Corey Mohn and Shameka Montgomery on Next Gen Career Education

You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast where we unpack what is new and innovative in education. Corey Moan is executive director of the Blue Valley Center for Advanced Professional Studies, also known as CAPS. This next generation career center supports five suburban Kansas City high schools with

what they call professions-based learning. It’s an applied project-based learning that immerses young people in the challenges of high wage, high growth jobs. The Next Gen Career Center has inspired a national network that includes more than 60 school districts.

One of those districts is Little Rock Public Schools where Shamika Montgomery is director of career development. Shamika joins Corey in this interview today to discuss how career education has changed in Little Rock. But quickly, before we get into today’s episode, I just wanted to share an email from Zandria

Brewer, a recent graduate of the Excel Careers for Advanced Professional Studies High School in Little Rock. Zandria shared her thanks for the program and said, It changed my life. I’ve always enjoyed learning, but I hated school because there wasn’t enough emphasis on doing what you’re passionate about.

I loved my teacher and I was determined to be the best because this was one of the best opportunities to present itself to me. The Excel Medical Strand gave me the freedom to learn what I love. It also gifted me with rapport, professional skills, access to resources and opportunities and people who share the same interests as me.

This program has helped me grow mentally, spiritually, professionally and educationally. School never taught me much about the real world, but being in Excel has. Hey, Corey Mone, welcome to the Getting Smart podcast. Thank you, Tom. It’s so good to be here with you.

We are so pleased to be joined by Shamika Montgomery. Hi, Shamika. Hello. How are you doing, Tom? I’m terrific.

You’re the director of career development in Little Rock, right? Yes, sir. You’ve been there for a while. How long? I’ve been in the district for 20 years and it feels like just yesterday.

That’s amazing. How long have you been director of career development? This is my fifth year. That’s great. We really appreciate your work in Little Rock.

I want to come back and talk about that. Corey, what is professions-based learning? Yes, professions-based learning for us in our model and what we see around other programs that are out there. Our model being Center for Advanced Professional Studies or CAPS and the CAPS Network is really

any effort in which we can take the curriculum and the learning of students and put the lens of what it means out in the quote-unquote real world. That lens is a direct, meaningful, authentic connection. It often involves project work where we are cultivating possibilities, providing students with a project to work on that goes beyond a simulated project or something that’s already

been kind of teed up or canned up for students, allowing for a lot of flexibility and for some of that randomness that we see in life when we get out in the work world to happen and fostering project management skills and team building skills and all of those things. Sometimes it involves more traditional elements like apprenticeships, internships, but really at the end of the day, it’s anything that would directly connect those students and

the teachers in the school or in the program to for-profit and non-profit professionals. Corey, you mentioned the Blue Valley Center for Advanced Professional Studies or CAPS. Blue Valley is a suburban Kansas City district. This is on the Kansas side. Maybe you could tell us the origin story of Blue Valley CAPS.

Yeah, absolutely. So really interesting. The district itself, as you mentioned, a suburban district, very well thought of nationally, always on traditional measurements historically has performed very well. The students have done a very nice job academically, but going back, gosh, more than 11 years now,

the program started in 2009, but if you go back a few years before that, there was a school board and a superintendent that was new to the district that both started asking really intentional questions about whether or not the students that were leaving Blue Valley to go on to their next stop, whether that was career or college, whether or not they were fully prepared for what they were going to experience.

And if you looked at traditional academic measures, they were, but the interesting thing was the feedback from those students on their college experience and also from the professionals in the community around Kansas City was that they were missing development of those professional skill sets. So how do you communicate?

How do you manage your time? How do you live at leadership? How do you feel comfortable being a self-advocate? Those things were missing. And so the origin story was those board members being willing to change a system that everyone

was recognizing as a successful one, a superintendent that was new and hungry to do something interesting and different, and culminating in a vision and a plan to move forward. And so then come 2009, 10 school year, that program launched with about 100 students getting out into the community. Actually students meeting off site.

There was no facility in the first year or center space for those students. So you had engineering students going to national, international engineering company, Black and Beach. You had business students going to the Sprint headquarters, which is in Overland Park, Kansas, and a few other sites that hosted DLR Group, another one that hosted our design engineering

students. And that was the beginning. And then from there, getting the word out, peers talking to peers, students getting excited, business partners providing projects and spaces and what was possible, what people saw as possible, expanded and kind of grew exponentially.

