Advisory as a space for nurturing critical consciousness in middle grade students Free

The purpose of this qualitative study is to examine how a relationship-focused advisory model in middle schools can nurture students’ critical consciousness. While many middle schools recognize adolescence as a pivotal period for social, emotional and identity development, the structures designed to support students during this transition are often underexamined as potential spaces for social justice learning. Advisory programs, which are regularly scheduled, small-group meetings between teachers and students, offer one such structure. To situate advisory within existing developmental and educational research, we first review advisory and then how adolescence represents a unique period for relational and cognitive growth.

Advisory refers to a program in which students gather with a small group of peers and a teacher to build supportive relationships, develop the skills of effective learners and discuss issues relevant to their lives (Gambone, 2024; Shulkind & Foote, 2009). Although advisory programs can be found in elementary, middle and high schools, the Association of Middle Level Education encourages all US middle schools to incorporate advisory into their academic schedules as a tool for supporting middle school students’ social-emotional development as they begin adolescence (Bishop & Harrison, 2020).

It is important to note that social-emotional development is a broad concept that includes the development of students’ self-awareness skills, self-management skills, social awareness skills, relationship-building skills and responsible decision-making skills (CASEL, 2025). Accordingly, different middle schools that utilize advisory to nurture students’ social-emotional development focus on different dimensions of students’ social-emotional development. For example, some middle schools position advisory as a break from academic learning in order to give opportunities for relationship building and community building (Foster et al., 2017). Other middle schools utilize advisory as a tool for nurturing students’ self-management skills by introducing them to concepts such as grit, tenacity and goal setting (Character Lab, 2023) and still other middle schools position advisory primarily as a space for supporting students’ academic development through check-ins and oversight from their faculty mentor (Kemp, 2011).

Despite its prominence in middle-level education, advisory has rarely been studied as a potential site for cultivating critical consciousness. Critical consciousness refers to the ability to understand, analyze and challenge oppressive forces shaping our lives and communities (Freire, 1970). Additionally, a growing body of psychology research suggests that young people’s critical consciousness is associated with a host of positive youth outcomes, including resilience, self-esteem, academic achievement and civic engagement (Heberle, Rapa, & Farago, 2020; Maker Castro, Wray-Lake, & Cohen, 2022; Tyler, Geldhof, Black, & Bowers, 2020). Given these associations, it is valuable to explore opportunities within K-12 schooling to intentionally nurture students’ awareness and responses to oppression. Early adolescence, in particular, presents a promising developmental window for fostering critical consciousness in students through age-appropriate structures like advisory, which offer a dedicated and relational space for these conversations. These insights suggest that advisory may offer fertile ground for cultivating students’ critical consciousness in authentic and developmentally appropriate ways. Yet, few studies have examined how structured, school-based practices, like advisory, can explicitly nurture this development, particularly within the middle grades.

To address this gap, the present study focuses on a set of middle schools that feature a relationship-focused advisory model whose primary goal is community building. Our research team has theorized that the focus in these advisory spaces on relationship building and community building might also potentially make these spaces a powerful site for nurturing middle schoolers’ critical consciousness (Alford et al., 2026; Seider & Graves, 2020). Specifically, the closer peer-to-peer and peer-to-teacher relationships forged in advisory spaces might increase the ability of youth in these spaces to engage together in rich dialogue about complex and nuanced issues of injustice, and potentially social action aimed at addressing these issues. In other words, advisory spaces might be powerful sites for engaging early adolescents in rich debate, dialogue and action about the oppressive forces shaping our lives and communities at a developmental moment when adolescents are developing greater social awareness and critical thinking skills and deepening their capacity for empathy and feelings of social responsibility. By situating this work within advisory, a central structure of middle-level schooling (Association of Middle Level Education, 2010), this study contributes to a growing body of research (e.g. Diemer, Rapa, Voight, & McWhirter, 2016; Seider, Clark, & Graves, 2020; Watts, Diemer, & Voight, 2011) examining how adolescents develop critical consciousness. Accordingly, we pose the following research question: How do advisory structures in middle school settings afford and constrain opportunities for students’ critical consciousness development?

This study was informed by the critical consciousness framework (Freire, 1970; Watts et al., 2011), with particular attention to developmental and social-cognitive theories related to early adolescence. The term, critical consciousness, comes from philosopher-educator Paulo Freire (1970) whose work as a literacy teacher in rural Brazil in the 1940s led to his discovery that the adult laborers with whom he was working were motivated to learn to read by their investment in decoding and challenging their social conditions. Freire invoked the term conscientização, or critical consciousness, to describe the capacity to understand and analyze oppressive social systems (“critical reflection”) and engage in collective social action to challenge and resist them (“critical action”).

Freire (1970) argued that nurturing students’ critical consciousness should be the central purpose of education. He further contended that educators could only do so by abandoning the dominant “banking model” of education, which conceptualizes students as empty vessels into which teachers deposit knowledge. Instead, he proposed a problem-posing approach to education in which teachers and students work collaboratively to investigate and address real-world problems in their communities. While Freire's original definition centered on reflection and action, Watts et al. (2011) expanded the framework by adding a third dimension, critical motivation.

Building upon Freire, Watts et al.’s (2011) conceptualized critical consciousness as comprising three interrelated components: critical reflection, critical action and critical motivation (Freire, 1970; Watts et al., 2011). Critical reflection involves systematically analyzing and questioning oppressive systems to understand their impact on individuals and communities, fostering awareness of societal power dynamics and inequalities (Heberle et al., 2020; Watts et al., 2011; Seider & Graves, 2020). Critical action entails proactive engagement in collective efforts to challenge and transform oppressive structures, mobilizing resources, building alliances and advocating for systemic change (Heberle et al., 2020; Seider et al., 2020; Seider & Graves, 2020; Watts et al., 2011). Critical motivation is the intrinsic belief in the necessity and efficacy of challenging oppression, fostering a sense of agency and empowerment to effect meaningful social change (Seider et al., 2023; Watts et al., 2011). This tripartite model—critical reflection, motivation and action—has guided much of the empirical research on youth sociopolitical development (Heberle et al., 2020; Hope & Bañales, 2019). In this study, these three components also informed how teachers structured advisory discussions, how researchers supported teachers in professional learning communities (PLCs) and how we analyzed student and educator interviews.

