AVID Student Voices
AVID student leaders are recruited from across the nation and provided with the opportunity to represent themselves, their schools, and AVID students all over the country. They are interviewed about how they utilize AVID strategies to increase their academic preparedness, how they organize their learning, how AVID tutorials have impacted their success, and how relationships are built, both in and out of the AVID Elective classroom. We are excited to share their stories with you below.
AVID Strategies
AVID strategies are practices and methodologies, applicable in any content area, that support students in developing the college readiness skills of writing, inquiry, collaboration, organization, and reading, which allow students access to rigorous curriculum.
Relational Capacity
AVID defines Relational Capacity as the connection among individuals that develops over time when interactions are built on respect, trust, and authenticity. When educators connect with students and colleagues, and students connect with peers, learning and confidence are activated among all on a campus. All three connections are instrumental in helping students grow to see their capabilities and find their own way.
Organization
Based on what we know through brain research, learning has to be organized in such a way that allows students to build on existing schema to create new neural pathways. Pathways are only built if the brain has an opportunity to “wrestle” with new information—to figure out how the new fits with the old. This “wrestling” is best accomplished when we ask students to work actively with new information. They have to think, talk, write, read, and ask questions.
AVID Tutorials
AVID tutorials take place in a collaborative environment. Students use the inquiry process and Socratic dialogue to address Points of Confusion from their content classes in order to come to a more complete understanding of what they are learning. Tutorials are structured routines that take students through a variety of metacognitive tasks, starting with identifying a specific Point of Confusion, all the way through applying its resolution in an academic class.