In today's ever-changing society, teachers are being told to prepare students for jobs that don't even exist yet. They work on building their students' skills in communication, reading, science, and math. I personally have spent hours building presentations or worksheets to engage my high school students in rigorous skill-building with thoughts of their future in mind. I try to convince them, with scenarios from my life, that notetaking, vocabulary, and reading comprehension are real skills. Without fail, a student always asks, "When exactly will I use this in real life?"
You never want to answer with, "Because the Common Core State Standards or the school board says so." Though I can respond with examples from my life about critical thinking or college preparedness, this isn't what students are really asking. What students want is to add my lesson to the schema that they have created about life after high school. And it doesn't always fit.
Expanding Mindsets
Piaget's concept of schemata finds that these cognitive frameworks or concepts influence students' uptake of new information as they organize and interpret it (Tuckey, 2003). Students have predetermined stereotypes and expectations of how life will be after high school based on the schema they have generated with input from parents, teachers, friends, movies, and popular culture. Many of my students expect that they will not go to college because their parents did not attend or because of the expense, and so they plan on joining trades through our automotive or certified nursing assistant medical programs. Others don't see their bilingual heritage as an asset and consider construction or fast-food jobs the only options for the future. A few have told me they want to be car mechanics, join the Navy, or own their own salon or boutique. These are all honorable professions, but I also want to make sure students know they have the support to explore any option they desire, even if it feels out of reach or isn't what they originally imagined.
The good news is that psychologist Frederic Bartlett showed that schemas evolve over time with experiences (1932). How do stakeholders in students' futures—teachers, higher education professionals, and community members—expand students' expectations and give them a clearer, more nuanced picture of their options beyond high school?
Educators in secondary schools can help this evolution along by creating new and applicable experiences. At my school, that meant dividing teachers, administrators, and staff into teams focusing on different areas of student life, including professional development, athletics, community, college and career, sense of belonging, and alumni outreach. My team had the task of getting our community more involved in the school. We decided to bring in community members to shed light on local careers. Our local businesses are very supportive in providing student lunch discounts or athletic sponsorships, but students are less aware of this passive support. Our goal became to make the opportunities in our area visible.
Learning in Real Time
Each month for the past school year (up until COVID-19 closed schools), we invited a different community member to come and speak to students for a lunchtime program we called "Lunch with Leaders." We prioritized professionals who work in fields for which we did not already offer a CTE class. When in-person classes resume, we will extend invitations to a veterinarian, a local restaurant chef, and a construction project manager who rebuilt our gym.
Before presenters arrived, we emailed talking points generated from questions we'd heard students most commonly ask. Each presenter would explain why they chose to get into their work, what educational experiences led to their career path, what advice they would give their younger selves, and how students might get started in a similar career.
We asked students to sign up in advance and publicized the program with the student council's help. I was skeptical that we would fill even half of the allotted 25 spaces for the first lunch, but to my delight, 18 students arrived at the library to listen to two sergeants from the Air Force 367 Training Support Squadron present on coding in the military. One sergeant shared his story of attending college for computer programming and then joining the military. The other joined right out of high school and had a self-taught approach.
I watched as barriers between adults and students came down. They talked about their shared love of all things tech; issues students had encountered in tech class assignments or passion projects; and, more importantly, examples based on the real world of work. When the lunch bell rang, conversation was still in full swing.
Later, in a lull during 5th period, one of my more introverted students approached me. He asked simply, "Do you think you could get a mechanical engineer for next month?" A fellow classmate heard him, realized he had missed the event, and responded, "They were from the Air Force? Man, I want to join the Air Force, can I get his number?" This one moment showed me the power of this approach. My colleagues heard similar reactions from their students. We had made a career field approachable and accessible by giving it a human face. We also had student feedback that there was a need for them to have access to more of these opportunities.
When in-person school resumes, our team plans to continue the Lunch with Leaders series and add a short student reflection survey at the end to improve our data collection. These connections to the community already exist; one must simply activate them. This opportunity may not answer all students' questions about real-world applications, but it helps them to evolve that schemata and think, "What if ...?"
