Posts published on August 3, 2010

Can Career Theme Secondary Schools Enhance College Readiness?

The Irvine foundation has provided money for development of career themes and 4- year college preparation in the same high school. This keeps the college door open, but enables significant focus on a career cluster.

Over the past 10 years, many of California’s high schools have gotten worse, according to The San Francisco Chronicle. In an encouraging trend, however, thousands of high schoolers across California have joined an educational approach called Linked Learning, which changes the way core academics are taught by combining classroom learning with real-world, work-based experience. The idea behind Linked Learning is simple: To make it easier for students to stay engaged, coursework must be relevant to their aspirations. For instance, at Skyline High School in Oakland, Calif., every 10th-grader chooses from seven different career-themed programs where they spend the next three years combining out-of-school internships in their academy field with a rigorous academic core, taught through the lens of their industry theme, which qualifies every student for college. Teachers are trained to incorporate this work-based experience into the classroom, and vice versa. In Skyline’s architecture academy, for example, algebra and physics teachers show their students how the formulas they’re learning are used in real-world projects like building bridges or designing buildings. The Chronicle describes one student, Cynthia Gutierrez, who entered high school “bored” and garnered mostly Cs and Ds her first year. In the 10th grade, she joined the education academy, centered on careers in education. “Before, I couldn’t really connect with my teachers all that well,” Gutierrez says. “But in the academy, it was different.” Gutierrez’s grades improved despite a more demanding course load, and have qualified her for admission to the state university system.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/07/24/IN1K1EGR92.DTL#ixzz0uz2DMpfp

Source: PEN newsblast