And to a program now that is in year 11 and supports over 600 students this semester from five different public high schools and a number of private high schools and even homeschool students. So it’s been quite a journey. I wanted to give a shout out to your founding director, Donna McDaniels, who is now educator

and residence at the Kauffman Foundation. Absolutely. Donna was the first executive director hired by the board and the superintendent at the time, Dr. Tom Trigg. When that kind of vision was established, there was a need for someone to step up and

be active with the work and try to do something that was pretty radical. And Donna came in with both experience in education and the business world. And for the first, gosh, I’ve got to do the math now, for the first five years of operation, I think it was, stepped in and helped to get the program off the ground. Shamiko, I guess two questions, sort of what caused your interest in a career education

and then how and when did you hear about CAPS and this idea of professions-based learning? Well, I was introduced to career education as a high school student, you know, taking those traditional classes like keyboarding and accounting and computer business applications. And so when I went to college, I decided to major in business education and I wanted to teach.

And so when I got into the teaching field, I could immediately see how students would perform better in a career-oriented class as compared to a core course. And so throughout my career, I’ve noticed that something was always different about students and the way they learn and the way career teachers taught as opposed to just a regular core teacher.

And so I was introduced to CAPS through my superintendent, Mike Poor, who started the CAPS program in Benville, Arkansas, the Ignite program. And when he was hard in Little Rock, he called me and said, hey, have you ever heard of CAPS? And I said, no. And I must admit, I was a little reluctant at first because I’ve been in career education

my whole life and I have experience in seeing, you know, how students perform differently in career ed. And I said, well, this is just we’re already doing this. We’ve been doing this in Little Rock for so long. And then when I got into the CAPS network and met Corey and got a new understanding

for what the CAPS model, what it does for students, because in traditional career ed, the authentic project-based learning was not there. And the network of business professionals wasn’t present where students actually had the opportunity or got the opportunity to interact with these people. So it’s not traditional career ed.

A CAPS is new, is innovative. And I can see how students have grown from being involved in our program, the Excel program. I want to come back and talk about your program. But Corey, so you’ve been at CAPS six years now? Yeah, hard to believe, like Shamika said.

Time really flies. Yeah, it’s been right at six years now. It’s interesting, Corey, that unlike Shamika, who’s a career educator, you’re an icon economic development guy. You’re an MBA sort of a policy guy.

So how did you hear about CAPS? What gave you interest in sort of why and how is your economic development background useful? Yeah, yeah. It’s really interesting how it all kind of came to be. And yeah, my background is really in economic development and entrepreneurship.

My interest in CAPS initially before there was ever an opportunity to step in and be a part of the program as executive director was in just the innovation of the idea of CAPS of this really powerful connection between industry and entrepreneurs and students and that young energy that comes from young people. One of our friends in the program, Clifton Talbert, who’s a well-known author and entrepreneur,

told us one time, there’s something magical that happens when you combine exuberance and experience. And the students bring all kinds of exuberance and certainly our teachers and our professionals and those of us that are so lucky to be a part of this kind of thing bring experience and those two things together are powerful.

So I saw it from a bit of a distance when I was working for the State Center for Entrepreneurship in the state of Kansas called Network Kansas and was in awe of it and thought it was really interesting. And then actually got connected in during a business meeting that had nothing to do with CAPS, someone that I was working with who said, you know, there’s this program that’s

pretty awesome and there’s an opportunity coming open and I think you would really love it. And so kind of started looking at this and thinking, gosh, what would that mean to move to education? My parents are both educators, so there’s a little bit of it in my blood, so to speak.

