How Goal-Setting and Reflection Improve AVID
By James Bailey, Former Superintendent and School Transformation Leader
The AVID elective class is the core experience for AVID students no matter the grade level or school. In this class, students develop deep relationships and learn advanced strategies for reading and writing; but most importantly, they learn the metacognitive skills of goal setting, reflecting and applying new strategies to their learning.
As a former superintendent and district director of our AVID program, we grew our AVID program from 2 elective sections at our high school to 20 elective sections across all of our secondary schools. It became the model for the rest of our district on how to develop the learning strategies that underlie academic success.
Watching our AVID teachers show students how to set goals weekly, manage their time and reflect on their successes was always a joy. You could see these so called non-cognitive skills grow in our students on a week to week basis.
When I left that district to become the Turnaround Leader at Carpe Diem Innovative Schools in San Antonio, I brought with me many ideas on how we could use an AVID like structure for all of our students. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the same resources I had before for training or school licenses.
That’s when I ran across Sown To Grow, and I immediately saw how this tool could be used to improve student reflection and save teachers a ton of time and effort.
What is Sown To Grow?
Sown To Grow is a technology platform that allows students to develop many of the metacognitive skills that are being promoted today such as goal setting, reflection, growth mindset and student agency: all critical attributes of the AVID student.
In a formal efficacy study done by Sown To Grow in partnership with an independent researcher at UCLA, findings suggest that use of the platform had a significant impact on student reflection and overall GPA growth.
Using Sown To Grow as Part of the AVID Classroom
After using Sown To Grow for a year at Carpe Diem, I can now see many potential uses as part of the AVID elective. For example similar to the weekly binder and grade check, we used a weekly cycle in which all students would do the following:
- Students would check their unit trackers and current grades and write about what they had accomplished from the past week. At certain parts of the semester, students would also enter all of their grades.
- Students would then write a reflection on what strategies worked for them the previous week and what strategies they were going to take on the next week to improve. We used a specific self-direction rubric to guide students on their reflections and enabled a specific strategy bank on the platform.
- After a short 1:1 check in meeting with their advisor, students would then set specific goals for the next week on how what they wanted to accomplish the next week along with any new learning strategies they wanted to try. We also did a binder check during this time to help students stay organized similar to AVID.
Through our use of Sown To Grow, students’ sense of self-direction improved on pre and post surveys we administered as did their feelings that adults in the building cared for them. And by the way, our high school students increased the number of end of course assessments passed from the previous year by 20% and gained 53% more credits. I believe much of this growth was due to helping our students better track their learning and learn to reflect on their effort and learning strategies. Isn’t that a major goal of any AVID program?
How the Advisory Platform Works on Sown to Grow
This summer, the Sown to Grow team added a new design to the platform just for advisory systems which could easily be used for the AVID weekly check in. When students log in at sowntogrow.com/ they are immediately shown a My To-Do List screen asking them to check in and to enter their latest grade. By clicking Add Score students are taken to a screen where they can add their latest percentage score for a particular class
Students then see a reflection prompt asking them how they feel about their accomplishment and what strategies worked best this week. If students get stuck on the strategies, the Sample Strategies link will give them a set of strategies to look over and choose from Sample strategies from the AVID catalog could easily be added for students to use.
At the end of entering their reflections the student can go to the Summary where they will be able to see their scores over time showing the percentage of classes in which they are meeting expectations and view their grade history
A Powerful Partnership
Much like AVID, at Carpe Diem we believed that a weekly routine of entering and tracking grades and reflecting on strategies used could make a difference on student’s grades, and our data showed it did.
Along with individual meetings with a caring adult and intervention systems, we believe this simple time effective routine could play a significant difference in AVID elective time and overall student success.
