RESEARCH BASED EVIDENCE OF THE NEED FOR AVID

RESEARCH BASED EVIDENCE OF THE NEED FOR AVID AVID is a practical program; its philosophies and curriculum developed wholly in response to the needs and experiences of the students and teachers participating in it The recent excellence in education and school restructuring movement has put the AVID Program in the educational spotlight, because AVID already has an established track record of providing effective solutions to the problems now being examined in the commission reports and research on excellence in education Indeed, the ideal school setting described in the Carnegie Forum’s “Schools for the 21st Century: A Scenario” is a description of AVID: a classroom organized by a “lead teacher” who has support personnel to help in the education of the students, a school that raises the academic expectations and preparation of students, a school where teachers become enthusiastic because they collaborate in an environment in which educational practices work The four major points of agreement between AVID and the reports and research are as follows: (1) it is the students of mid-range abilities whose needs are least served by the present system; (2) students and teachers are more successful when they are not working in isolation; (3) the most effective organization for the classroom is not the teacher-centered classroom but the classroom managed by a lead teacher with support personnel who individualize instruction; and (4) revitalization of the educational system will be achieved only by the redefinition of the relationship between the schools and the communities they serve AVID is a model of all four of these concepts The present educational system has special programs for gifted students and for students in need of remedial help, but special attention has not been paid to the students who make up the largest sector of the school population—students of average ability The Path Study from Stanford University, examines the course of study students follow through high school: The Stanford researchers found that the high school population was, in effect, divided into four distinct "tracks": the honors track with about 10 of all students, the remedial track with 10-15, the college prep track with up to 35, and the biggest group of all, the general track, with around 45 Unfortunately, it was precisely this last and largest group who were following the weakest and most incoherent program Furthermore, the [study] found that in contrast with the college prep students, the general track students had fewer requirements t fulfill and more electives to choose from, and typically, received no advice from counselors In my opinion, these students .are being defrauded of the education they need to make it in our society One of the most common misconceptions about the excellence in education movement is that it is aimed solely at the high-achieving students, at the expense of the rest Nothing could be further from the truth As the Stanford study shows, it is the great cross section of average kids currently languishing in the general track who stand to gain the most from curriculum reform (Honig Last Chance for Our Children Reading, MA: Addison-Wessley Publishing Company, Inc., 1985, pp 43-44.) It is precisely this group of students that AVID seeks to serve AVID students are not gifted students; most often they are students with ordinary abilities who develop the motivation and confidence to succeed in extraordinary ways Before entering AVID, many of these students never consider the possibility of going to college, either because the idea has never occurred to them or because they think a college education is an unattainable goal Many of them tell of how they were just automatically scheduled into vocational classes, never being counseled that they had other options Ultimately, it is these students who will become the backbone of society, and the AVID Program aims to graduate students who have a full understanding of their own potentials and the ability to contribute their fullest to society One of the keys to motivating these students is to take them out of isolation characteristic of current educational experience by helping them become part of a new peer group who shares their goals, and by helping the group work together to realize achievement This strategy is successful for at least two reasons: first, students know that they are no longer alone in their struggle for success, and second, students often perform better for their peers than for their teachers William Glasser addresses the effectiveness of group rather than individual study in his book Control Theory in the Classroom Glasser advocates the adoption of a new classroom structure, built on the concept of "learning teams." These learning teams allow students to work together to achieve a goal, rather than to work in isolation According to Glasser, learning groups satisfy for students the four basic psychological needs: belonging, power, freedom, and fun Glasser points out that learning teams help students realize the connection between power and learning and that once students make this connection, they become independent learners It is the ability to learn and to think independently that allows students to go on to make the most of their education, careers, and lives AVID promotes collaboration and independent learning among its students by providing a forum in which students are at once nurtured and challenged Whether they are working in study groups or sharing their writing in reader-writer workshops or read-arounds, students know that they can trust other students both to support their learning and to provide another source of feedback and new ideas The stimulation and inherent creativity fostered by collaboration among students produces an enthusiasm and thirst for knowledge among students that many teachers never see in a conventional classroom In order to implement the learning team approach in a classroom, the teacher must depart from the idea of the teacher-centered classroom that has so long been the norm Although a lecture is often the fastest way to disseminate information, it is not the most effective way of making knowledge the student's own Glasser emphasizes that for learning groups to work, the teacher must stop feeling responsible for doing the learning (which, as absurd as it sounds, is actually the burden many teachers suffer under, feeling it is their responsibility for the students to learn) and start managing the learning instead This means placing the responsibility for learning squarely where it belongs—with the student —and acting as a facilitator in the learning process In Glasser's model, the manager-teacher moves from group to group, listening, advising, or intervening as necessary AVID, the coordinator is a manager, overseeing the tutors who lead study groups The coordinator, the tutors, and the students work together as a team, with the implicit understanding that even though the teacher is the teacher, and the tutors are the tutors, they are all human beings in the process of learning No one has a monopoly