Using Career Pathways /Career Academies as a Framework for Redesign
October 26, 2017 Transcript
[00:00:00]Good afternoon. My name is Sharon Acuff, Specialist for Marketing and Related Clusters in the Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education at the Virginia Department of Education. Welcome to the tenth of 15 video streaming sessions on Career and Technical Education programs and initiatives for the 2017-2018 school year. Today's video session will focus on using Career Pathways and Career Academies as a framework for design. This and the next session will be hosted by the Southern Regional Education Board. The Commonwealth of Virginia was a founding member of the nation's first interstate compact in 1948. Since then, SREB has worked with the Virginia Department of Education, policy makers, and post-secondary leaders to improve education in the state. A unique aspect of the work over the last three decades has been to link state policy with school practice. Since 1987, Virginia has been an active part of SREB's High Schools That Work school improvement network. Through that effort, SREB provides ongoing support to the Virginia Department of Education's Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education. These videos are one way in which SREB provides support. Schools and divisions may also receive support from SREB and many have used the High Schools That Work framework of Key Practices to guide their improvement efforts and have participated in workshops, such as Counseling for Careers, that have been provided through the Virginia Department of Education-SREB partnership. Please feel free to reach out to any of the video leaders for assistance in your schools.I'm very fortunate to have Scott Warren from SREB today. Scott is the Director of State and District Partnerships at SREB. During his 18 years at SREB, he has worked with multiple schools and divisions throughout Virginia and has led SREB's efforts to help large schools redesign into Career Academies. He leads a team of leadership consultants who assist schools and districts to align Career Pathways to workforce demands, connect pathways with postsecondary and improved instruction and student support within pathways. Prior to coming to SREB, Scott was a high school principal, assistant principal, and math teacher in Indiana and Kentucky and with the Department of Defense Dependent Schools in Germany.
Using Career Pathways /Career Academies as a Framework for Redesign
October 26, 2017 Transcript
[00:02:49]Thank you, Sharon. I have been at SREB for almost 18 years now, and during that time SREB has learned a lot about working with schools. The first lesson we have learned is that success with students in the 21st century is really dependent upon them finding purpose in high school. Quite simply, students need to see that high school leads to something. The great thing about the focus on Career Pathways and Career Academies is that it provides that purpose to students. In fact, just last month, Phi Delta Kappan did their annual study of both students and parents, and parents think this is important too. 86% of parents indicated they want students to take classes that will lead to certifications and potential future employment. 82% said they want students to have the opportunity to take those classes in place of other academic classes. So we all agree that finding purpose is important, and in this session we're going to talk a little bit about two elements of that: developing Career Pathways for students and, in larger high schools, organizing the school into Career Academies as ways for any high school to improve. What has SREB learned about school improvement? It's really a domino effect. To change achievement we have found we have to change student effort. And we've found to change student effort, we have to change adult practices. And for years we've heard the term rigor, relevance, and relationships, and we have found that, although those are very, very true, we may have been talking about them in the reverse order. And we really may need to start with the idea of creating positive relationships with students, ensuring that the learning experiences are relevant to them and lead to future employment, future careers, and at that point then we can focus in on the rigor of the assignments and what is taking place in the classroom. So in essence, one of the things we believe wholeheartedly is Career Pathways and Career Academies provide opportunities to build the relationships, provide relevant learning experiences, and allow teachers the opportunity to create those regular assignments and assessments that result in schools making major improvements. Now the next slide talks specifically about designing with pathways and why it is important, and I'm going to focus on one of the highlighted items. Some teachers do not feel a part of school improvement or evaluation process. Over the years, SREB has found they've gone into many schools, and we find that school improvement is left up to the English and math teachers, as an example, because they're the ones teaching in the tested areas. In other schools it's just whatever the tested subjects happen to be. They're the ones that all the school improvement focus is placed on. Yet we know that Career Technical programs, art programs, other programs have a tremendous value added academically, and we all need to be involved in improvement. I'm an old basketball coach, and I just wonder how good my teams would have been if I would have just focused on 10% of the players when I was working with them in practice. We find that many times in school improvement that's what is happening. We're focusing on a very small select group of teachers for improvement, and we believe Career Pathways, Career Academies expand that focus to all teachers and can make a tremendous differences in achievement in schools. One other thing, reason why we think it's important to focus on Career Pathways and Career Academies is some recent data that has come out about the jobs of today and the past. This particular slides shows data all the way back to 1973 up through 2016. And I want to point out back in 1973 about three-quarters of the jobs in America required a high-school diploma or less.
