Advocacy

Advocacy and Character Strengths: Lesson Plans & Instructional Strategies

This lesson asks students to build upon the skills built up over several classes. As such, it offers students a chance to engage in the higher-order thinking necessary to effectively advocate, or to write an argument: application of information, synthesis of an argument, and careful use of rhetorical appeals (in particular, appeals to logos through the scientific path). These lessons prepare students to engage in advocacy around their own topics of interest or concern as they enter high school and, eventually, college and the workforce, without limiting their understanding of advocacy to certain 'hot-button' issues.

These artifacts demonstrates a specific instructional strategy; I scaffold the introduction of knowledge and skills for students over several lessons, then introduce a genuine problem (school start times and sleep schedules), before giving them a chance to apply those skills and synthesize an argumentative text in the included lesson plan.

These artifacts demonstrate several criteria. The first is that I have explicitly taught students about advocacy, as both a concept and a skill; the second is that I have embedded this instruction in an asset-based framework that empowers students. The third fulfilled criteria is that I have used explicit instructional strategies around synthesizing information and constructing argumentative texts to teach students about engaging in advocacy. The final criteria these artifacts demonstrate is that I have explicitly taught students about real-world problems, on both a macro scale (the To Kill a Mockingbird unit deals substantively with the character strength required to stand up and oppose a racist society) and a micro scale (it is fundamentally unfair to expect students to be productive at 7:50 AM; see below for student thoughts on this topic).

Student Follow-Through

Student Advocacy: Arguing a Real-World Issue

As noted above, students wrote argumentative texts arguing for or against changing start times at our school. A few examples are included below. These examples demonstrate that my students write about real issues in the world and in their lives, and that they are able to marshal teacher-provided resources to support their arguments. These examples also demonstrate that I initiate serious discussions and activities about real world issues, and that students engage in these discussion and activities.

Student Advocacy: Self-Advocacy Through Reflection & Practice

Students engaged in a similar process for writing about how to advocate for themselves around stress-reduction. Stress reduction is a consistent theme that students report wanting more of, and, as you can see in the Culturally-Responsive Teaching section of this website, one of the commitments I made with my classes last year was to build routines and practices which reduced stress. This activity represents one instance of follow-through on that commitment, on both my part and the part of the students.

We engaged in this process the week before the STAAR exams, which traditionally see students struggle with stress, anxiety, and fear of testing. Students reported to me that they would appreciate practice with concrete skills to reduce their stress levels before exams, and so I built a lesson around that concern. We practiced several stress-reduction techniques, including visualization, stretching, breath control, and rhythmic breathing practice.

One of the products of this lesson was short reflection writings, a few of which I've included below. These writings identify useful and not-so-useful stress reduction techniques; to model the impact of effective advocacy, I gave students a few minutes at the start of each subsequent class to engage in these techniques. Students verbally reported that this helped them engage in the test-preparation classes more fully.

This process shows that students are able to engage with provided materials to advocate for themselves around a real-world issue (testing anxiety). These artifacts also show evidence of follow-through, from students raising a concern to taking specific action (practicing stress-reduction techniques) to alleviate that concern.

Advocacy Through History: Student Projects

Students from each grade would attend the fair, and students would have the chance to present to each other, in groups of varying sizes. 8th grade took the 1970s, which offered the chance to let students research a variety of culturally-relevant and advocacy-based movements.

Below, I have included a set of student presentations that demonstrate an awareness of the long history of protest movements in the United States. While student names have been obscured for privacy reasons, students self-selected their research topics, and conducted their research with minimal input from me or their other teachers. For example, the students who worked on the Chicanismo presentation got an index card from me with the phrases "Brown Berets" and "Mexican American Youth Organization" on it; they kept digging and found a whole set of interrelated movements on which to base their presentation.

To assist and coach them, I guided students towards reliable sources, and modeled how to check for reliability by having them collect citation information in Zotero (a free resource, which is useful in a high-poverty area) and assessing when source information was too sparse to be reliable. I also coached students to ensure that information across sources was broadly consistent, as this reinforces source reliability. This demonstrates that my students are capable of taking the lead on investigations into historical advocacy, and grounding their understanding of advocacy in historically-informed models. These projects also demonstrate that students have developed knowledge of both current injustices and their historical roots, and have taken action to educate themselves and their peers on these topics.

Allowing students to largely self-direct their research is an instructional strategy recommended in Project-Based Learning contexts, which this overall project fits into. The Buck Institute for Education recommends that "[m]ore advanced students may... select the topic and nature of the project itself; they can write their own driving question and decide how they want to investigate it, demonstrate what they have learned, and make their work public" (BIE, 2019). As a result, students demonstrated a real enthusiasm and commitment to this research process, which resulted in an unusually thorough presentation of information.

However, a cautionary note: students struggled with how to correctly cite their information, and so these presentations contain some quotations and paraphrases from unclear sources. One of the objectives for the year was to teach students how to quote, cite, and integrate information from other texts into their own writing; this history fair, taking place midway through the year, represents students caught in a state of partial mastery. To see growth in my students' citation practices, consult the 'Dramatic Academic Growth: Qualitative Evidence' section for an in-depth look.

Advocacy Section Conclusion & Reflection

The above evidence demonstrates fulfillment of the following criteria. The lesson plans demonstrate that I have explicitly taught students about advocacy, using specific instructional strategies to take a strengths-based and literature- and standards-connected approach to the topic.

The student essays demonstrate that students have written about real-world problems, using teacher-provided resources, and have engaged in follow-through to advocate for themselves, especially around stress-reduction. The practice of trying, giving feedback, and then implementing that feedback on stress-reduction techniques also gave students a chance to practice useful self-advocacy skills, which will serve them well in high school.

The student projects from the history fair demonstrate that students engaged in more-or-less self-directed research around the history of social injustices and public advocacy, which grounds their own education in a stronger sense of community. Their presentations of this research also served as public education for their peers, which itself constitutes advocacy.

Overall, the artifacts in this section shows a clear commitment to giving students the necessary skills to understand how and why to engage in advocacy for themselves and for others. This is vital preparatory work for students who, as they head into high school, are beginning to consider what their adult lives will eventually look like. By ensuring that these students have the basic skills necessary to engage in effective advocacy, students are more likely to feel that they can engage in advocacy, which is not always a common feeling in a small, rural town. This is likely to lead to more long-term follow-through from students, even when their teachers are no longer there to provide scaffolds and supports. Thus, while the artifacts included here show the short-term outcome of my teaching about advocacy, the long-term outcomes will only be visible as these students become full-fledged members of the community, and take on the work of building, maintaining, and improving their community.

References

Buck Institute for Education. (2019). Gold Standard PBL: Essential Project Design Elements. https://my.pblworks.org/resource/document/gold_standard_pbl_essential_project_design_elements

Carse, J. P. (1986). Finite and infinite games. Free Press. https://wtf.tw/ref/carse.pdf

Graves, K. (2016). Using Strengths to Increase Educator and Student Engagement | VIA Institute. https://www.viacharacter.org/topics/articles/using-strengths-to-increase-educator-and-student-engagement

Modeling: Essential for Learning. (n.d.). Edutopia. Retrieved October 6, 2022, from https://www.edutopia.org/blog/modeling-essential-for-learning-karen-lea