High School and Higher Ed Faculty Working Together

Part 1

I am mourning the end of probably the best educational project I have been involved with. It's called SLATE - the Strategic Linking of Academics and Technical Education - and it has been funded for three years by the Irvine Foundation, and overseen by The Institute for Evidence-Based Change.

What we're doing is cutting edge in so many ways. We started with three groups of content area faculty from regional high schools, community colleges and universities. (We had been meeting as inter-segmental faculty Professional Learning Councils for about 5 years before getting the SLATE project handed to us by Irvine). Irvine is getting more and more involved with Linked Learning, and was intrigued by the fact that IEBC had inter-segmental groups already in place to dig their hands into this project. 

The assignment was to create lesson plans that combined a core content area with a CTE program offered at community colleges. The goal with this project, as with all linked learning projects, was to increase student engagement in learning by being able to apply what students are learning to real-work activities, and make it relevant. The question of "when will I ever use this in real life?" might be addressed with this type of thoughtful planning. To do this project, we had to recruit a few CTE faculty from the community college and gather their input on expectations, assignments and CTE standards. 

IEBC took this project one step further by training SLATE faculty in Understanding by Design lesson planning methods (my Wiggins and McTighe books are absolutely thrashed!) . Each lesson was to start with an essential question that shaped the entire lesson. This question is at the forefront of each lesson, each activity and each class discussion. In fact, we recommend this essential question get posted on butcher paper and hung in the classroom throughout the lesson.  

I will go into detail on our approach to this project, but first I must get through this mourning period. I have two more sessions left with my Contra Costa math, science, English and CTE teachers. Just two. Our work will be published in a guide for faculty, districts and, perhaps, policy makers. But the end product, this guide, is not where the meat is. Several other factors came into play that made this the best professional development I have ever been involved with. First, it was an intense and oftentimes frustrating learning-by- doing project. Second, it involved same-content teachers from both high school and higher education (which aded to alignment of expectations and deep discussions about teaching and learning). And third, it was a long-term project that created a tight sense of community among teachers. More to come.