A Simple Formula for Advocacy Statements

Hello Reader,

This email is the first of two parts. In today's email, I explain how I teach my seventh graders to write advocacy statements. I'll continue and wrap things up next week. First, a quick update:

Quick Update

I'm updating my 8th-grade accessing valid information unit to fit the revised National Health Education Standards. I pair it with the health content area of mental health. If you want additional emails about that process, please click this link (it will bring you to my home page, but you don't need to do anything else). I'll only send emails about revising my unit to those who click the link. However, I might share a final unit outline or assessment with everyone later in the year. Now, onto today's newsletter!

Using Skill Cues

Many health educators use skill cues when teaching their students the steps of different skills. Providing students with a step-by-step process checks many boxes as an educator. Using skill cues can:

• Make it easy to connect performance indicators from the National Health Education Standards to specific actions.
• Provide students with easy-to-remember steps for demonstrating a skill.
• Allow teachers to quickly create success criteria (in the form of a checklist or rubric).
• Provide opportunities for peer and/or self-feedback.

In my seventh-grade health class, we pair the skill of advocacy with vaping. Students have already gone through decision-making with vaping, too; like many schools, we're dealing with more-than-ideal amounts of vaping among our students. Students learn how to write and communicate advocacy statements via social media posts in this advocacy unit. Here's how students do it!

Context

Students are asked to use facts to support their advocacy statements. I give students a list of resources to use because I don't have time to thoroughly teach the skill of accessing information in seventh grade. They pull information from the resources I provide.

The updated National Health Education Standards performance indicators are a little different than the previous standards, but they were easy to adapt for this unit. I'm looking for students to be able to do the following:

• 8.8.3 Adapt advocacy skills and strategies for a variety of audiences and contexts.
  • Students are given different target audiences and must create different advocacy statements for them: their peers as one target audience and adults in the community as the other. This objective is new for me this school year.
• 8.8.4 Demonstrate advocacy skills and strategies to promote the health and well-being of self and others.
  • By creating social media posts (using Canva templates), students demonstrate advocacy skills and the content they create aims to promote the health and well-being of others instead of scaring or shaming.

Why Write Advocacy Statements?

Advocacy statements are versatile. They can be the start of a written advocacy piece, like a blog post, a letter to the editor, or an email to an elected official. Advocacy statements can be communicated verbally in a speech, podcast, or TED-Talk-style presentation. They can also be paired with images or other visuals in a poster, infographic, or social media post. If I were to differentiate my project or better align it with UDL principles, I could still keep writing the advocacy statements as the basis for branching out the how of advocating. Now that I think of it, that could be a way to assess the performance indicator 8.8.4. Maybe I'll switch up that project now.

Ah, the things you learn when self-reflecting and passing that along to others! Okay, on to the rest of the details...

How To

After looking at different skill cues and steps for advocacy, including those from RMC Health, I developed a basic "formula" to use as an advocacy statement. This two-step process checks the boxes for using the skill cues I mentioned above, mainly because it provides students with easy-to-remember steps for demonstrating a skill. It's also very similar to what students are familiar with from ELA class as they learn to write persuasive essays.

As the image above shows, the basic formula is Stance + Supporting Details = Advocacy Statement. To provide students with as much clarification as possible, I use these definitions:

• A stance is your position or view on something. It's a claim you're sharing with the world.
  • Using advocating for recess in middle school as an example, a claim might be, "Middle schoolers need to have recess during the school day."
• Supporting details are the reasons you use to support your claim. These could include facts (from reputable sources), examples, or personal experiences. The supporting details strengthen the claim. For this unit, we use facts in our advocacy statement. If a student is building off of the stance about recess above, they might include:
  • Facts: information from studies about how physical activity affects learning, focus, or behavior.
  • Examples: quotes from teachers or students from schools that implemented recess and saw better student behavior.
  • Personal Experiences: "I feel more energized after recess."

These two components form the basis of the advocacy statements I teach my 8th graders, too; those statements have four parts instead of two. That's for another email, though.

With that as my starting point, I'm ready to model the skill for my students before they go through the first round of skill practice. Actually, they don't realize it, but I have them practice advocating before I teach them how to without them even knowing they're advocating. For more information on how that happens, keep an eye on your inbox for next week's newsletter, where I'll outline my skill practice progression for this unit, from my unit hook through my summative assessment.

As always, please feel free to reply with any questions.

Thanks for reading!

Jeff B.