But, but yeah, it, it was interesting and it really came down to moving away from seeing opportunities as jobs in certain industries and looking at it more from the lens of does this fulfill me in terms of my purpose. And I had come to determine that my purpose was to help people connect to the resources that would help them reach their dreams and fulfill their dreams that that really is the

thing that pushes my button gets me excited. And I was doing that in entrepreneurship. I was helping entrepreneurs by funding. I was helping them find technical resources and I loved it. But when I looked at caps, I saw that times 10 and working with younger people who had

a much longer, well, kind of a strange way to say it, but I guess, but a lot longer lifespan in which they could enact and make positive impact on the world. And so I jumped into it and a lot of my friends and family thought I was a little bit crazy to jump from entrepreneurship to education. But I mean, it’s just been an amazing opportunity and I’ve just been so blessed to be a part

of it. You know, last year we published a book called Better Together that highlighted the important role that tool networks play and it’s been so fun to watch caps grow from being a single district opportunity to a national network. How did that happen?

What was the impetus for becoming a national network? Well, it’s been a real fun journey and Tom, your book is a great one and we were privileged to, I think just by really luck of timing when we had you out to visit us for our summer convening that it just so happened to be right about the time that the book was publishing and to have kind of the first copies of your book there in caps was a special thing for

us. A great book for anybody listening. But yeah, the network, it’s interesting. When I was lucky enough to be part of the program and jump in in August of 2014, going back five and a half years ago or so, caps as a program in the Kansas City area was getting

itself established. It was clear that this was not a flavor of the month type of initiative, that this was going to have some staying power. But what wasn’t clear was kind of what the next 2.0 was going to be and where it was going to go and all this potential that had kind of built up.

And the thing that was a couple of things that were kind of the impetus for this, really the big one was there was a lot of outside interest. So we were getting calls all the time. We had people showing up all the time wanting to take a look, not only at our facility, but what was happening inside of the facility, the more important part.

And we loved that. But it was quite honestly becoming difficult to manage because of all of the traffic. And we started asking ourselves questions about what is our role in cultivating this movement around profession-based learning with others. And are we in a position where we want as a school district in Blue Valley to kind of

close our doors and hold this innovation in as a competitive advantage of sorts? Or do we want to open those doors? And if we open them, do we want them to be open kind of strategically in a way that we can take advantage of the connections? Or do we just open things up and say, wherever this goes, it goes.

And if you want to take things and run with them, you take them and run with them. It was a really interesting conversation. But at the end of the day, I vividly remember sitting down with our superintendent at the time and some of our board members and pitching them on this idea that there’s tremendous power and value if we are able to harness others that want to run this model to where

we can help them get started. But in return, we’re building connectivity to them and as they innovate. So when Shamika and her team do something really interesting, like being the first CAHPS network affiliate to run their own kind of CAHPS hackathon event based on a national thing we had done, but doing it locally, we get to take advantage of that.

We get to see how they did it. We get to maybe run something like that ourselves. And so we had some conversations about that. The district, to their credit, gave myself and our team enough leash to actually run after it and set up a framework for it.

And I’ve just been blown away by the growth. I mean, we started with Blue Valley and then it was five core partners, one of which was Northland CAHPS in Kansas City and a few others, Vantage Program up in Minnesota and Park City CAHPS and others. But it went from that, basically five or six programs running this to now 60 across a much

larger footprint. And my gosh, and we’re excited about where the future is going to. I just think we’ve got so much potential to help kids wherever they are. Hey listeners, it’s your host, Jessica. I wanted to just take a quick break to share an important resource with you.

Recently, our team launched the Getting Through MicroSite to support educators, leaders and families on the path forward during this unprecedented and uncertain time. There’s something there for everyone, whether you’re just getting started with your transition to distance learning or you’ve had plans in place for a while and now have the opportunity to share your work and guidance with others.

We hope this gives you a place for your voice and an opportunity to learn. We know we will get through this together. Check it out at GettingSmart.com slash Getting Through. Okay, now back to the show. Shamika, I’d love to know you’ve been career director for five years.

How are the learning opportunities better for young people, at least in part because of your CAPS affiliation today compared to five years ago? Well, learning opportunities have changed dramatically since the implementation of our CAPS program because students, number one, they’re not in a school environment for their course.

They meet off campus. For instance, our technology students meet at Little Rock Tech Park where they are in a building with tech entrepreneurs that they get to interact with, they get to intern and do projects for. The learning has shifted from theory to actual authentic projects and collaboration team work.

