Introducing this blog

Photo used under a Creative Commons license

As it says over there in the sidebar, this blog is about being a year adviser.  Links, information, ideas, useful stuff.  All the wild, wonderful, tiring, exhilarating elements of this experience.  It's a carousel ride (unsubtle link to picture above...blog entries with pictures are more fun to read, I find).

In the school system in which I work, each year group in high school, from Year 7 (12-13 year olds) to Year 12 (17-18 year olds) has a year adviser; sometimes two, if people choose to work as a team.  The year adviser/s stay with that year group as they go through high school, from the adaptation and adjustments of Year 7, the hormones and hassles of the middle years of high school to the challenges of Year 12 and the final year credential, the Higher School Certificate, with its external examinations.

The role of a year adviser is a welfare role, having oversight of the group, helping kids as they need it, helping to solve problems and to do what you can to assist them to succeed in their high school careers.

This is the definition of the job from the schools.nsw.edu.au website (which is aimed at parents):

Student Advisers
Student advisers are like the surrogate parent for a particular year (for example Year 8) accepting responsibility for your child's learning and welfare while at school. The student adviser, who works closely with the school's welfare team and your child's classroom teachers, is often the first person a parent should approach to discuss any problems or issues about your child.

I've done this job before, taking a year group from Year 7 in 2002 to the HSC in Year 12 in 2007.  I did the job as part of a team of two, first with a colleague I shall call B1; and then, when he transferred overseas, with B2. 

This time round, starting in  at the beginning of the next school year in January 2012 (although we start our work months before the Year 7 kids prance through the gate), a decade after beginning with that first group, I am working again with B2, and our plan (unless disaster intervenes) is to work together and with this year group until they finish their HSC in 2017.

Already I can see new challenges which weren't around so much ten years ago.  The existence and penetration of Facebook, for example, has altered the landscape in relation to issues like digital footprints, cyber safety and cyber bullying.  Other things are as constant and inconstant as human nature.  I know already that 5% of the kids (or less) will generate maybe 70% of the work, through behaviour/social issues they may have and for which we will need to do our best to work out solutions/strategies, together with other members of the school's welfare team and staff.  That is always the way.  I know that at my school, we will be writing a summative comment for each child's report, twice a year (at out school the year groups are around 200 kids in the junior years - a lot of reports to read, a lot of comments to devise).

The transition program at school has already begun, and we've had each feeder school group visit our high school for a day; I can't yet tell you names, but my general impression is of a great group of kids, lots of different personalities and enthusiasm. I look forward to getting to know them better.  One avenue we plan to explore, which wasn't around ten years ago, is some kind of internal school blog for the kids - information, photographs, announcements, events, all sorts of content and 'glue'.  B2 and I both agree on the importance of glueing the kids together, strengthening the ties and friendships and collaboration between them: it makes a huge difference to their happiness and success in high school.  One of our strategies is a Year 7 camp in their first term at high school, and we've begun planning that.

So, lots of plans, lots of ideas, lots of unknowns.  An adventure.  I plan to blog here on a regular basis - not daily, as I do on my teacher librarian blog http://skerricks.blogspot.com/, but regularly and as I find things which might be useful to us and to you.

If you've got links and ideas to share, please leave a comment (comments are all moderated, ie. not published until I've reviewed them so I can eliminate any spammy ones).  It would be great if this blog became a community of voices, not just mine.

Cheers

Ruth