While the concept of critical consciousness originates in adult learning, the developmental period of early adolescence holds distinct potential for its cultivation. During middle school, students experience rapid cognitive and identity development (Piaget, 1971; Erikson, 1968; Helms, 1995; Steinberg, 2005; Tatum, 2017), which can enable them to analyze social systems, question inequities and imagine alternative possibilities for justice.

Because the social and cognitive development taking place during early adolescence holds such potential for nurturing adolescents' critical consciousness, several other scholars and educators have examined mechanisms for engaging middle school-age students in reflection and action on various forms of injustice. For example, scholars have investigated the impact of introducing middle schools to ethnic studies curriculum that engages students in learning about the experiences and histories of people of color in the USA through a social justice lens, and with a particular focus on injustices experienced by particular groups of people and how they have resisted and challenged these injustices (Sleeter & Zavala, 2020). Nojan (2020) reported that introducing middle school students to an ethnic studies curriculum deepened these early adolescents’ ability to think in nuanced and complex ways about social inequality. Along similar lines, other scholars have considered the impact on middle school students of engaging in youth participatory action research (YPAR) that seeks to empower young people by engaging them as partners with adults to both research and address inequities present in their own communities. Kennedy et al. (2019) found that engaging middle school students in youth participatory action research contributed to their critical consciousness development.

Building on this work, Godfrey, Burson, Yanisch, Hughes, & Way (2019) underscores that critical motivation—the sense that one can make change—is a crucial bridge between reflection and action in the critical consciousness framework. This construct parallels Bandura's (1977) notion of self-efficacy, in which individuals develop a sense of agency through experiences of mastery and vicarious learning from peers and community members. Developing this belief in one's capacity to effect change requires attention to both the cognitive and emotional dimensions of learning.

In their study of adolescents’ beliefs about fairness, government responsiveness and personal efficacy, Godfrey et al. (2019) found wide variation in students’ levels of reflection, action and motivation. Their findings highlight the need for educational strategies that cultivate not only students' intellectual skills for critical reflection and action but also their emotional motivation and sense of self-efficacy. Likewise, Hope (2016) identified a positive relationship between Black early adolescents' critical motivation and their engagement in critical action, suggesting that motivation is a key driver of participation in change efforts.

Taken together, these findings suggest that educators must intentionally scaffold learning experiences that support both the cognitive and emotional dimensions of motivation. This can be done, for example, through developmentally appropriate goal setting, encouragement and peer collaboration. Given early adolescents’ developmental trajectories, we position advisory as a potential “zone of proximal development” (Vygotsky, 1978) for critical consciousness–a scaffolded context in which students can link personal experiences to systemic issues.

Since advisory is enacted through teachers’ facilitation, understanding how educators learn to support critical consciousness is also key. In addition to adolescent developmental considerations, understanding how teachers learn and collaborate is essential for explaining how advisory structures can be enacted to support students’ critical consciousness. Critical consciousness and learning how to teach about it with students requires an understanding of what teachers believe, how teachers learn and learn together and how they come to implement new curricula in their classrooms. Teaching new curricular lessons cannot simply be implemented by interested individuals or in single workshops and often have mixed implementation results (Borko, 2004; Elmore, 2004; Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 2014), instead, teachers need support from high quality materials and spaces to learn together and adapt material to their own contexts in order to see successful and lasting implementation of new curricula (Fullan, 2001; Loucks-Horsley, Hewson, Love, & Stiles, 1998). When this work is done in ongoing and context-specific ways, professional learning can lead to reform in teaching practices (Coburn, 2004; Darling-Hammond, Wei, Andree, Richardson, & Orphanos, 2009; Dobbs et al., 2017).

Collaboration has been shown to be a key to the establishment of professional learning that contributes to the construction of new knowledge about teaching and to the improvement of instruction (Desimone, Porter, Garet, Yoon, & Birman, 2002; Dobbs et al., 2017; Jensen, Sonnemann, Roberts-Hull, & Hunter, 2016). One such approach is using a community of practice model for professional learning, a community within the workplace that focuses on what individuals want to learn about the real practice, in this case, of teaching (Wenger, 1998). These communities can take many shapes, but focus on the specific needs of particular teachers to support students more effectively. Within such communities, teachers can co-construct knowledge, test new approaches and engage in reflective dialogue—processes that are especially valuable for learning how to facilitate critical consciousness in advisory.

In this study, we examine how a relationship-focused advisory program in middle schools can nurture students' critical consciousness. Analyses are based on qualitative data collected from semi-structured interviews with middle school students and educators in the five participating schools. The epistemological stance or paradigm guiding this study's research design can be characterized as “interpretivist” because our analyses of this study's qualitative interviews (described in greater detail below) focus on understanding the subjective meaning-making that each interview participant offers about their specific teaching and learning experience in advisory rather than treating these participants’ perspectives as objective reality (Ritchie, Lewis, Nicholls, & Ormston, 2013). This section provides an overview of the advisory context, research setting, participants, data collection methods and data analysis procedures.

The data for this paper come out of a project that established Communities of Practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) for educators from five middle schools, within the same national network, to explore how the advisory structure can nurture middle school students’ critical consciousness, focusing on virtues like care, tolerance and responsibility. This qualitative study explores the potential to nurture middle schoolers’ critical consciousness. Our work is guided by the question: How do advisory structures in middle school settings afford and constrain opportunities for students’ critical consciousness development?

Educators engaged in virtual and in-person meetings with colleagues from their respective schools and researchers throughout the 2022–2023 school year, sharing strategies and challenges in using advisory to foster civic knowledge, skills and virtues in their students. The project emphasized advisory's potential as a key space for civic character development during early adolescence, which is a critical yet under-researched period.

We draw on qualitative data from interviews with students and educators spanning all of the schools we worked with (The full interview protocol can be found in  Appendix 1 and  2.). This study is part of a larger research initiative aimed at exploring educational practices that foster critical consciousness among middle school students. Specifically, this qualitative study focuses on middle school educators and students, investigating their experiences as they engage in advisory sessions designed to address issues of critical consciousness.

All five of the schools that are part of our study are part of a national network of schools that emphasize inquiry-based learning and position advisory as a central part of their model. The group of schools in this study represents a diverse range of geographic settings and student populations. Schools span urban, suburban and rural areas across different regions of the USA, including the East Coast, West Coast, Midwest and South. The student demographics also vary significantly, with minority enrollment ranging from 12.6% to 96.2% and the percentage of low-income students ranging from 22.2% to 74.9%, reflecting the diverse socioeconomic backgrounds of the student populations. Selected demographics can be found in Table 1.

