Leadership magazine May/June 2015 V 44 No 5 | Page 22

LEARNING TO CAREER PATHWAYS
To prepare students for jobs in
emerging fields, schools should
begin with understanding student
interest, then backwards-design a
plan that links to the marketplace.

22

Leadership

T

he deliberate move to build
community partnerships and
align industry needs with educational pathways is fundamental to our long-term sustainability – not
only as a profession, but also as a country.
The need to prepare students for these jobs,
many of which are in emerging fields and
do not yet exist, creates a central challenge
for schools to authentically reach out to the
private sector.
The sincere desire to teach skills that
match the fundamental needs of business
and ensure that students are college and career ready is offset by an emerging accountability and assessment system that has led to
high anxiety among teachers. Presumptive,
narrowly focused district implementation of
Common Core transition schemes are backing practitioners into corners and robbing
them of their ability to explore, question
and discover innovative pedagogy to truly
improve their effectiveness and learner engagement efforts.

It is clear that education is caught in a
vicious paradoxical dilemma – preparing
students to be economically viable while
creating a learning environment that truly
engages students to fully discover themselves and their passion. The issue is not
whether there is a creative and innovative
spirit with our learners; the central challenge in front of us is to get them to approach
their learning metacognitively and to allow
them to explore the skill sets that lead to entrepreneurship, hope and results. Ideally, we
would engage students by employing that
same approach with teachers and their craft.
Education is at a crossroad. With all of
the lip service being given to reaching out
to business and the private sector, it is clear
we need a different approach than that employed in the 1980s, when we were attempting to link potential jobs in the automotive
field with students right out of high school.

By Michael John Roe