You may have heard about some of the recent efforts in Minnesota to build a better, highly-skilled workforce such as Skills@Work (http://www.gwdc.org/initiatives/skills_at_work.html) and the Workforce Assessment. http://www.mnscu.edu/business/workforceassessment/index.html.? I recently attended listening sessions where business executives shared their needs and the challenges they are seeing related to workforce.? Problem-solving, creative thinking, communicating, and teamwork are common skills that are missing.
As far back as 2006, the ITEA (International Technology Education Association), NASA, and the National Science Foundation were pushing for more hands-on, technology education courses to be integrated into the ?normal? high school curriculum. These courses are often the first to be eliminated in strained budget cuts and if they do exist, they are electives that compete with the required curriculum (http://www.iteea.org/AboutITEEA/AdvocacyBro.pdf). Add to this the impacts of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (No Child Left Behind), and our students and teachers are truly challenged to fit in hands-on learning opportunities.
I received an email from a teacher indicating that some current changes in the Minnesota standards (http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/GradReq/index.html) are leading to a high probability that students won?t be able to fit in a specialized course related to environmental science and energy. This is in reference to the standard that requires students in the graduating class of 2015 and beyond to have three science credits that includes one biology credit and one physics or chemistry. As a high school student, I would need to take biology and physics or chemistry. That leaves just one elective in the three credits that might be fulfilled by an Agriculture or Career and Technical Education (CTE) credit. Unless there is a CTE course that also meets the standards underlying the chemistry or physics credit.
It is often the ?extra? courses that provide students with the opportunity to have more hands-on experiences, work with team projects, look at things in a different way, and creatively work to solve problems. Technology education courses also enable students to survey areas in which they have an interest, aptitude, or career aspirations and provide an excellent opportunity to learn about industry and technology. These types of courses emphasize learning through hands-on activities coupled with the rigor of other academic areas.
I am thinking back to what I heard our businesses say is missing in young workers and I?m reminded of a Steve Jobs excerpt, ?Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn?t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That?s because they were able to connect experiences they?ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they?ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that?s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven?t had very diverse experiences. So they don?t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.? ~ Wired, February, 1996
Young people having more opportunities to experience many different things through experiential learning could go a long way to developing the next generation of the thinkers, entrepreneurs, and leaders we need in the future.? Just trying to connect my recent discussions and wonder what our business executives think about the requirements of the secondary education system!
Source: http://mncore.com/connecting-the-dots/
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