Each of these schools partners with a national nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting educational equity and high-quality learning for all students. The organization's mission centers on creating classrooms that challenge, engage and empower learners through content-rich, culturally affirming instruction and a school culture that fosters belonging, identity and purpose. Its model of school reform is organized around three interrelated dimensions of student achievement: mastery of knowledge and skills, character and high-quality student work.

Advisory is both a structural and cultural cornerstone of this model. Structurally, advisory provides a dedicated time during the school day for small groups of students to meet regularly with a teacher to build community, reflect on academic and personal growth and engage in social-emotional and character-based learning. Culturally, advisory embodies the organization's commitment to fostering strong relationships, collective responsibility and student leadership.

While all participating schools shared this relationship-based advisory model, they implemented it in slightly different ways depending on their local context. In some schools, advisory took place daily at the start of the school day for a 30-min period and again for an extended period midweek to allow for more sustained engagement with advisory curricula and projects. Other schools incorporated advisory into a short, homeroom-like structure with additional time set aside weekly for more deliberate community-building or curricular discussions. Across sites, the number of students per advisory group typically ranged from 10 to 15, and advisories were led by teachers, school administrators and other staff (such as the school counselor). The time and format of advisory varied across schools and grade levels, but all shared a commitment to using advisory as a space for belonging, identity development, and the exploration of civic and social issues. This variation was intentional: the national organization's model encourages schools to adapt advisory structures to best meet the needs of their students and communities.

Although each school adapted advisory to its local context, all advisories followed the network's shared four-part structure: Greeting, Reading, Initiative and Debrief. Within this framework, educators implemented lessons that reflected both developmental and contextual needs. For instance, in one school, student conversations about racial joking and teasing prompted a lesson focused on how to recognize and respond to biased comments among peers. In several others, teachers guided students through a series of lessons on counternarratives—stories that challenge dominant narratives and center marginalized voices. These lessons invited students to examine stereotypes in the media, reflect on whose perspectives are heard or excluded and create their own counter-narratives as a way to advocate for equity and inclusion. Across all sites, advisory served as a flexible yet structured space for belonging, critical reflection and civic character development.

The teacher participants in the present study are middle school educators (n = 36) from five different public middle schools located in five different parts of the USA (see Table 1). All of these teachers lead advisories in their respective middle schools, and they participated in a community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) during the 2022–2023 school year, facilitated by our research team that sought to explore opportunities in advisory for nurturing students' critical consciousness of racism. The teachers in this study built communities of practice using a Professional Learning Community (PLC) structure. A PLC is a collaborative group of educators who regularly meet to reflect on and improve teaching practices, student outcomes and their own professional growth (DuFour, 2004). In this PLC, the teachers met with researchers once per month for a year; each session was 1 hour in duration. While the advisory programs were not uniform, they were united by a shared relational focus and participation in the PLC process, through which teachers co-constructed advisory practices that fostered students’ critical consciousness. Despite differences in implementation, common themes emerged across schools related to the ways advisory supported belonging, reflection and engagement with issues of race and social justice.

Teacher participants were selected based on their participation in the PLCs at their respective schools. How teachers came to participate in these PLCs varied across sites. At Center City, the school administration decided that all eighth-grade advisories would participate, and thus all eighth-grade teachers were included. At Mountain City, there were only three middle school teachers, all of whom agreed to participate. At Winter Hill, Oak and Stone, middle school teachers volunteered to participate in the PLCs. Therefore, this represents a form of criterion sampling, as teacher participants met the criterion of participating in a PLC, though there was some variation in how teachers either volunteered or were assigned to participate. Additional interviewees in the study are middle school students (n = 53) enrolled in these teachers’ advisories during the 2022–2023 school year. Each school in the study chose and scheduled students to meet with researchers while they were on site. The teachers were asked to select a diverse group of students that would provide different perspectives about advisory, with particular attention to racial and ethnic diversity, given the focus of the project. The student participants were selected using purposive samples.

The teacher demographics for the group of 36 educators reveal that 25 self-identified as White, 9 as Black, 1 as Latinx and 1 as Multiracial. In terms of gender, 28 of the educators self-identified as women, while 8 self-identified as men. A subset of the middle school students who participated in the advisory sessions were interviewed by our research team. The study sample consisted of 53 students from various schools. The self-identified demographics for those that participated in the interviews consisted of 26 white students, 13 black students, 7 Latinx students, 3 multiracial students and 4 students who did not specify their race. There were 20 girls, 25 boys, 7 nonbinary students and 1 not specified. There were nine 6th graders, fifteen 7th grade and 29 8th grade represented in the study sample.

The PLCs were intentionally co-constructed by teachers and researchers. The first meetings focused on establishing a shared understanding of critical consciousness, race and school context as well as educators' expectations and interests in the work. At each subsequent meeting, the researcher-facilitators shared “learning riffs”—structured yet flexible idea-building activities for teaching about race that were responsive to educators' stated interests. The riffs were structured in such a way that they allowed participants to adapt and remix practices for their unique advisory contexts. Rather than following a prescribed advisory curriculum, teachers collaboratively developed and refined their own lessons and approaches through this process. This meant that no two advisories looked exactly the same by design; each reflected the distinct needs, cultures and relational dynamics of the students and teachers in that community. This variability was an intentional feature of the model, emphasizing authenticity, adaptability and local relevance.

After receiving approval from the lead author's Institutional Review Board, several types of data were collected as part of this research study. Recognizing early adolescence as a crucial time for nurturing students’ critical consciousness of racism, the research team conducted one-on-one, semi-structured interviews with all participating educators at the end of the 2022–2023 school year. These interviews aimed to elicit reflections on their experiences in advisory, which was used as a space for fostering students’ critical consciousness. Educators also reflected on the types of learning activities they found most fruitful, and the challenges that emerged in this work. Through these discussions, we explored educators’ perspectives on their students’ developmental readiness to engage in conversations about racism. Teacher interviews took place over Zoom or in a quiet space in the school, usually in the teacher’s classroom.

Likewise, we conducted one-on-one interviews with a subset of the middle school students (n = 53) participating in these teachers’ advisories in order to elicit their perspectives about these same topics. Additionally, we assessed students’ own readiness to engage in these discussions. The students who participated in interviews were identified through purposive sampling, relying on the teachers to help identify a diverse range of students from their advisory teachers in terms of academic profile, race and gender. All the student interviews took place in a quiet location within the school, mostly in a classroom or in the school library. Our research team also collected field notes during observations of 3–5 advisory lessons in each of the participating schools as well as all for all of the meetings of the PLCs.

