Middle School CTE
Career and Technical Education (CATE)
multimedia presentation on CTE
Hello, and welcome to middle school career and technical education. My name is Camden roe V, and this is my original contribution for my capstone experience for curriculum and instruction at the American college of education, so today we are going to be talking about four different career and technical education topics, or CTE topics. First of all, we're going to talk about what is career and technical education or CTE. Then we'll talk about the need for CTE in middle school. Next, we'll learn about a middle school CTE pilot project in Emmett, Idaho, and then finally, we'll consider future growth in career and technical education, so what is career and technical education, well, career and technical education or CTE, is commonly referred to as vocational training or hands on learning.
Now, if you look to the pictures off to the side, you'll see hands on learning myself being taught by the automotive teacher at the high school, how to do an alignment on my vehicle. Likewise, students obtain training from real life experiences just like doing that alignment that ready them for high wage, high skill and high demand careers. Traditionally, students begin to take CTE courses at the high school. However, we're finding that many students don't have enough time to finish those courses, therefore we have a need for CTE at the middle school. However, many students do finish their CTE programs in high school, and those that don't, but have gone through all four years, may need to continue on at a community college. For example, a student in culinary may be able to finish with a career workplace readiness certificate in high school. However, somebody in the business, career and technical education program might need to finish at the community college.
So we have a need for CTE in the middle school. And some of that stems from the fact that students are unable to finish a program at the high school in four years. Sometimes that's because of students switching programs or not starting early enough. So we see from Armstrong and others that the Perkins act governs and funds CTE at both the second post secondary college and the secondary, middle and high school education levels. Now within this landscape, surprisingly little research has focused on literacy readiness within CTE content areas. However, CTE teachers realize that their times are literacy gaps with our students. So it's very important to work on literacy with our students. We also see that students are not only struggling with their literacy and English language arts, but they're also struggling with math and science. However, CTE and corporates these different disciplines through a cross curricular approach.
So when students are struggling with these, it can help them by taking a CTE class, therefore we see a need for CTE in the middle school to help students academically. Not only that, but it can help students get ready and prepared to graduate with a workplace readiness certificate in high school or to further their education in CTE at a community college. It's very important, though, that students start and finish before your plan in four years in high school. So it's important to open those different opportunities to students at the middle school level so they understand what is available to them. We see many times many students starting in the automotive program, and then going through that for a year, and then deciding that they want to do welding instead, starting that their sophomore year, but unable to complete that program by their senior year because they did not dedicate four years to that program. Therefore, the need for CTE in middle school is very important so we can make sure that students understand the CTE programs.
Now, students need to understand that there is rigor to the CTE course. They also need to understand the time commitment and the requirements of completing a CTE program. We want all students to graduate with a workplace readiness certificate if possible. We also want students to understand the options that are available to them in high school. So that means that teachers need to take personal interest in students so that they can help them pick up pathway during their high school years to complete in career and technical education. Teachers also need to create a curriculum that helps instruct students so that they can decide which program best suits them. That way we will alleviate that issue of starting in an automotive program and then switching to a welding program or starting in a business program and switching to a culinary program. Students have the opportunity to take more than two CTE programs in high school, but they have to dedicate their time appropriately.
So middle school students, they also create a four year plan without the middle school CTE program, they are unaware of the options available to them in high school, and they're just randomly choosing classes by their name. So really, we see a need for middle school CTE, that way students know what they're planning on doing in the future. So in Emmett Idaho, there was a middle school CTE pilot project that I was privileged to be a part of. Now when I received this assignment, I had no idea what I was doing. However, my education at the American college of education truly helped me. When I first tried to figure out what I was doing with the class, I asked myself a few questions. What are my parameters? What am I really teaching? What are my standards at the time the state had not come out with any standards for this pilot project? And then I also asked myself, and this was very important. What are the preconceived ideas of this class to stakeholders? Not only administrators, but also to parents because we want to see them involved in the classroom.
