his new school and his old one.
11th graders Joicel Granados, left, Christopher Cruz, and Francisco Gonzalez create a chemistry
board game.
—Photo by Emile Wamsteker
He thinks he had a counselor at Evander Childs, he said, but he’s not sure. He never met any of
the counselors there. At Bronx Lab, he has his “second mom,” Ms. Bernard, and so many
teachers checking on his grades, college plans, and overall well-being that he can’t escape them,
he said with a smile. At Evander, no adult at school ever mentioned college to him. Here, he’s
been on so many campus trips that he already knows, midway through his junior year, that he
wants to go to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and become a mechanical engineer.
For his schoolmate Stephanie Silva, advisory is a safe place where she can handle her problems,
learn important skills, and fall back on close bonds when things get tough. But most of all, she
said, her relationship with her adviser, Cara Sandberg, makes her want to go out into the big
world and do well.
“I want her to be proud of me,” Ms. Silva said. “I want her to say, ‘Yeah, that was my advisee.’ ”
Coverage of new schooling arrangements and classroom improvement efforts is supported by a
grant from the Annenberg Foundation.
Vol. 26, Issue 26, Pages 22-25