Students are really getting those 21st century skills where they can take them out. They’re beyond the school walls. That’s a great experience within itself for many of the students that we serve, just having the opportunity to communicate with someone who doesn’t look like them, who they’ve never seen or been introduced to.

It has just changed how I see career education moving forward in our district. Are there more young people involved in career education now? Yes, in our district, we had the standalone traditional CTE classes and now more students are looking or becoming interested in the CAPS model and leaving the school wall to become, to be infused with business partners.

Like Corey mentioned, the hackathon, having the opportunity to hack out a project with their teammate from students all over the district because in Little Rock, we have five high schools. Some of these students never get the opportunity to interact with anyone outside of their school. In our CAPS program, they’re in the class with people from those other schools and they

work together and become teammates. They collaborate with one another and they become lifelong learning partners and friends from this experience. How many of those students go take classes at the Little Rock Tech Park? We have about, now our numbers are small, but this year we had about 20 students within

the Tech strand and it grew because when we first started, we only had three students because what we spend a lot of time on in Little Rock is recruiting students to leave their traditional setting and that task is becoming easier and easier because all of the stories that we have to share from students who are getting this awesome experience. It sounds like the impact of being part of CAPS is not only classes at the Little Rock

Tech Park, but really a change and expansion of the offerings at each of the five high schools. Is that right? Right. Exactly.

This program is offered to all of our students and there’s just a dip. When you have a conversation with a traditional student as opposed to a CAPS student, there’s a different sparkle. There’s a, students have a sense of belonging to our program and then a great outlook on their life in the future.

You have to come here because Little Rock is an urban environment and we’re one of the first school districts to try this model within our setting. It’s just a remarkable experience for our students because some of the experiences that the students in Blue Valley may get just from the parents that they have or from relationships they built through their network, our students are getting that same opportunity.

So Corey, in Blue Valley, you have a spectacular building there and it operates like a next generation career center. Is that common for your other partners? How do some of the other districts join the network and sort of upgrade their career education as a result of the affiliation?

Great question. It really varies and we’ve been intentional when we built the concept of the network. One thing we did not want it to become was akin to what you would see as a traditional franchise model where there would be a whole list and litany of requirements, restrictions. You have to maintain all of these various sub points in terms of how you roll out the

program. It’s just not what we were forming it to be. What we really wanted to see was diversity across that network, certainly tied together by some core values so that we would recognize that what was being deployed was caps and that there was brand fidelity in that.

But we certainly did not want to dictate certain things and one of those things was where you would run the program. A number of our programs handle this a different way than just having their own newly built facility or center. In fact, most of our programs do it in different ways.

Quite a few of them utilize the model that we had in our first year, which was the Thaddleite model. They’ll go out and when they identify business partners in their community that are willing to collaborate with students, they’ll actually make their request that, hey, can we get a little bit of in-kind space on site with you?

Can we get a conference room that maybe you aren’t using as much or maybe a corner of an office level or something along those lines? The students would then report directly to that business or industry site, which is incredible when it comes to adapting and getting the students really familiar with the culture of that industry to get a sense of if that’s something for them.

We also have programs that will grab space, maybe lease space off site that would be in a business area, a business building or a business park. We have programs that have redeployed space that they already have inside of their district. An example of that would be in Park City, Utah, where our Park City Caps program operates is the old high school library that they renovated and made into much more of a maker space,

but with some classrooms built within it. It becomes a really amazing hub of activity with their mentors. They’re probably one of the best programs that we’ve seen in terms of having professionals show up on site pretty much every day to work with students. They do it right there inside of the high school.

The one thing we know is that if every student deserves this opportunity, we can’t have space or dollar resources for facilities be a barrier. We have to figure out ways to make it flexible and make it work. There are lots of different examples and I really have enjoyed that. Chimika, is this applied hands-on community connected learning, making a difference for

young people in Little Rock? I believe it’s making a difference. One example that I’ll share with you, when we started this program in 2017, I met a student who was not doing very well in high school. He didn’t have any plans of going to college and somehow he got enrolled.

