Rose has recently implemented a new program and elective, AVID, into classrooms in order to help students have a better understanding of the material they’re being taught. AVID stands for Advancement Via Individual Determination. This program
introduces students to many different learning strategies such as note taking, organization, collaboration and inquiry.
     English teacher Maura Aceto is the teacher of the new AVID elective. In this elective, students engage with one another, ask each other questions and figure out which strategies work best
and which strategies may not be as effective for them.
     “The last two weeks we’ve been building relational capacity and our classroom community because part of AVID is operation,” Aceto said. “We’ve talked about the framework, and we’ve also talked about organization; it’s not just me lecturing.”

     Students for the AVID elective are personally selected based on their academic performance in their middle school years.

Photo by Anna Porter

This allows for students who need extra help to receive more attention, enabling them to be successful.
     “We go to the middle schools and interview the kids, so not any student can sign up for the AVID elective,” Aceto said.
     Some of the main strategies that AVID consists of are focused notes and organization skills. This allows students to focus on the important information in the curriculum.
     “Not only do you copy down information but you need to be able to pick out the important pieces of the information and then extra information,” science teacher Donna Lynn Brody said. “When students know exactly what they need to write down and how they need to keep things organized, it makes a big difference in being able to manage the amount of curriculum we have.”
     Brody and fellow science teacher Lauren Ritchie were appointed site coordinators for the AVID program this past year. What led these teachers to being coordinators of the program was their previous experiences with the AVID program.
     “[My] experience with AVID before was at North Pitt for nine years and seven of those nine years [Brody and I] were teaching with AVID, so we’ve been doing it for a while,” Ritchie said.
     Over the summer, Ritchie and Brody, along with other members of the AVID site team, attended a summer training program to help them become more familiar with AVID and how to expand its strategies throughout Rose.
     Not only did they train to better implement the program through Rose, but to best serve in their position.
     “My training is very specifically, how to be a good site coordinator,” Brody said. “There was a big emphasis on structure and that it’s important for teachers to use AVID strategies, but it’s also important for teachers to find an AVID strategy and push it throughout the entire school,” Brody said.
     The goal of AVID is to positively impact communication in the classrooms and how students grow intellectually.
     “My students will benefit from these strategies and these are things they can take to other courses,”Aceto said.