Ask the Experts: Becoming Your Own Advocates

Q: How can middle school students become their own best advocates?

A: “You start with giving them small opportunities to be in charge of something of their own choosing,” says Sharon Baker, middle school director at Hathaway Brown School. “We have them run their own parent-teacher conferences, where they talk about what their strengths are, what their challenges are, and they ask for the support that they might need. At every turn, they’re being given opportunities to develop their voices. They become more resilient, so if they run into an obstacle — because they’ve been in charge of fixing something that might have been broken before — they don’t completely shut down. They know that they can move on. They become much more resilient and much more able to see an obstacle as an opportunity.”