Our research team is composed of eight individuals with diverse backgrounds and expertise: one Asian woman, two Black men, one Latina woman, two multiethnic (Latina and White; Filipino and White) women, one White man and one White woman. Our team includes three senior faculty members from three different institutions and four PhD students. Among us, two faculty members and one PhD student have secondary education experience. Our academic expertise spans teacher education (three members) and developmental psychology (five members). This diverse composition allows us to approach our research with a rich variety of perspectives and experiences, enhancing the depth and breadth of our scholarly inquiry.

Interviews with educators and students were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Next, our research team analyzed these interviews using a multi-step analytic strategy consistent with qualitative research methods that seek to balance etic/outsider and emic/insider perspectives (Erikson & Murphy, 2008). Our first step was to utilize our research questions and guiding conceptual framework to construct codes that represent key dimensions of our inquiry during team meetings (Adair & Pastori, 2011). An example of this kind of theory/concept-driven code from the teacher codebook is “PLC Efficacy,” which refers to teachers’ perceptions of how participating in Professional Learning Communities supports their motivation and ability to engage in anti-racism work. An example of a theory/concept-driven code from the student codebook is: “Advisory Racism,” which was utilized to indicate a description of students’ engaging in critical reflection and/or action in advisory around issues of racism/antiracism.

To complement these theory-driven codes, the first and second authors independently read through the teacher and student interview transcripts to seek out inductive/emic codes relevant to this study's research questions (Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2014). This iterative process involved separate coding efforts followed by discussions to compare, synthesize and reach consensus on the themes and patterns observed. For example, a data-driven code from the student codebook included “Advisory Identity,” which referred to descriptions by a student of ways in which advisory has (or has not) offered opportunities to explore their own identity. An example of a code from the teacher codebook was “PLC Surprise/Questions,” which referred to descriptions by participating teachers of something that surprised them about the PLC or raised doubts, skepticism, or questions.

After this dual-stage coding, we engaged in a collaborative, iterative process of theme construction. In this phase, we examined relationships among codes across teacher and student data sets and organized them into higher-order thematic categories that reflected our research questions. To determine which codes and themes were most analytically salient, we examined both their frequency and depth—that is, whether they appeared across multiple participants and data sources and whether they offered conceptual richness or explanatory power relevant to our guiding questions. Codes that appeared only once or were not conceptually meaningful were not elevated to themes. Through this analysis, we identified two primary themes: (1) Middle Schoolers’ Readiness for Complex Thinking about Racism and (2) Classroom Culture Conditions Facilitating Readiness for Learning.

Following the theme construction, our research team re-read the interview transcripts and field notes to ensure that the themes accurately represented the data corpus. At this stage, we also selected illustrative quotations to represent each theme, prioritizing those that captured the range of perspectives (e.g. across different schools, grade levels and demographic groups) while maintaining analytic clarity. Quotations were chosen not for representativeness alone but because they exemplified the interpretive claims made in our analysis.

While our interviews with educators and students represented the data of primary interest for the present study, we also drew on our ethnographic field notes collected during advisory lessons at the participating schools and from the community of practice meetings with each school. These field notes offered a valuable contextual backdrop, allowing us to gain a deeper understanding of the dynamics within advisory lessons and their potential influence on middle school student learning. Our observations of advisory served as a form of triangulation, allowing us to compare and connect insights from teacher and student interviews to strengthen the credibility of our interpretations. To enhance reliability and trustworthiness, our four-member research team engaged in a consensus-building process throughout coding and theme development. This process involved collaborative review, discussion and refinement of codes to ensure shared understanding and analytic coherence. We also engaged in ongoing reflexive dialogue about how our positionalities might shape interpretation, complementing and challenging one another's assumptions and blind spots to promote analytic rigor.

The findings presented here reveal that middle school students demonstrate a developing readiness to engage with complex topics like racism, progressing from a focus on individual identity to broader societal issues. Both students and educators recognize that this readiness is facilitated by thoughtful scaffolding, peer interactions and supportive classroom cultures, which create the conditions necessary for students to navigate challenging conversations and embrace critical consciousness. These findings – which we describe in greater detail below – build on the two primary themes that we identified from our analyses of interviews with participating teachers and students: (1) Middle Schoolers’ Readiness for Complex Thinking about Racism and (2) Classroom Culture Conditions Facilitating Readiness for Learning. The first theme offers insight into students’ developmental readiness from both student and educator perspectives. The second theme examines the environmental conditions within advisory that sustain this growth. In this paper, we provide gender and racial identifiers to offer context for the perspectives shared by students and educators. However, while we understand that analyzing through the lenses of gender or racial identity is a useful research endeavor, we do not specifically analyze through these lenses for the purposes of this paper.

Below, we first report on the data we gathered and analyzed on students’ perspectives on their fellow middle schoolers’ readiness to engage with complex topics such as racism. Next, we report on the interview data from the teacher interviews that shed light on their perspectives of their middle school students’ readiness to engage with these issues.

Students' reflections reveal that their ability to engage with discussions about racism develops gradually across middle school, with eighth graders often showing more nuanced understanding than younger peers. As students progress through middle school, their cognitive and social-emotional development enables a deeper understanding of complex issues, including racism. Our data suggest that middle schoolers, particularly by the 8th grade, are beginning to grasp the systemic and institutional dimensions of social issues, moving beyond individual experiences.

Irving, a White eighth-grade student from Stone Middle School, articulates the growing awareness of institutional racism.

Irving's reflection indicates that for some students, by the end of middle school, there is a growing capacity to see the complexities underlying societal problems, including racism. His comment reveals a developing readiness to engage in nuanced discussions that consider both individual and systemic factors.

Similarly, other students described how exposure to open discussions about race helped them move from surface-level understandings to deeper, more critical perspectives. Sasha, a Black eighth-grade student also from Stone Middle School, offers a contrasting perspective based on her experience moving from a private Catholic school to her current school environment. She reflects:

Sasha's comments reveal her growing awareness of the importance of examining the histories and experiences of marginalized groups in depth, rather than glossing over these topics. Her experience highlights how exposure to open discussions about racism has allowed her to move beyond surface-level understandings as she aged, gaining a more nuanced appreciation of the lived experiences of others. Together, Irving and Sasha's perspectives illustrate that some middle schoolers, by eighth grade, are developing a readiness to approach discussions about racism with a more comprehensive and empathetic understanding.

