rigor with support: LESSONS FROM AVID

Leadership, Nov, 2000 by Mary Catherine Swanson, Michelle Marcus, Julie Elliott

When students who are overlooked as having college potential are supported with the academic and social skills they need, their lives can change dramatically.

Last June our AVID students described their personal journeys to college. Each had overcome barriers and setbacks many would find daunting: discouragingly low expectations held for them as members of underrepresented minorities, poverty, lack of peer support, difficult family situations. Each had beaten the odds.

As we listened to Precious Jackson, Binh Nguyen and Rudy Molina, we thought about the concept of "perceived confidence" and the impact that AVID had in these students' lives.

Educator Alfie Kohn discusses the impact of failure on a student's mindset and the effect of failure on a student's ability to rebound. "For students to do serious thinking, they have to feel confident in their ability to make sense of problematic situations." The source of that "perceived confidence comes from success experiences" (Kohn, 1999).

As we listened intently to these students' stories, we contemplated Kohn's point: "Research suggests that kids who fail at something are less likely to succeed the next time -- even if they're perfectly capable of completing the second task."

As the AVID students spoke with confidence about their education and career plans, we noted the "perceived confidence" they each exhibited because they had the benefit of experiencing support from AVID teachers, tutors and mentors during their high school years.

AVID -- Advancement Via Individual Determination -- was founded on a philosophy of access to rigor with support and hard work. AVID pedagogy emphasizes methodologies that empower students to take responsibility for their own learning. AVID coaches students to develop the academic and interpersonal skills that allow them to take rigorous college prep courses. By developing their "perceived confidence" through their involvement in AVID, students' lives are changed dramatically by new opportunities available to them.

Recognizing in the 1980s that "rigor without support is a prescription for failure and that support without rigor is a tragic waste of potential" (Swanson, 1986), AVID developed a set of "essentials" founded on a philosophy researchers describe as "effort creates ability" (Resnick, 1987).

AVID's pedagogy is based on intensive writing, inquiry and collaboration, which some researchers now attribute as "the `new' pedagogy: interesting, hands-on projects; students working cooperatively to solve problems; intense debates where students analyze historical episodes to clarify their reasoning; creative writing that uses literature to illuminate personal experience" (Newmann, 1992).

AVID has been implementing these writing, inquiry and collaboration methodologies as part of its "Essentials" since 1980. AVID data illustrate the success of its students, originally 30 in one classroom at one high school in San Diego and now more than 40,000 middle and high school students in more than 600 schools in California. Over 20 years an amazing record of students' success has been documented. Between 1990 and 1997, 92.8 percent of AVID graduates enrolled in universities, a rate 75 percent higher than the overall student population nationwide. Two years later 89 percent of them were still enrolled (Mehan, 1996).

AVID has grown because it engages students who are often overlooked as having college potential, develops the academic and social skills that empower them to access the most rigorous curriculum at their schools, and supports them in that acquisition. AVID involves parents and brings them into the school community through the AVID "family."

Students and families work with the AVID site team to keep students enrolled in college prep, Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate level classes, and to practice the AVID strategies that develop and hone students' writing and math performances.

AVID students are coached to acquire new skills. When they pick up a book, they're thinking about what they're reading, not about how well they're reading it. They learn to process information more deeply, review things they didn't understand the first time, and make connections between what they're doing now and what they learned earlier.

The AVID essentials

AVID's longitudinal data highlight the success of middle level and high school students who engage in an AVID program that implements the 11 AVID essentials (Guthrie & Guthrie, 1999). The following elements and their rationales are essential to success and their effective implementation is a condition for the use of the AVID name, trademark and logo:

1. AVID student selection must focus on students in the middle (2.0 to 3.5 G.P.A. as one indicator) with academic potential, who would benefit from AVID support to improve their academic record and begin college preparation. By being placed in rigorous courses alongside high-achieving students and provided with support from the AVID class, these students make significant gains in their academic achievement. Additional AVID selection criteria identifies students who are low-income students of any ethnicity, who will be the first in their family to attend college, who face special circumstances that may be obstacles to achievement, or who are of an ethnicity traditionally underrepresented in four-year colleges.