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Northlakes High School

Northlakes High School

Opportunities for Future Success

Telephone02 4390 0555

Emailnorthlake-h.school@det.nsw.edu.au

AVID

AVID at Northlakes High School

AVID stands for Advancement Via Individual Determination and has been a successful program at Northlakes High School since 2015.

AVID’s mission is to close the achievement gap by preparing all students for university and work readiness and success in a global society.

Employers seek employees who have strong interpersonal skills, communicate well, and have the ability to develop creative solutions to new problems in collaborative ways.  

WICOR is the core teaching methodology of AVID that delivers these skills.  WICOR represents:

Writing – The use of Cornell Notes in all classes.  Writing requiring students to consider issues in new, complex ways, contributing to self-knowledge, and helping them to clarify and order experience and ideas.

Inquiry – To understand the content being presented in their subject areas, it is essential for students to learn to think critically and to ask higher levels of questions.

Collaboration – AVID’s better earning strategies involve collaborative activities where students help each other learn, thereby strengthening their own learning.

Organisation – Students face competing priorities that are often overwhelming, organisational skills are critical to success in academic and social situations.

Reading - AVID’s approach to “critical reading” provides common-sense and research-based strategies designed to help students read more effectively. Students are connecting reading material to prior knowledge, understanding the structure of texts, and using text-processing strategies during and after reading to improve comprehension.

Every student in every class at Northlakes High School is supported in developing and implementing successful AVID strategies.  Students will be using Cornell Notes, learning logs, quickwrites, critical reading, philosophical chairs and many other strategies in all classes.

The targeted AVID class is a university and work readiness program with the mission of ‘closing the achievement gap’. It targets students who have the desire to achieve academic success and attend university with the willingness to commit to working hard to achieve their goal. The program incorporates systematic training in note taking, questioning techniques, organisational skills and weekly Tutorials where AVID students work with university tutors to provide intensive support for learning in weekly timetabled AVID periods.