Greetings Kent Community,

Every Tuesday afternoon we take a short break from the academic rigor in our classrooms to welcome students into an environment with a completely different focus, Advisory class. Advisory is a 30-minute session designed to create a safe and supportive home base for our students. It is a time in everybody’s weekly schedule to connect with a teacher and classmates, and to explore topics other than the daily progression of their classroom lessons and learning.

Activities in Advisory emphasize social and emotional learning (SEL), rather than academic learning. The Collaborative for Social and Emotional Learning defines SEL as the process through which children and adults understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions. During Advisory sessions students can expect to engage in team building with classmates, discuss social challenges at school, play constructive games, role play through dilemmas and challenges, have class meetings, and complete academic check-ins with their teacher. While social and emotional learning is embedded within academic and enrichment classes in many ways, spending this time on Tuesdays creates an opportunity to explicitly teach critical life skills that will serve our middle schoolers well in their experience at Kent and in their lives beyond middle school. During Advisory, students have the chance to create bonds with classmates around non-academic topics, and to build relationships with adults on our campus.

The 30-minute Advisory class every Tuesday afternoon is time well spent, and we see the evidence of its positive impact through the ways in which students support each other to navigate the social and academic environments at our school.