Using Career Pathways /Career Academies as a Framework for Redesign
October 26, 2017 Transcript
[00:08:37]I do want to highlight what we believe divisions, districts, schools can do to go through this process to align their pathways, ensure that they are appropriate, and in some cases revise or replace some specific pathways offered in the school. The first step we recommend is the idea of a Career Pathway audit or review. I don't like the term audit. I think it is really a review to look at what your current pathways are, how they align to workforce needs, and how effective they are in meeting those needs. The pathway review at SREB and and others do these type reviews where they send in an outside team to look at the school. In many cases they do it division wide or district wide. And they look not only at the data on what pathways are offered, but the actually go in and look at the instruction taking place in the pathways. They talk with students, teachers about the pathways and provide a set of recommendations to the school to investigate as they move forward in this process. The next step we recommend is that either a school or a division go through a series of Career Pathway workshops that bring the partners into the discussion. And they look at what opportunities are available in the community, region and listen to the business and industry partners about what the skills they feel the graduates are lacking as they come out into the workforce to help in determining the skills needed within each pathway. They involve the postsecondary partners in these workshops so that they can help make decisions about how they may better align the work. One of the things that SREB has found in its research across the 16 SREB states is there's often tremendous misalignment between the secondary Career Pathways and postsecondary Career Pathways, and so the purpose of the postsecondary being involved is to help eliminate those misalignment opportunities. One of the things that we think is critical in this process and often happens in some of the latter workshops in this Career Pathways series is to really be intentional in creating a system of exploration that begins at the elementary level. If we want students to make good decisions about careers, that they select careers that they have a passion in and are in need, then we need to do as good a job as possible at helping them learn about what those options are in the school, the community, in the region. The lastly is really about expectations. Once this process is done and is developed that we go through a process of ensuring that every student has and completes an intellectually demanding Career Pathway. That it's not just for a few, it's for all. And there's a saying that we use in our Counseling for Careers work that college is not the goal, a career is the goal. College is one avenue in which to achieve that goal. We want, we believe every student will put forth greater effort in high school, greater effort in middle school, if they see a purpose in school, they see it leading to a career. And therefore we think it's important that every student have such a Career Pathway to help guide their work. And SREB stands ready to support any school in this process or division. As I said, it's often done across an entire district rather than individual schools, but it's essential that, we believe, every student complete a challenging Career Pathway.
Using Career Pathways /Career Academies as a Framework for Redesign
October 26, 2017 Transcript
[00:13:17]For larger schools, we recommend they look at not just having Career Pathways but organizing those pathways into Career Academies.The idea of a Career Academy is that they link multiple Academic and Career Pathways together in a broad career field. It's almost, you've heard multiple terms about it in the past, it's almost a school within a school type of situation. Often ones, not the only ones, but often ones include a Health Academy, a Business and Finance Academy, possibly a STEM Academy. I know very important over on the coast in Virginia is things like a Transportation Academy. But the things about Career Academies, it's a team of teachers both academic and technical that work collaboratively with a common group of students, a cohort of students, for both academic and career courses. The essence is a school-within-a-school framework. It takes the large school and I jokingly say it turns it into Cheers. It's where everybody knows their name type of situation. Some of the lessons SREB and High Schools that Work have learned about Career Academies is that we have found there are some key elements that are essential if they're going to be effective. First they are semi-autonomous. By that I mean they have some ownership of the decision-making they do. They are working with a common group of students, common group of teachers, and they may do some things a bit different. Now they don't have complete autonomy where they can do everything absolutely in their own ways, but they have some. They're able to do some things in different ways in this process. Typically they are somewhere in the neighborhood of three hundred to five hundred students in an Academy. If you get much smaller than that, it is difficult for scheduling for a teacher to be just in one Academy. If you get much larger than that 500 number, then you run into issues with the relationships piece, everybody knowing their name type of situation. There are both Academic Pathways and Career Pathways in each Academy. It may be that you have an AP Pathway within the Academy. It may be that you have within the Business and Marketing Academy you have multiple different Career Pathways a student can follow aligned with Business and Marketing. Now there are situations in small schools to where they may form what is known as a Pocket Academy, where there's one specific pathway or area that really lends itself to teachers working collaboratively to support the students to where they may form, such as a math and science teacher may work with a Career Tech teacher in a STEM Academy to form a STEM Pocket Academy. And that's kind of a unique situation that may occur in a small school. One of the lessons we've learned in this work is that if you're looking to form Career Academies, don't do it in isolation. Start with involvement with the business and post-secondary partners. Bring them in and help them in design. A lesson many schools have learned is they've built their Academies, then went out and tried to involve business and industry and postsecondary, and they found it very difficult. If you've got them at the table from the beginning, we find that the opportunities for blending and supporting are so much more likely to occur. I mentioned this one on the slide prior, but something we think is critical is they have that common cohort of students. The teachers also have common planning where they talk about those students, they can plan common instruction or integrated instruction. They work together as a unit with a unit of students. A unique aspect of the work SREB has promoted with Career Academies, and we find it a critical element in our work with schools, is that you need to create a leadership structure to where there is a person within each Academy whose primary role is improving instruction. We often use a triad approach with the leadership within an Academy. Triad being an assistant principal that is over an Academy, an instructional lead which may be a lead teacher in the Academy, and a guidance counselor within each Academy. Now I realize some schools don't have this the size or the staffing to be able to accomplish that in the ideal situation, but the thing that I say is we want to try to as much as possible approach ideal, and having that person who has a primary focus on instruction is critical. I've worked with schools in the past that didn't have the staffing to be able to accomplish that across all their Academies, but they had an instructional lead that served as the instructional expert across all the Academies. And lastly, and this is highlighted in red for a specific reason, Career Academies cannot be a sorting mechanism. They are not there to separate students out, gifted and various levels of need, that they have to be heterogeneous across all the academies.