So innovation and sustainability were required when creating the curriculum. And again, the curriculum and instruction program really helped me while creating this curriculum for the middle school CTE pilot project. Now the curriculum I understood needed to address all diverse learners. Now typically when we think of diverse learners, we might think of somebody that's in special education. However, we all learn in different ways. So we are all diverse learners. So that was something that needed to be addressed. Also, sometimes some of these students are losing interest in school. So I felt that it was important to implement a positive behavior support system into my classroom because CTE was a new experience for these students, and it should be a positive experience. I wanted to reinforce those positive behaviors to make my class enjoyable, even though the school does not have a positive behavior support system. That was another approach that I learned at the American college of education that's a very important, not just for CTE, but any classroom. I also thought about a cross curricular approach, and that was because we see that students are struggling in ELA, math, science, and other disciplines.
So in that career and technical education class, I was able to address these issues and work with students on different items. For example, we made pancakes and students had to figure out the amount of ingredients that they needed. This was just one example, but I was able to implement that cross curricular approach into my classroom. And on a daily basis, students were able to use English language arts, math and science, and so they were able to relate these different disciplines to hands on and real life learning through the curriculum and instruction that I was giving them. So what does the project based and student focus curriculum really look like? Well, I came up with my own parameters for the class, which ended up being very similar to what the state later came out with. I created interest inventory, so personality surveys for the students to take to explore what they like to do, and then after they completed these interest inventories or personality surveys, we went through different units based on the available high school CTE courses. So for example, we would do about a week and a half of business, a week and a half of automotive, a week and a half of culinary, until we got through all 13 different CTE pathways that were available to them. And finally, each student was able to make their own for your plan.
Now, each individual student had a different four year plan and they were able to do it in an educated way because they had taken the middle school CTE class. So it's very important that we have middle school CTE in any school and any district. All right, so here we go to future growth. So students need to be exposed to career and technical education as soon as they enter middle school. That is a must. They need to be exposed to real world application. That way they're learning is taken home and they're able to become engaged with their traditional disciplines. So for example, with English or math or science, they're able to relate that to real world application. That's extremely important and career and technical education does that. Also, career and technical education needs to be extended to more than just one semester class in middle school.
Right now it's an 8th grade class for once the master and it's not long enough to do all of the interest inventories as well as the different units that are available or pathways that are available through the units, and it's also not long enough to create a four year plan. So we need more CTE classes in the middle school. More time so that students understand what's available to them. Now the ACT E, which is the association of career and technical educators, said that while career exploration has proven beneficial for middle grade students, programs and activities can be difficult to implement due to a lack of funding. A focus on core academic courses and overburdened school counselors. So what's going on right now is school counselors are being directed to help with these CTE programs. But they're not because they're school counselors. So they're not implementing that CTE. And then also there's a lack of funding, so we're not seeing CTE in every middle school.
So as teachers, we need to make sure that CTE is a part of every middle school. We also need to make sure that stakeholders, because they're an important part of any child's education, administrators, leaders, teacher leaders, that they all understand and buy into the importance of the middle school CTE programs, and we can even do some of that through collaboration during professional development or PLC time to help them to understand the CTE programs, specifically others, staff members at our school. And then finally, as teachers, we need to make sure that policymakers understand that middle school CTE is important and funding is in the necessity for our students so that they become successful adults. And that's our goal as teachers for them to become successful adults. So in conclusion, students enjoy hands on CTE learning. And this helps to motivate them to continue to finish their education. We want them to graduate from high school.
Middle school is the perfect time for students to start taking introductory CTE classes at an early age, and it was very beneficial for me to go through the American college of education with the curriculum and instruction due to the fact that this pilot project that I was a part of, I was able to come up with the curriculum and the instruction all on my own without state standards and be able to figure out what would be best for my students. So CTE really can be a cross curricular approach on its own and it can help students become successful with their traditional academics. We also see that students go through a CTE program when they do their able to obtain real life experience, and then they're able to go out and get a high wage, high skill, high demand, job, or career. So finally, the most important, we need funding to be available to start educating our students through CTE programs because it's very important that they start at the middle school level. Here are my references and thank you very much for listening to my capstone project.