Students also recognized that their readiness to discuss complex social issues was supported by intentional scaffolding from teachers. The data show that students understand the importance of scaffolding, recognizing that these challenging conversations must be introduced gradually and in a structured manner to facilitate deeper engagement. This awareness highlights students’ growing ability to reflect on how they learn, as they come to appreciate the thoughtful progression their teachers provide.

Mila, a White student from Mountain City, reflects on how her teachers leveraged the students' developmental progression over the course of the year, guiding them from an introspective focus to broader societal thinking. This intentional scaffolding allowed students to gradually move from individual identity work to engaging with complex issues, including racism, as a community. “I feel like in the beginning of the year [the lessons were] more about who you are as an individual, and then towards the middle and end, we've been learning about as a community and as a world, how we are and how we can improve each other and ourselves for the better.” Mila's words underscore the developmental journey her teachers facilitated, shifting students' focus from self-awareness to communal responsibility.

She goes on to reflect on how these discussions were structured, noting how the progression allowed for deeper engagement with sensitive topics.

Arthur, a Hispanic student also from Mountain City, echoes this sentiment, describing how his learning journey across middle school builds in manageable stages:

Both Mila and Arthur's reflections underscore how their teachers’ gradual introduction of complex topics, from personal identity to global citizenship, enabled them to engage more deeply with societal issues like racism. This scaffolding not only prepared students to think critically about the world but also fostered an environment of accountability and mutual respect in the classroom. Arthur's comment also highlights the necessity of beginning with self-discovery as a foundation for broader engagement. His recognition that he must figure himself out before helping others underscores the importance of personal development as a prerequisite for contributing meaningfully to community and societal issues.

Educators' reflections align with those of their students, emphasizing that middle school is a key developmental period when learners begin to grapple with complex social issues such as racism. The data from our educators echo students’ reflections, recognizing a developmental readiness among middle schoolers to engage in critical consciousness. Robert, a White principal at Winter Hill, notes: “Students move from a more personal level to an intermediate stage, starting to see a more global perspective on things. By high school, they can hold different perspectives more clearly, but we already see this shift happening in middle school.” This observation reflects educators’ perspectives that middle school is a key period when students begin to embrace global perspectives and wrestle with societal issues.

Teachers also described how students’ comfort with these conversations increased over time, suggesting that readiness can grow through repeated exposure and support. Thali, a Black teacher at Stone Middle School, reflects on how her students initially approached conversations about racism and inequality with hesitation, but as the year progressed, they became more willing and even eager to participate: “The kids all wanted more of it. They were, they were intrigued by it and that was like a big thing. They're just like, oh, are we gonna have more conversations about this now? That like, originally they were really nervous about it...” This perspective underscores the idea that middle school may be the first time many students are having these types of difficult discussions, and although it may be challenging at the outset, students demonstrate a hunger for these conversations and a readiness to engage further once the space for dialogue is created.

Educators further highlighted that productive discomfort plays a central role in helping students deepen understanding. Tamika, a Black teacher from Centre City Middle School, said of conversations about race and racism with her students: “They were productively uncomfortable. And they were sitting with their thoughts. They were sitting with the information. There were kids who would raise their hands and be like, can you tell me what this word means? Can you help me understand this?” Her observation of students being “productively uncomfortable” speaks to middle schoolers' developmental capacity to sit with complex and sometimes unsettling ideas while actively seeking clarity and understanding. Tamika's description illustrates how students move beyond initial hesitation to a space where they can wrestle with the material, ask questions and seek deeper comprehension. This readiness for complex thinking, even when met with discomfort, is a sign of growth and an essential part of their learning process.

In this section, we first explore how students describe the role of peer interactions in their learning about racism. Through candid reflections, they demonstrate how these exchanges not only help them process new ideas but also allow them to influence their classmates’ thinking, fostering collective growth.

Following this, we turn to educators’ perspectives on the classroom culture necessary to facilitate these discussions. Their insights emphasize how conditions such as trust, open-mindedness and careful attention to students’ identities and positionalities lay the groundwork for students to engage meaningfully in critical conversations. Together, these reflections illustrate the vital interplay between peer interactions and teacher-led scaffolding in nurturing students’ readiness for these critical conversations.

The analysis of our student interviews revealed the importance of peer interactions as catalysts for empowering students to deepen their learning about racism. Lennie, a Black student from Stone Middle School, expressed, “I think that for racism and stuff, I know I can't change some people's points of view on race and stuff, but I do know that I could probably try to give them a little push on having a better mindset. Like, hey, you may think most people do this, but actually they're just like you, they do this.” His reflection encapsulates the potential of peer-led discussions in advancing his peers' motivation or intellectual approach to understanding racism. Lennie’s attempt to shift his classmates’ perspectives reflects how peer interactions serve as opportunities for students to challenge each other’s preconceived notions, fostering collective growth.

Within peer interactions, students not only navigate personal growth but also emerge as agents of change, challenging stereotypes and fostering empathy through dialogue. This highlights how students’ readiness for critical consciousness work can be both demonstrated and expanded through their ability to engage their peers in reflective and transformative conversations about race.

Julie, a White student at Winter Hill Middle School, reflects on the transformative impact of peers on her worldview. She shares, “Um, yeah, because we're learning about it and we're seeing it and we're listening to other people's experiences with it and what's happened with them with racism before. And we kind of see that and we kind of look at the world a little differently because of it.” Julie's narrative highlights the role of community-based learning experiences in fostering critical consciousness and empathy towards diverse perspectives and lived experiences.

A Black student from Centre City Middle School, Mawi, underscores the value of diverse community experiences in promoting open-mindedness and empathy. He observes:

Mawi's reflection highlights how diverse interactions foster nuanced perspectives and encourage students to embrace empathy and understanding across varied social contexts.

Students' ability to demonstrate readiness for complex thinking about racism is, in part, informed by the scaffolding that their teachers afford them. Teachers cultivate the necessary conditions through fostering dialogue with students’ identities/positionalities in mind and building classroom cultures that foster critical conversations to facilitate deeper learning for their students. What follows is a presentation of teacher interview data that speaks to the kinds of scaffolding they engaged in.

