Students Need Human Relationships to Thrive. Why Students Need Boards Of Advisors
This is a domain where chatbots are especially likely to take hold. On average, high schools have one guidance counselor for every 385 students. Research suggests a mere 6% of high school counselors’ time is spent on career advising. Such scarce human resources create gaps where chatbots can help, offering students on-demand personalized advice about applying to college, graduating and launching careers.
One of my consistent recommendations to young people is to develop a personal board of advisors.
These are people you can turn to for support and help in navigating life.
This is another example of one of our errors in Assumptions. If we rely on the schools as the sole source for learning, we are doing it wrong.
Education is the responsibility of the family and the state steps in to support it.
It is the responsibility of the students to seek advice for college and career readiness. It is the responsibility of the schools to step in and help when the students don’t know how to or what to do in that situation.
If Schools is the source of support for college planning and career advising, it makes total sense for AI to provide that personalized support, because there is no other way to make it happen. We don’t have enough staff.
But, let’s turn this around. Let’s say, for example, that of the 385 students on a counselor’s caseload, there are only 100 who don’t have the family or network support to help them choose a career. The counselor’s role is greatly diminished for the other 285 students. They do have the capacity to help 100 kids more than they have the capacity to help 385.
Some of you will argue that way more than 100 would need help.
If we shifted our perspective so that families and students themselves were responsible for this, we’d be in much better shape.
All parents want their kids to be successful. All parents want what is best for their kids. All parents want their kids to be better than they themselves are. Even terrible parents who put down their kids and are abusive will say they want their kids to have something better than they do.
This article quoted above makes some good suggestions, but it is still operating on a fundamentally wrong perspective:
Involving students’ families and friends:
Freeland Fisher is adding this as an afterthought. This is not good enough. And it’s also one of the other mistakes we make in education. We think that we need to get parents to partner with us, when it is really the other way around. We need to partner with parents. The students are the only ones who care about their life.
Sure, we as educators can care, and even go to great lengths to show we care, but ultimately, it is their life to live, not ours. Nobody cares about our life as much as we do.
One of my colleagues once said that there is no accountability for poor parenting, but there is accountability for poor schooling. I beg to differ. Your child living in your basement when they are thirty years old because they haven’t figured out how to leave the nest yet is much more severe accountability than schools will ever have!
We need to lead with the idea that kids’ families and friends are involved and want to be committed to that young person’s success.