on knowledge in AVID, and no individual is responsible for the success of the whole Once this basic understanding has been established, the quality of the work and the enthusiasm of the workers soar Visitors to the AVID Program almost always remark on the responsibility and initiative students show in their learning, and this is a result of the collaborative spirit, not only among students, but also among the coordinator and tutors Being manager of the classroom, instead of its center, frees the teacher to look at the classroom's overall structure and to become more creative in teaching approaches It is this sort of reorganization that Jim Cummins talks about in his article "Empowering Minority Students: A Framework for Intervention," which appears in the Harvard Educational Review (February 1986) Cummins observes that: A major reason previous attempts at educational reform have been unsuccessful is that the relationship between school and communities has remained essentially unchanged The required changes involve persona redefinitions of the way classroom teachers interact with the children and communities they serve Implementation of change is dependent upon the extent educators, both collectively and individually, redefine their roles with respect to minority students and communities (p 19) AVID supports this broad redefinition of roles and responsibilities, and shifts onto the community as a whole the responsibility for integrating students into both the academic and the social worlds AVID expects parents, businesses, and area universities to share in the task of preparing and motivating underserved students willing to prepare for college Cummins identifies three characteristics of programs that determine whether underserved students will be "disabled" or "empowered": (1) "disadvantaged community participation as an integral component of children's education"; (2) a "pedagogy that promotes intrinsic motivation on the part of the students to use language actively in order to generate their own knowledge"; and (3) "professionals involved in assessment becoming advocates for disadvantaged students." The AVTD Program demonstrates all of these characteristics, by making parents partners in education, by providing tutor role models, by using writing as a tool of learning, inquiry method and collaboration, and by showing students daily that through working together, we can achieve things we never before let ourselves dream In 1986, Mary Catherine Swanson, AVID Founder and Director, met Dr Philip Uri Treisman, then a professor of mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley They had both been engaged in developing strategies to promote effective learning among all groups of students - Swanson as a practitioner, Treisman as a researcher And, although Swanson's work was at the secondary level and Treisman's was at the post-secondary level, their findings were parallel Treisman became aware of the high rate at which African-American students were failing calculus and the high rate at which Chinese students were succeeding in calculus He sought to examine these students' study habits, and methods of preparing for examinations - in short, anything that might affect their course performance He was particularly interested in learning about the use they made of their textbooks and classroom notes and about their approach to homework and review problems they could not solve Treisman found that "in looking for common characteristics of black students that might help to explain the dismal failure rate, he was struck by the sharp separation that most black students maintained between their school lives and social lives Unlike the Chinese, black students rarely studied with classmates The Chinese students routinely critiqued each other's work, assisted each other with homework problems, and shared all manner of information related to their common interests Their collaboration provided them with valuable information that guided their day-to-day study A Chinese student confronted with a homework problem that he could not solve while working alone might reasonably guess, upon learning that his study mates had been similarly stymied, that the problem was indeed, unusually difficult, and his failure not one of simple oversight He could then ask a teaching assistant about the problem without fear of appearing incompetent or ill-prepared." The Chinese students in calculus courses at Berkeley “ did not let the fierce competition for grades among undergraduates, pride, or a fear of appearing ignorant interfere with sharing information There was friendly competition among the students — individuals would strive to come up with the best solution to a problem or to come up with a solution first - but, in the end, they shared what information they had so they all could excel Because the students saw themselves as being roughly equal in mathematical ability, they tended to be openly skeptical of each other’s work Passing judgment was a commonplace activity in their meetings Interaction like these were extremely rare among the blacks Finally, black students rarely sought help from their teaching assistants But, even when they did, their inability to define their needs clearly coupled with the low expectations that many TA’s held for the academic achievement of black students usually precluded a fruitful exchange The black students had come to Berkeley highly motivated and under great pressure to succeed Nevertheless, finding themselves without a supportive academically-focused peer group, the willingness to seek out help when they needed it, very few could meet the rigorous demands of their freshman year.” As a solution, Treisman developed a pilot Math Workshop wherein students “ spent approximately six hours per week working together on problem sets [Treisman] constructed.” He took care that “ the problem sets were always difficult to protect the Workshop’s non-remedial veneer The students began to seek out their weaknesses and to ask for help Eventually the students were solving most of the problems on their own.” Treisman intervened in their personal lives as well to " avert in the making, problems that if allowed to develop would almost surely have interfered with their academic performance The average grade of the Workshop students in both first- and second-term calculus was B; their average grade in third-term calculus was A-.” A Study of the Mathematics Performance of Black Students at the University of California, Berkeley, Philip Uri Treisman Treisman’s pilot mathematics workshop is today a frequently replicated program for post-secondary students In 1987 Treisman won the Charles A Dana Award for Pioneering Achievement in Postsecondary Education, and in 1992 he won the MacArthur Genius Grant In 1991, Mary Catherine Swanson was the first and as yet the only public school teacher to win the Charles A Dana Award for Pioneering Achievement in Secondary Education Swanson’s work in the early 80’s paralleled that of Treisman She found that underachieving, underserved students rarely worked on academic problems together, that, indeed, they