Structuring dialogue with students’ positionalities in mind. Across interviews, educators described intentionally structuring discussions to account for students' diverse identities and comfort levels. This often meant offering multiple avenues for participation—such as small-group or partner work—to ensure that all students, particularly students of color, could engage meaningfully in discussions about racism. Lex, a White teacher at Winter Hill, exemplified this approach, fostering a supportive classroom culture that encourages participation in different ways, anticipating that not all students would feel comfortable sharing with the larger advisory group. Lex was thinking about his students of color, in particular, who were in the numerical minority in the advisory. Lex reflected on a lesson where the students watched a video based on “The Gardener's Tale” (Jones, 2000). The video explained racism on three levels—institutionalized, interpersonal and internalized—using an allegory of a gardener with two flower boxes, one with rich soil and one with poor soil, illustrating the impacts of racism and prompting discussions on health disparities and interventions. Lex shared the impact of having multiple modalities for his students of color to engage in conversations about racism:

Lex's observation reveals how the importance of creating multiple ways for students to participate in the discussion, in light of the students’ positionalities and identities, enhances the learning experience, particularly for students of color or other minoritized students. According to Lex, the students of color, while not always vocal in the larger group setting, found the discussion valuable and appreciated being able to engage in smaller groups and by listening to their peers. This discussion structure in Lex's advisory did not spotlight or pressure students of color to speak for their racial identity in front of the large group, but instead allowed them to participate in a way that felt comfortable and meaningful to them.

Building a culture for critical conversations. Troy, a White teacher from Winter Hill Middle School, highlights the potential of building trust in fostering meaningful dialogue amongst classmates. He states, “I think if you can build that community, if the community can be built and to that level of depth of trust, I think there can be some powerful space [for dialogue] that's created there. And I think that's what we need...” Troy's perspective underscores the importance of students building trust between themselves in order to address societal issues and nurture a culture of empathy and collaboration.

Tamika reinforces the importance of this peer-driven discourse, describing how students reflected on a particular activity that had been introduced in advisory. It was about their multiple and intersectional identities together: “Some chose to share it with their friends, talk about it. I saw kids taking it with them to lunch to kind of go over, make sure that they had they were very invested in all aspects of the identity wheel [activity]…Our students seem to look forward to the conversations…” Tamika's observation reveals that the eagerness and commitment students show in their peer interactions are essential components of their readiness to engage in discussions about race. Her insight demonstrates how middle school students might not only be ready but might be eager to engage in reflective dialogues about complex topics like race. This eagerness, coupled with peer-led conversations, allows students to test out ideas, build confidence and refine their understanding of complex social issues within a supportive peer environment.

In addition to the importance of building trust for meaningful dialogue between students, teachers must also build trust and rapport with their students. Curtis, a Black teacher at Stone Middle School, emphasizes the foundational role of relationship-building that includes the teacher: “Um, you can't really have critical conversations without building a relationship first. So I feel like the first kind of like month or couple months, I was really just trying to at least form some sort of relationship...” Curtis's reflection underscores the importance of teachers building trust and rapport with their students in creating spaces for critical inquiry.

By examining how students engage in conversations about racism and other social justice topics, this research uncovers important implications for curriculum design, teacher professional development and the role of classroom culture. The discussion explores how early adolescence can serve as a pivotal period for shaping students' capacity for critical thinking and social agency, presenting powerful opportunities for intellectual and ethical growth.

The study underscores the role of middle school as a key time for developing students’ critical consciousness. Middle school represents a pivotal developmental stage where students begin to move beyond individualistic thinking to embrace more complex, societal perspectives (Erikson, 1968; Piaget, 1971; Godfrey et al., 2019). This period of cognitive growth provides a unique opportunity for engaging students in critical discussions about racism and other societal issues, as made evident by existing research on the positive impact of engaging middle schoolers in ethnic studies curriculum (Nojan, 2020) and youth participatory action research (Kennedy et al., 2019).

The finding that both the students and the educators in our study aligned on the belief that middle school was a ripe development moment for students to be engaging in conversations about racism is important to consider. The analysis of our data revealed that teachers were intentional in thinking about the gradual sequence in which the middle school students were taught about how racism occurs. Educators recognized students' readiness to think critically about racism and developed their lessons to nurture this readiness, while students appreciated and validated their teachers’ intentional approach. This shared belief between educators and students emerged as an asset in this context, creating a mutual understanding of early adolescence as a key period for grappling with societal issues. This alignment fostered a learning environment in which students felt supported to explore complex topics and develop their critical consciousness.

The study highlights the importance of integrating discussions about racism and other social justice issues into middle school curricula. Given the increased ability to engage in perspective-taking (Erikson, 1968) and abstract thinking (Piaget, 1971) associated with burgeoning adolescence, our data from students and educators suggest that educators should scaffold learning experiences that gradually build students’ capacity to engage with racism. In particular, the data speaks to developing learning trajectorileses that move from students exploring how racism impacts them on individual levels from exploring its impacts on systemic/institutional domains.

These findings can also be considered in light of Hope and Bañales (2019) and Godfrey et al. (2019) and research that indicates different typologies of middle school students along their critical consciousness development. Hope and Bañales (2019) and Godfrey et al. (2019) work points educators to gauging students’ capabilities in the realms of critical reflection, in particular, which was the primary focus of our data. Looking through the lenses where they see the root of the problems of racism and on how fair they think US systems are, Godfrey et al. (2019) research presents a range of possibilities for early adolescents’ displaying their understanding of how much work needs to happen on the individual vs. systemic levels in order to combat racism. Godfrey et al. (2019) infers links between the types of critical reflection students engage in and the types of action they think they should engage in, or whether to engage in action at all. In this regard, to the extent that they are interested in the kinds of actions their students might engage in, educators need to explicitly gauge their students’ understanding of the ways that racism can happen on individual and systemic/institutional levels as they develop and implement their curricula.

Because students and educators in the present study were reflecting on conversations and learning about injustice in advisory, it is important to consider which aspects of the advisory space may have contributed to the richness of these discussion and learning experiences, and how to expand these aspects of advisory to other spaces within middle schools. Recall from this study's introduction that advisory brings students together with a small group of peers and a teacher for the purpose of building supportive relationships and discussing issues relevant to students’ lives (Gambone, 2024; Shulkind & Foote, 2009). It is a space that explicitly nurtures less hierarchical teacher-student relationships and gives students an opportunity to get to know a smaller group of peers in greater depth (Bishop & Harrison, 2020). With the goal of nurturing students’ critical consciousness in middle school sites beyond advisory, how can educators and school leaders bring learnings from the advisory space into these other sites?

