With almost 1700 hundred students across four grade levels. Over one hundred and fifty course options. All with separate curriculum made to engage students, with only general requirements to graduate. There’s no set course path, no course is required for every student at Buffalo High School–with one exception.
A curriculum that reaches 1681 students isn’t easy to make fun or engaging – especially because different people find different things fun – and it’s not simple to run. It means constantly tracking upcoming events, updating games and slideshows, monitoring student engagement, and updating the curriculum to match along with the students. All of that takes a lot of time. It takes a special, committed person. This year Advisory Coordinator Kinsey Mens and the Administration seek to change Advisory for the better. There are a couple of notable changes and notable mentions for the amount of effort.
Advisory Overhaul
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New Curriculum Buffalo High School is replacing Harbor videos with Wayfinder, a social-emotional learning program designed to build resilience and career exploration skills.
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Student Incentives New trimester free days will allow Advisory classes to participate in community-building activities like themed food days or social time.
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Coordinator Dedication Advisory Coordinator Kinsey Mens manages complex logistics, including weekly trivia and custom Canva presentations, to keep the curriculum engaging.
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Improved Transparency Mens plans to ensure all announcements and posters include proper staff attribution to clarify the source of school information.
Mens runs weekly trivia, creating the questions and the surveys sent out to Advisory’s. Then she waits for all answers to be submitted. Mens pulls up her spreadsheet to tally and keep score. Doing this all year long for every Advisory and form submission.
With Trivia come the games that she makes for each grade level and picks where it would fit best on the slideshow, or in the entire curriculum. Mens will go into her calendar she created for the entire year of advisory and make adjustments where needed. She makes most of the slides and is very proud of them. Mens uses CANVA to make all the slides. She loves adding flair and pizzazz, mostly in the form of GIFS.
Mens and Assistant Principal Stephanie Ward are in charge of coordinating Advisory, and together they have agreed that Advisory is better when always adapting, therefore there are some notable changes to it.
The first and most notable, Mens and Ward have heard the many pleas to get rid of the Harbor videos – or at least decrease their frequency – and they have agreed to see how it goes and to pilot a new base curriculum. Instead of the Harbor, they will be implementing a new SEL-Social Emotional Learning- course, Wayfinder.
Wayfinder was created to be relevant to students. It originated from the idea of students being resilient, learning important SEL skills, and finding a place within the community that surrounds them – leading to exploration of career paths. Wayfinder was founded at Stanford by research-leading experts in adolescent development. It was first trialed within the Hawai’i Department of Education, and has exponentially grown since its creation in 2015. Visit Wayfinder if you want to know more. If all goes to plan, the Harbor videos could be gone next year.
Along with this, another change that will be Ward and Mens are super excited for this year is the new free days every trimester. During a free day the Advisory gets to choose anything to do together. These are community-building days that could be used for activities such as Quesadilla Fridays or Magical Donut Mondays. It could even be a simple chill-out day and have a conversation with the people in the room.
There are some more seemingly unnoticeable things being implemented. The AI cleanse in the slideshow, Mens does not support AI; all AI posters and such come from outside sources.
“Teachers and administrators who ask me to include them, and I have to include them, cause its apart of the announcements. I have to,” said Mens referring to the inclusion of AI in her Advisory Slideshow.
Mens vows to attach teacher or Staff names to every poster or announcement that comes through the Advisory slideshow. The AI was never her.
Other changes include trying to have more interactive lessons through Wayfinder and using more paper assignments. Mens has always wanted bigger rewards for things like trivia and helping with school drives and competitions between Advisory classes and has decided to include that this year.
Mens and Ward, as the driving force behind advisory, have seen and understood that something in the previous Advisory curriculum was not working, and as hard as it is, they are working to create a course for every kid in Buffalo High School. A course that is engaging, relevant, and fun.
Its not just students that have seen issues with the way Advisory has been in the past, staff see it too. But it all adds up; it adds up to a lot of hours and effort on the part of Mens and Ward. With Behind-the-scenes passion and criticism, debate over advisory having grades, seeing problems and trying to fix them.
