This summer, CommonAction is presenting two professional development sessions on Meaningful Student Involvement in Career and Technical Education. Scott LeDuc, a master teacher/trainer with CommonAction, and myself will spend two days with teachers from Bethel School District in Spanaway, Washington, covering this powerful integration of new roles for students as partners with lifelong learning and livelihood education.
Here are the descriptions from Bethel School District’s professional development catalogue. Participants may attend both sessions, but it is not necessary to attend both because they are not sequential.
Day One (Monday, August 20, 2012)
Engaging Students as Partners in CTE—This session will introduce participants to Adam Fletcher’s nationally-recognized “Frameworks for Meaningful Student Involvement.” Participants will explore the main elements, principles, key characteristics, and barriers to engaging students as partners in CTE. You will have the opportunity to use our popular “Types of Meaningful Student Involvement” and learn about our evaluation tools.
Throughout the session, participants examine real classroom case studies where students are powerfully engaged through Meaningful Student Involvement to meet 21st century learning goals through CTE. Hands-on and interactive activities, practical exercises, and meaningful examples will allow you to draw on your own knowledge and experiences to enhance student engagement in your classroom.
Day Two (Tuesday, August 21, 2012)
Integrating Student Engagement into CTE—Participants in this session will explore the relationship of Meaningful Student Involvement to 21st century learning goals. Focusing on Adam Fletcher’s nationally-recognized “Frameworks for Meaningful Student Involvement” and 21st Century Skills, participants will identify how to practically incorporate these skills into existing classroom approaches.
The session will be very interactive, emphasizing classroom applications and shared knowledge. With Meaningful Student Involvement as a recognized high-quality standard in schools across the US and Canada, participants will discover how to infuse practical standards into their classroom design and implementation.
By the end of this session, participants will have gained new abilities focused on teaching 21st Century Skills, discovered new avenues to promote positive, powerful student behavior, and learned effective ways to integrate feedback from students into classroom activities. You will also have begun focused planning to apply this new knowledge.
We’re excited to move further into CTE, and look forward to sharing our expertise. Scott has been a CTE teacher for over a decade, and is passionately committed to moving the field forward. This builds on past CTE and STEM-related work we have done, including working in the fields of technology education, student leadership organizations, and others. CommonAction’s SoundOut program has always been about real world and real life skills, and we’re looking forward to n connecting schools to academics and training they need to bring students on board as partners in this field.
Adam F.C. Fletcher 