He was enrolled in the program and he became a technology student. He was introduced to Johnny Burgess, the CEO of mainstream technologies. Johnny became his mentor and the kid was really good at coding and computer science and programming. Johnny took this kid under his wing and hired him to work for his company after he graduated. Three years, fast forward, three years later, the young man is still employed with mainstream

technologies and he enrolled in school to further his education. Whereas before CAHPS, he didn’t have a desire or any aspirations to continue. So yes, this program is changing student lives. That’s just one example and I can give you many more. Yeah, that’s really exciting.

For so many kids, those sort of meetings either don’t happen or they’re very happenstance. So it’s great that you guys are making those connections for kids every day. Corey, what’s next for the CAHPS network? Yeah, you know, it’s interesting, right? So when you embrace an entrepreneurial mindset and that’s something we believe very strongly

in our network, it’s one of our five core values, you kind of put yourself out there as an administrator or a teacher. If you say that we embrace that and we want you to have that, then you now have to live up to that standard as well. And we all know at the time that we’re recording this, we’re right smack dab in the middle

of the age of COVID and everyone is kind of on a forced virtual situation at this point. And so, you know, it’s interesting, we are embracing that as an opportunity, a huge opportunity to redefine profession-based learning in a way that can be deployed in a blended fashion because we believe that that really is the future. Whether or not we are back in person in the fall and have a full semester that feels like

normal or we’re not or anything in between, there seem to be some really interesting ways in which we can keep the work going. And I know that those that are out there that have been dipping their toes in the water don’t see it just yet, a lot of them don’t, that it’s going to be possible and in fact, even maybe an improved opportunity, but it’s there.

So we’re doing some things, you know, one of the things that we’re noticing is with the use of technology, the ability to connect and have virtual PLCs, right, these professional learning communities is much more possible just because our concept of use of time and the restrictions that had been in place around time in school are lifted now to a great extent. So before when, you know, everyone was assigned to classrooms for certain periods of the day,

for most of their day, it was almost impossible for us to convene a large group of teachers to discuss ways in which they could work together or share resources. But now we’ve actually gotten some great traction around getting some of these connections built between people that are in completely different places and that’s really inspiring and provides a lot of hope.

We’ve built some interesting modules and content around the development of professional skills that are things that can be deployed remotely and students can work on kind of at their pace and away from a classroom. And so the more we build this muscle now, the better prepared we’re all going to be going forward into the future.

And so that’s one thing that’s immediate. The other thing I would say is we’re strong believers in this movement around experiential learning and profession-based learning. You know, at the end of the day, it really doesn’t have anything to do with CAPS as a brand.

CAPS is the way we deploy in the movement, but we really think that we’re getting closer and closer to a tipping point in this country around education and what’s the right thing to do for kids and how do you do it equitably. In many ways, you know, doing things in a blended fashion, building virtual muscle, it’s so long as we can make sure that kids have access to the devices and the technology could

actually bring us closer together in all of this. So we’re excited. I mean, we’re still expanding and adding partnerships to CAPS, but we think the broader movement, this is a really exciting time to be a part of it. And we look forward to sharing whatever we can to help others as they redefine what education

is. Because a lot of those artifacts that have been there forever, you know, how we use our time and how many kids in a classroom and, you know, rows of seats and all those things, we just proved in this last quarter of this year that guess what, the world goes on and kids still learn.

So we can shake the tree a little bit here. And when we come back, we’ve got a great opportunity. Sorry, I got on my soapbox there. Shamika, you must be missing your kids and teachers while all your remote. Yes, I am missing them.

But like Corey said, we’ve actually been connected even more because we have time to spend, you know, be it virtually to work out plans for next year and, you know, plan our boot camp. And so I miss them physically, but we still meet intellectually. Their minds are meeting virtually.

We’re all learning new things during this episode. We really appreciate the leadership that you’re providing in your cities. And nationally, it’s great to see more kids connected to authentic community connected learning really immersing themselves in professions at young ages. So Shamika Montgomery and Corey Mon, we really appreciate you being on the Getting Smart

podcast. Thanks, Tom. Appreciate all your work in this space as well. A big thanks to Corey and Shamika for joining us on this week’s episode. We appreciate their contribution to next generation career education.

And thank you listeners for tuning in this week. Before you go, make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss out on any future episodes and also write and review the show. All right. That’s it for today.

For the Getting Smart podcast, this is Jessica signing off.