This article I wrote was published in the June 11 edition of EducationNews.org (http://www.educationnews.org/ed_reports/92710.html). This is another indication that the work we are all doing is valued. Hope you enjoy.
Assuring Meaningful School Work: A Career Context
Andrew Rothstein, Ph.D.
Senior Director, Curriculum & Assessment
National Academy Foundation
It was noon on a Saturday when my son, still in high school at the time, walked into the kitchen to have breakfast. I was watching a TV show about education while my son was trying to shake off his adolescent morning grogginess.
The debate caught my son’s attention when one of the panelists stressed the importance of “raising the bar” for students. He swallowed and looked up at me. He asked, “Dad, doesn’t ‘raising the bar’ mean making school harder?”
“I think so,” I said.
He grunted and said, “That’ll never work. More kids‘ll just quit.” Then he went back to his cereal.
My son’s reaction wasn’t unusual among his friends. While there is no guarantee that anything taught to students will strike them as interesting, it’s clear that more demands and harder work is not enough to motivate reluctant students.
One approach to engaging students is teaching content in a professional context. This increases the likelihood that students will acquire valuable skills, generate relevance, and see their education as a step toward long term career options rather than just compliance with the demands of the educational system. Creating career-contextualized curriculum starts with engaging professionals about what they experience and think about. It makes it easier to create integrated curriculum around professionally authentic project-based learning and workplace learning, embed literacy instruction into career studies, and define rigor in a way the makes learning attractive.
Raising the bar is one of those phrases we educators hear or use to describe expecting more from our students. What any one person means by that phrase varies widely, however. The context my son put it into is more dull work. The way I interpreted it was expecting more creativity, professionalism, complexity, and purpose. The interpretations were miles apart. If the phase meant more hours of repetitive and dull worksheets or memorizing trivial facts, he wanted no part of it and thought none of his friends would either.
When my son made this comment, I asked him to share his gripes about school beyond it being hard and boring. He told me that he did not see much purpose to things he learned beyond learning what teachers told him to learn.
His views not being uncommon among many students, it seems worth considering how to “raise the bar” in a way that makes learning more interesting and not just harder, while contextualizing learning in careers that actually apply the knowledge being conveyed in school.
Integrated Curriculum and Project-based Learning
In almost every career, professionals integrate knowledge from a variety of disciplines on a daily basis. Those who enjoy their work tend to point to aspects of their jobs in which they bring together many of their skills and talents to solve interesting challenges. They get great satisfaction in being part of well-functioning teams.
My father was a CPA and constantly advised me to go into another line of work. As fate would have it, I end up as an educator who has the task of designing accounting courses for high school students. Since my father is no longer alive, I went to a friend of mine who happens to be an accountant and asked him if he ever recalled working on a project that really got him excited. Here is what he told me:
I joined the Depository Trust Company in 1990 as an Internal Auditor. On my first day, they put me on a mail van out to Long Island in order to work on a special project. I was confused by this because nobody would tell me what it was about “until I arrived at the unknown location”. I was told not to ask so many questions. It was a bit bizarre.
Once I arrived I learned why there was such security and ambiguity about the task at hand. The entire audit and finance Departments were to work on a special project for the New York Stock Exchange and the Investment community. The holding company of all “Street-Named Securities” was in crisis.
The location I was at looked like a regular building in Garden City, Long Island but once inside there were scores of uniformed guards and gated areas. This location housed trillions of dollars of bearer bonds for the brokerage industry. The crisis was that DTC had received millions of dollars in interest payment that it did not know who the rightful owners were.
My department was given the task of developing a system of applying those funds to the rightful owners of the securities. I, personally, was given a 100 page list of all the monies that were received and unapplied. I had to find the rightful owner by looking through microfiche and hardcopies of reports in order to match up cusip numbers and accounts numbers. This was very complicated, as I first had to be given an orientation on Wall Street jargon and procedures. This was my first day on the job and I was very anxious because of the importance of what I was supposed to do and the fact that there was no obvious solution.
I took a complex process and broke it down into a simple system and slowly but surely married off the monies to the proper brokerage firms. The report and process is still in existence and is called the Berky report. I still speak with some lifers at DTC and they actually call me a legend.
Notice this story unfolds, with its elements of risk, the unknown, and responsibility for designing a solution, mastering a new vocabulary, and then implementing the process to a successful conclusion. Above all, notice how proud he is of what he did and its impact.
If we can replicate the elements of a positive work environment in the high school, then students are likely to feel gratification and relevance in their work. By creating career-contextualized curriculum, we can apply the experience of professionals excited about their work to the learning environment, thus establishing guideposts for teachers to make learning relevant and connecting what sometimes appear to be unrelated subjects. This approach helps give coherence to instruction and avoid teaching skills in isolation. It is also more likely to prepare young people to succeed in their future workplaces.
An integrated, rigorous curriculum leads to essential skills and deeper understanding of content. The organization of instruction into projects facilitates linking those concepts.
