Creating Community with Multi-Age Looping Advisory

It was our June Celebration, Community School’s culminating end-of-year event and graduation for our eighth graders. One of these students had entered my advisory group four years prior as a quiet and reserved “tween” new to the middle school. At first, I knew little about her interests and family and worked to break down her reticence as we shared one advisory block at a time.

Over the four years that we worked together, I got to know and love not just this student, but her family as well. I learned that my student was an adept communicator with so much to share. I found out that her parents had immigrated to our community from China and owned a restaurant in town, and that one parent spoke English but the other did not—which led to their sometimes feeling isolated from their child’s educational experience. This understanding enabled me to adapt our school’s communication methods to better meet her parents’ needs. Together, we built a wonderful middle school experience for this student, culminating in her delivering the graduation speech to the entire school community—including 160 other students and their families.

At Community School, we are fortunate to have a middle school program that runs fifth through eighth grade. Our fifth- and sixth-grade students are “looped” together for two years in classes with the same teachers. The seventh and eighth graders…