First middle school educators may benefit from professional development that equips them with strategies to foster environments that facilitate difficult conversations about racism and other analogous systems. Our data suggests educators need to learn how to foster dialogue with students' identities/positionalities in mind, allow for multiple forms of participation and build trust and productive discomfort through collective dialogue. Students expressed appreciation of hearing other students engaged in learning about racism under these conditions. The interview data seem to indicate that these features of environments allow students to explore challenging topics, like racism, in ways that facilitate students addressing and engaging each other while respecting each other.

Building on Bandura's (1977) conceptualization of self-efficacy (which we link to critical motivation), the aforementioned features of classroom culture give students opportunities to experience some of the affective components of building motivation to analyze and act against racism. More specifically, observing other students engage in difficult conversations and getting positive emotional feedback from peers and teachers speaks to the power of vicarious experiences, arousal and persuasion (Bandura, 1977) in increasing one's belief that one can engage in meaningful critical reflection and action. Vicarious experiences refer to observing others perform challenging tasks and succeed, which can boost students’ confidence in their own ability to engage in similar activities. In this case, witnessing peers navigate difficult conversations about racism provides students with examples of success, strengthening their belief that they too can engage meaningfully in these discussions. Arousal involves emotional responses that can motivate individuals to engage in tasks. In the context of racism discussions, the emotional energy generated can drive students to reflect deeply on the topic and inspire action. Teachers can help students manage this emotional arousal, turning it into a productive force for engagement. Persuasion refers to verbal encouragement and positive feedback from others, which can enhance students’ self-efficacy. Teachers and peers offering affirmations and reinforcement during challenging discussions help students believe in their capacity to handle difficult topics and contribute to the conversation. This also echoes the implications of Hope's (2016) that speaks to the importance of building students’ critical motivation if we hope for them to ultimately engage in critical action.

The readiness of middle school students to engage in complex conversations (about racism) is significantly shaped by the culture established in their classrooms. Both students and teachers reflect on how peer interactions and the intentional building of supportive environments foster a deeper engagement with difficult topics. Students’ reflections reveal how they learn and grow through discussions with peers, challenging and expanding their own and others’ understanding of racism. Educators, on the other hand, highlight the importance of creating conditions that allow for these critical conversations to thrive—whether through fostering relationships, cultivating trust, or thoughtfully scaffolding discussions around sensitive topics.

Further work is needed to understand how students’ racial identities shape their engagement with these topics. Investigating how racial identity development intersects with critical consciousness in diverse classroom settings could provide deeper insights into how to support both marginalized and privileged students in navigating complex conversations about race (Mathews et al., 2020). Additionally, future studies could examine the long-term impact of early exposure to discussions about race on students’ evolving racial identities, particularly in relation to their academic experiences and civic engagement. Understanding how these conversations influence students’ sense of self, both individually and as part of a broader racial group, can inform more effective strategies for fostering inclusive and equitable classroom environments. Ultimately, this research can help educators develop approaches that not only encourage critical thinking about race but also support positive racial identity development for all students.

One limitation of this study is that it captures a snapshot within a single academic year, which may not fully reflect the long-term impact of advisory sessions on students’ critical consciousness and civic character development. While valuable insights were gained from observing teacher and student interactions over the course of the year, the findings are limited to this time frame and may not account for shifts in dynamics or outcomes that could occur over multiple years as students continue to engage in these discussions. Additionally, there are dynamics that occurred within the school year that we were unable to capture, as we interviewed students and educators a significant time after the lessons took place. This means that our findings reflect how participants made meaning of these conversations after the learning had time to settle, rather than their immediate responses. This temporal limitation constrains the ability to assess whether the observed changes in student engagement and understanding are sustained or deepened over time.

Additionally, all of the schools involved in the study were part of the same network, which had already integrated advisory sessions into their curricula. This built-in structure for advisory may have given these schools a unique advantage in fostering conversations around critical consciousness compared to schools without such a foundation. As a result, the findings may not be easily generalizable to schools that do not have advisory programs or that are just beginning to introduce similar frameworks. Future research could explore the implementation of advisory in more varied educational settings to better understand how schools without pre-established advisory structures navigate these discussions.

In this study, we explored how middle school students develop the readiness to engage in complex discussions about racism, emphasizing the importance of thoughtful scaffolding, peer interactions and a supportive classroom culture. Our findings show that as students advance through middle school, they are increasingly able to understand the systemic nature of racism, moving beyond individual experiences to engage with larger societal issues. Both students and educators recognized that this readiness is nurtured through intentional, developmental progressions in curriculum and dialogue. Scaffolding, especially as it relates to students’ developmental stages and identities, plays a key role in facilitating these conversations, enabling students to engage critically and empathetically with sensitive topics. Teachers fostered these discussions by creating inclusive environments where diverse perspectives were valued, and students could explore challenging ideas in ways that respected their comfort levels. Taken together, these findings address our central research question about how advisory structures in middle school settings afford and constrain opportunities for students’ critical consciousness development. The study illustrates that while advisory provides a powerful space for fostering such growth through trust, peer connection and guided dialogue, it can also be constrained by variability in facilitation, comfort levels and structural support across contexts. Ultimately, the study underscores the crucial role of middle school as a developmental period for cultivating critical consciousness and preparing students to engage meaningfully with complex social issues, with lasting implications for their academic and personal growth.

1. Confirm that parent consent form has been signed

2. Introduce self and project

“In this study we are looking at the ways in which Crew gives students and teachers an opportunity to learn about, think about, and talk about important social issues such as racism and how to challenge racism.”

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  Explain that interview will last 45 minutes

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  Ask for permission to tape record

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  Note that student’s name will be kept confidential.

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  Note that student can feel free to stop the interview at any time

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  Note there are no right/wrong answers. Ask student to be completely honest

1. Ask student to sign assent form

1. How old are you?

2. What grade are you in?

3. How long have you gone to school here?

4. Do you identify as a member of a particular gender? (maybe simplify)

5. Do you identify as a member of a particular racial group or groups? (maybe simplify)

6. Do you use languages other than English?

1. How would you describe Crew to a student who went to another school (that doesn't have Crew)?

2. What typically happens in Crew?

   • What sort of things do you usually talk about in Crew?