There is forty years of accumulated evidence that the instructional strategies and procedures that make up standards-focused Project Based Learning are effective in building deep content understanding, raising academic achievement and encouraging student motivation to learn. Professionally authentic curriculum design can be achieved though a series of logical steps.
The Buck Institute for Education (www.bie.org)
Designing and implementing project-based learning is both challenging and rewarding, and can be used in almost any discipline. One of the most promising approaches to using project-based learning is to link the projects to career themes.
Professionals work on projects. They have to manage their own workloads, set objectives, pull together resources, integrate disciplines, work well with others, and share their work. When students work on projects that have these components, their engagement increases and the relevance of their efforts is much clearer.
Organizing the high school day into periods for specific subjects has been around for a long time and serves some very important purposes, including the understandable function of determining time devoted to a particular area of study and scheduling. However, when subjects are taught in isolation, students are left to their own devices to make connections and understand how concepts come together outside of school. Thinking in an integrated way is essential to both professional and daily life and can be reflected in a career oriented curriculum.
Embedding Literacy
Once students leave elementary school, the responsibility for developing literacy skills gradually becomes the province of English teachers or special instructors. However, every subject area comes with a special vocabulary and genres. Establishing guidelines for what vocabulary needs to be taught helps educators focus on using instructional time efficiently and ensuring that the terminology outlined is of long term value to students.
Three guidelines that are practical are:
• Importance and Utility: Words that appear frequently across a variety of domains.
• Instructional Potential: Words that can be used in a variety of ways so that students can build rich representations of them and their connections to other words and concepts.
• Conceptual Understanding: Words for which students understand the general concept but provide precision & specificity in describing the concept.
Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction (Beck, McKeown, Kucan)
English teachers spend a great deal of time teaching students literary genres and subject area teachers tend to spend little time teaching non-literacy genres, including professional ones. The reality is that all subject areas have genres characterized by typical styles, forms, and content. Readers and writers benefit from knowing the characteristics of the genres they work in because that improves their ability to organize their thinking and follow the pattern of reading material they encounter.
Professional text is generally organized into predictable genres. For example, finance professionals are generally familiar with the annual report, proposal for services, prospectus, and financial statement. Each of these has predictable content and form. The practiced reader of these genres has an advantage over the novice because they know the underlying logic and where to find key information quickly. Teaching professional genres directly increases literacy power.
Vocabulary instruction that goes beyond memorization requires a more constructive approach to developing meaning. In contrast to simply providing students a definition of key terms, it is more powerful to give students a format for defining terms, have them complete the format through readings, lectures, and research, share their definitions with peers and professionals, and then compare and contrast the terms.
In a lesson on financial planning, for instance, students are expected to demonstrate teamwork and cooperation by framing and analyzing the meaning of financial independence. For the pre-reading activity, students share what they think of when they hear the word independence and then create a definition of financial independence.
The students read two vignettes that show different attitudes toward financial independence. They use the Defining Format (Rothstein, Rothstein, & Lauber, 2007) to record the characteristics of financial independence that they gleaned from the reading. Students work with partners and eventually support a full class discussion to arrive at both personal and class working definitions of the term.
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is an economics status
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The Potential a Career-Contextualized Curriculum Unlocks
By 2008, major public scandals had hit the nation’s financial systems. A serious question arose about how we educated people about ethics in business. The National Academy Foundation (NAF) was creating a new Academy of Finance curriculum and was interested in how to treat ethics for high school students who aspired to financial careers. At the same time, Ernst & Young, one of the country’s largest accounting firms, was looking to educate young people who might eventually become part of their workforce or in companies they serve. NAF and Ernst & Young decided to create an Ethics in Business course together.
The process was highly collaborative, involving Ernst & Young employees, NAF Academy teachers, curriculum writers from the Pearson Charitable Foundation, and other professionals in the field. We felt we had to tie in the daily ethical issues that teenagers confront and link them to the business world. The curriculum development team considered a wide range of ethical dilemmas that students could consider, debate and address. The result was a course where students focus on the significance of ethics in both their own environment and the business environment. They consider ethical issues that involve multiple stakeholders; examine who bears responsibility for monitoring ethics; and explore ethical situations common in organizations. Students examine how ethics affects various business disciplines and consider the impacts on organizational cultures. Students also explore ethics as social responsibility, the evolution of ethics in international business, and how the free market and ethics can coexist.
The course is built around a major project in which students select a corporation they may want to work for in the future. They work in groups to investigate and create a case study about the company. As students take part in lessons on ethical working conditions, ethical vs. unethical industries, corporate social responsibility, community involvement, sustainability, and global business practices, they research and analyze the business practices of their case corporations in these areas. The driving question for the project is, “Does Company X meet my ethical standards as a potential employer?”
Once the course was developed and was being taught in the classroom, it became a vehicle for student engagement with professionals. This is how it played out at Lincoln High School Academy of Finance in San Francisco in a course on Ethics in Business:
Three students decided to study Target Stores – because they all shop there and loved the store. One of the students, Marianna Ramirez arranged for the Human Resources director visited the class.
What resulted was a lively discussion over whether employees should be unionized. The Target representative defended the company’s position of not allowing unions while some student challenged him on the need for unionization.