were fearful of appearing “dumb.” And so, as an English teacher, she required AVID students to carry binders to honors classes in which they were enrolled without the prerequisites The AVID students were to take notes in these classes and share the notes with college tutors who would ideally understand the students’ shortcomings and be able to help them Although the notetaking system had the positive effect of altering teachers’ attitudes towards these students as they wrote voluminously, it was not a flawless system The largely untrained tutors tried to answer all the AVID students’ questions during a single class period Soon it became apparent that the students were dependent upon a tutor Swanson revised the notetaking, using a system developed at Cornell University in which the students write detailed notes on class lectures and textbook reading in a wide right-hand margin and develop conceptual questions from the notes in a narrower left-hand margin She trained tutors to use the students’ questions as the basis of the subject specific study groups In the first year, the AVID students pulled even with their former grades, but their course work was at an honors rather than a remedial level In the second year, the students’ grades climbed half a grade point, and in the third year, a full grade point, where it leveled off AVID tutors had become the students’ mentors, intervening in all problems that affected their academic work The AVID students consistently commented that “they didn’t know they were so smart.” It became okay to be a good student because their peers were good students also One final lesson was learned in the AVID experiment Many of the students were not proficient in standard English They were accustomed to being penalized for this inadequacy to the point that many were intimidated about both speaking and writing in class Conversely, within AVID, students were rewarded for taking good notes and participating verbally in study groups without reprisal for incorrect English usage Swanson understood that one’s thinking language is that learned in the home, and that when one is trying to clarify thought in either speaking or writing, it is deleterious to interrupt for correctness Standard written and spoken English needs to be emphasized as a process for formally produced, finely edited pieces Further in the collaborative groups, students worked from one another’s Strengths for understanding concepts Students were mixed by virtue of the course in which they needed help, so that the groups were ethnically diverse All groups learned to respect one another Indeed, an axiom of AVID became, “Education depends on honoring the dignity of the learner.” Treisman’s and Swanson’s work informed the educational world about the learning process First, the learner needs to grapple with new information on his own - in the school setting, this is usually done as homework Whenever and wherever it is done, the learner must first make sense of information within his own frame of reference Secondly, the learner must be able to clarify what he does not understand Within AVID, the Cornell questions accomplish this task Thirdly, the learner must share his understandings with other learners to glean their explanations of the concepts He must be able to ask focused questions of the “expert,” i.e the tutor or teacher, who must be adept at leading the learner to understanding rather than to an answer which still doesn’t make sense to the learner Finally, he must be able to internalize the new information so that he is able to explain it to someone else Fascinated with the success of AVID students Dr Hugh Mehan, sociologist and director of the teacher education program at the University of California, San Diego, began to study why AVTD works Mehan notes that in AVID we have an example of what Cummins (1986) called a “threatening example to conventional wisdom.” According to Mehan, “AVID pulls the rug out from under the assumption lurking in American education that suggests ethnic and linguistic minority kids can’t well in college bound classes.” Mehan’s data show that “ such students are not necessarily trapped by their social circumstances Students from the lowest income and educational levels are attaining a prestigious and economically important goal, enrollment in college This means social environments can be rearranged, at least under these circumstances, in order to facilitate educational opportunities.” Mehan points out that AVID students are socialized into an ideology that supports working hard, getting good grades, and entering the academic world Then they are provided with a system of social support that reinforces that ideology He says that ” if schools, not just well-to-do families, can deploy social capital to form productive social networks, then it means that schools can become transformative institutions, not just reproductive institutions.” Mehan concludes by saying that "When we examine day-to-day educational practices, we learn that students are constituted in different ways/ and their ascribed characteristics/ such as gender/ race/ ethnicity/ and social class influence the resulting representations Students’ intelligence, their access to educational curriculum, their scholastic achievement, and options later in life are assembled from such practice Tracking, testing and ability grouping and other sorting practices can limit the educational opportunities of students by making accessible to students certain career paths but not others The sorting practices of a school constitute the very identities of the students they touch It is not that dumb kids are placed in slow groups or low tracks; it is that kids are made dumb by being placed into slow groups or low tracks And as we have seen in AVID, students can be made smart by being placed in challenging courses when they have a system of social scaffolding supporting them.” Constructing School Success: The Consequences of Untracking Low Achieving Students, Mehan, et al Cambridge University Press, 1996 AVID has both the power and the vision to bring about the changes these and many other researchers foresee are needed if the course of education is to be righted The strength of AVID is that it is the product of experience and common sense It is a practical as well as a research based solution to problems plaguing the school system today, and it is an invigorating solution as well, one with substantial payoffs for everyone concerned: students, teachers, parents, administrators, and society  ... Press, 1996 AVID has both the power and the vision to bring about the changes these and many other researchers foresee are needed if the course of education is to be righted The strength of AVID is... established, the quality of the work and the enthusiasm of the workers soar Visitors to the AVID Program almost always remark on the responsibility and initiative students show in their learning,... the tutors are the tutors, they are all human beings in the process of learning No one has a monopoly on knowledge in AVID, and no individual is responsible for the success of the whole Once