3. How do you feel about Crew?

   • What do you like about Crew?

   • Is there anything you don't like about Crew? What is it?

   • Is it important to you to have Crew as a part of your school day?

4. Were there any Crew activities this year that were particularly interesting to you?

1. What felt like one of the most interesting or important discussions you had in Crew this year?

   • About our community or the larger world? Tell me about that

2. Can you think of an activity or discussion from Crew this year that has been useful for thinking about your own identity? Tell me about that.

3. Can you think of an activity or discussion from Crew this year that helped you better understand a classmate's identity or an identity that's not yours? Tell me about that.

   • Start offering prompts of PLC riffs that we believe were done in that students' Crew or other classes? (e.g. racist Red Cross poster, identity wheel)

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       Ask about all the riffs you believe the student may have participated in

4. Does it feel comfortable to have those conversations in Crew?

   • What in Crew helps you feel comfortable?

   • Are there aspects of Crew that make those conversations feel uncomfortable?

5. Have you had a chance in Crew to talk about racism? Tell me about that.

   • If yes…

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       Are there things you feel like you've learned about racism in Crew this year? Tell me about that.

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       How does it feel to have those types of conversations?

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       Does it feel comfortable to have those conversations in Crew?

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         What in Crew helps you feel comfortable?

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         Are there aspects of Crew that make those conversations uncomfortable?

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           What do you do when you feel uncomfortable?

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       Do you feel like those conversations will change how you see the world now or in the future?

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       Do you feel that conversations about race and identity are important to have in school?

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       Do you feel like those conversations will change your actions now or in the future?

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       Are there things you feel like you've learned in Crew this year about how to challenge racism? Tell me about that.

   • If no…

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       Would you like to talk more about racism in Crew? Do you think Crew is a good place for those kinds of conversations?

6. Can you think of any times where you talked about an issue in Crew and continued the conversation outside of class with friends, family, or online?

1. Have you had a chance in Crew to talk about other types of oppression like sexism or homophobia? Tell me about that.

   • OR… Have you had a chance in Crew to talk about other ways in which people get treated unfairly because of their identity?

2. Have you had a chance to talk about issues like racism in other classes or parts of your school day? Tell me about that.

   • OR… Have you had a chance to talk in other classes or parts of the school day about ways in which people get treated unfairly because of their identity?

   • If yes…

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       Are there things you feel like you've learned about issues like racism in your classes this year? Tell me about that.

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       Are there things you feel like you've learned in your classes this year about how to challenge issues like racism? Tell me about that.

   • If no…

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       Would you like to talk more about issues like racism in your classes? Do you think your classes are a good place for those kinds of conversations?

1. We're really interested in how students learn how to understand issues like racism and then do something about it (that could be anything from challenging someone's racial jokes to learning more about a topic to posting on social media). Are there ways we haven't talked about yet that Crew has helped you to do that?

1. Do you have any questions or anything else to tell me? for me?

1. Introduce self and project

As you know, we’re interested in the role that advisory can play in nurturing young people's civic development, and, in particular, their critical consciousness of oppressive forces such as racism. And we're interested in the role teacher professional learning communities can play in facilitating that learning in advisory.

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  Explain that interview will last 45 minutes

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  Ask for permission to tape record

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  Note that educator's name will be kept confidential.

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  Note that educator can feel free to stop the interview at any time

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  Note there are no right/wrong answers. Ask educator to be completely honest

1. Ask educator to sign consent form

When appropriate, follow-up with a probe for concrete examples…

We're going to be asking questions about your personal experience in the PLC and with this work as well as questions focused on your observations of your students in advisory.

1. Could you tell us about how you ended up participating in the Critical advisory PLC this year? What interested you about this opportunity?

2. What were you anticipating?

3. How has your experience in the PLC compared to what you were expecting? What surprised you?

4. What is something about the PLC that you have questions or even doubts about?

1. Has the PLC influenced the way you think about racism and other types of oppression? (How?)

   • “I used to think… Now I think…”

2. Has the PLC influenced the way you think about engaging middle schoolers in learning about these topics?

3. Has participating in the PLC influenced the way you think about your work as a teacher more broadly?

1. Going into this project, how comfortable were you with talking about oppressive forces like racism? Has that changed?

2. Was there a particular moment or conversation in the PLC that felt vulnerable or challenging to you?

3. In what ways does the PLC feel like a good space for engaging with these topics that are somewhat fraught?

4. Are there ways the PLC doesn't feel like a good space for engaging with these topics?

5. What has it been like to do this work this year during an historical moment when discussions about racism in schools feels particularly fraught? Was there a riff from the PLCs that made you feel nervous to teach?

6. Are there things your facilitators did that were particularly helpful? Not helpful?

7. What did you think of Zoom as a professional learning space for these types of conversations?

8. Tell me about the experience of collaborating with your colleagues in this PLC

1. What do you think of as the key purposes of advisory?

   • Has that purpose changed over time?

2. What do you think about using advisory as a space for this type of learning about racism and other types of oppression?

   • Is critical consciousness/antiracism work a good use of advisory time, or should this work be taking place elsewhere in the school day? Should this be happening more widely in your school? Beyond?

3. Tell us about a learning riff from the PLC that went well with your advisory.

   • What did you feel like your students got out this learning experience?

   • What interested or surprised you about their learning?

4. Tell us about a learning riff that didn't go as well.

   • What do you feel like contributed to the lesson/activity not going as well?

   • What interested or surprised you about your students' responses to the lesson?

5. Was there a learning riff introduced in the PLC that you were particularly excited to share with your students? Tell us about it.

6. Was there a learning riff introduced in the PLC that you decided not to share with your students (or you were concerned about sharing)? Tell us about it.

7. What is one of your takeaways from this year about doing critical consciousness/antiracism work with your students?

8. What are the pros and cons of doing this type of critical consciousness work in academic classes versus in advisory?

9. Are there tensions you feel between the work you typically do in advisory versus the civic/critical consciousness work we're focusing on in our PLC?

   • What does the school want you to do in advisory? What do you want to do in advisory? What do we want you to do in advisory?

10. To what extent would you say the critical consciousness work you're doing in advisory complement or resonates with critical consciousness work happening elsewhere in the school?

1. Are there aspects of this critical consciousness work that you would want to see continue in advisory next year?

2. What is something that came up in the PLC this year that you're still thinking about (or would like to continue to think and learn about)?