Here is what Marianna has to say about her experience in the Ethics course:
“Ethics was a course in which students had the chance to speak their mind about what they thought about the work environment. This course taught me how to act and maintain ethical thinking at work. We had debates, and in these debates we all had different opinions. Some people might think, “Those kids are in high school they just follow the crowd everyone thinks the same. Well, we all had voices in this class. There was a way for my classmates to acknowledge my perspective and now I know that I can make a difference in my Latino community by taking a chance to make a change. I have nothing to lose and everything to gain.”
How to Get Started
Career orientation gives students a sense of how their interests and passions can translate into occupations they might enjoy. Traditional core subjects all have careers associated with them, so career themes are not limited to the vocations that have historically been their focus. The steps in creating such an orientation requires designing content that is informed by professional practice.
Career Analysis
What are the likely growth careers of the 21 st century and how does one find out what will be expected of them?
A key to avoiding irrelevant content and busywork is to know what professionals are expected to know. For an initial overview of various careers, look at the Department of Labor (www.dol.gov/dol/topic/statistics/occupations.htm), the States’ Career Clusters (www.careerclusters.org), or Career One Stop (www.careeronestop.org). There are also a myriad of industry specific organizations that post additional career information.
Involve the Pros
Web sites are excellent starting point, but nothing informs authentic professional oriented project design more than asking practitioners about what they do and how they do it. As with the example above, many professionals are eager to share their expertise with young people. Thousands of professionals across the country willingly give time that can be used to design projects that replicate professional projects.
When professionals are involved in the construction of curriculum, they become more vested in the results of their advice. While it is vital to respect the hectic schedules of busy working people, there are many who can and will contribute time to meet with students, examine their projects, and give guidance to students. NAF estimates that more than 3,000 local Advisory Board members from almost 2,500 partner companies are currently working in its career academies across the country. Many others support career academies not associated with NAF.
There are a number of organizations that can be approached to find professionals to volunteer in schools, such as the Chambers of Commerce and Workforce Development or Education Development Committees.
Each project should have a strong driving question and characteristics that students will find engaging. A perspective that NAF found very useful in designing projects that will get students excited was offered by Strong, Silver, and Pirini (2001). It said that projects should have four components: complexity, emotion, provocativeness, and ambiguity. Such project characteristics are reflected in what Marianna wrote about her experience in the Ethics in Business course. She saw the range of views and the provocative challenges associated with a debate about ethics.
High School, Inc, in Hartford, Connecticut, was launched last year with The Travelers as a lead and financial partner. The advisory board of the Academy has an advisory board whose members go into the classrooms to give presentations along with spending extra time after school providing tutoring.
Beyond this, career oriented courses can contain lessons where students analyze careers through research and meeting with experts. For example, when studying computer systems, students examine the requirements and job prospects for Systems Administrator, Systems Engineer, Hardware Engineer, and Systems Analyst. Their research would reveal that the U.S. Department of Labor ( http://www.bls.gov/oco/cg/cgs033.htm ) projects that computer systems jobs il experience wage-and-salary employment to grow 45 percent from 2008 to 2018, about 4 times as fast as the 11 percent growth projected for all industries combined. In addition, this industry will add about 656,400 jobs over the decade, placing it among the 5 industries with the largest job growth. An increasing reliance on information technology will spur demand for computer systems design and related services. Organizations will continue to turn to firms in this industry to maximize their return on investments in equipment, and to help them satisfy their growing computing needs.
Conclusion
Expanding the traditional high school instructional approach with a focus on project-based career education and workplace learning has proven to be a solid approach to addressing the challenges of engaging reluctant learners. It helps focus instruction on relevant information and give a deeper sense of purpose to the content. It can be tied easily to literacy instruction, traditional core academics, and community involvement. In addition, it demonstrates the interrelatedness of many subjects while helping students look ahead to their futures.
Bibliography
Beck, I.L. , McKeown, M.G., Kucan, L. Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction (Guilford Press, New York, 2010).
Bridgeland, J.M., Balfanz, R., Moore, L.A., Friqnt, R.S., Raising Their Voices: Engaging Students, Teachers, and Parents to Help End the High School Dropout Epidemic (Civic Enterprises in Association with Peter Hart Associates, ATT Foundation & America’s Promise, March, 2010)
Bridgeland, J.M, DiIulio, Jr., J.J., Morison, K.B., The Silent Epidemic: Perspectives of High School Dropouts ( A report by Civic Enterprises in association with Peter D. Hart Research Associates for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, March, 2006)
National Academy Foundation. Preparing Youth for Life: The Gold Standards for High School Internships (www.naf.org/internship-gold-standards)
Rothstein, A., Rothstein, E., and Lauber, G. Writing-As-Learning (Corwin Press, Thousand Oaks, CA, 2007)
Strong, R.W., Silver, H.F., Berini, M.J., Teaching What Matters Most: Standards and Strategies for Raising Student Achievement (ASCD, Arlington, VA, 2001)
Wagner, T., Reinventing Teaching and Learning, (Presentation, Harvard University, 2008)