Town Hall Recap: New Pathways

During the event we were joined by some amazing guests including Dave Shuler, Superintendent of D214, Shaterra Weaver of VL Education, and Lydia Logan of IBM who all shared the important work they’re doing in this space. We hope you enjoyed this episode and be sure to register for our next town hall at www.gettingsmart.com. Welcome everyone to the Pathways Town Hall. We are the new Pathways Town Hall. We are so excited

that you’re here. Thank you for joining us today. Before we start we just want to go over some housekeeping rules. We really, really want your input. We want you to share generously and respectfully throughout the session. So in the chat please feel free to share resources and ideas. It’s just a time for us to really come together as a community and share what our thoughts are just around pathways. You can also share our generously on Twitter if you use the hashtag

GS Town Hall in your tags. We would welcome all the support and we want everyone who was not able to join us today to still feel like they’re part of the conversation. We will post a recap blog with the links mentioned on the event after the event and we’ll also include a brief FAQ for the questions that we don’t have time for and we know we’ll have a time. And so just so you don’t feel like you need to keep up with all of the links that are being shared with chat,

please feel free to access them during the recap. So we want your input. We want you to share generously and respectfully and then you’ll get all of the follow-up information after the event. All right, so let’s get started. A Getting Smart Town Hall. Some of you all may have joined us before and if you’re coming back, thank you. And for some it may be the very first town hall that you’ve ever attended for Getting Smart. So the purpose of our town hall is just to create a space to

just think collaboratively and to design and discuss and really discover what’s next in learning, which is what we’ve all been tasked to think about throughout our educational journey. Our time together is to really build a collective momentum in understanding. We want to better enable you all to empower every learner to thrive in actual purpose. We want this to be your time, your space. We wanted to really motivate you to go back and implement some of these thoughts and to continue

to share and think about what’s next. So let’s get started. For new pathways and where every learner is on a personalized path to opportunity and as NGS tradition, we start every event that we do with a poem and today is no exception. Today we will feature Rilke, which in the poem is, I don’t know the name of it, but it’s okay. We will feature Rilke and it says, I believe in all that has never yet been spoken. I want to be free what waits within me so that

what no one has dared to wish for may for once bring clear without my contriving. If this is arrogant, God forgive me, but this is what I need to say. May what I do flow for me like a river, no forcing and no holding back the way it is with children. Then in the swelling and ebbing currents, these deep needing ties moving out, returning, I will sing as no one ever has, streaming through whitening channels into the open sea. Tom, I know this is like your absolute

favorite poem and you’ll have the title. If you can just share that with us and just share your thoughts and why this poem is so apropos for the conversation that we’re having today. Yeah. Thanks, Shony. This is not only probably my favorite poem. It’s my favorite pathway poem. I think it’s a great poem for high school because it’s all about identity formation and and a discovery that for Roka, he probably wrote this when he was around 20 in a time of real turmoil

about 115 years ago that he wrote it in Germany in a time that probably feels pretty relevant to what we’re living through today. And it’s really, it’s in a book that came in English to be titled The Book of Hours or Love Poems to God. It was translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Veros and Shony, they just use these are without titles. So the it’s usually referred to by the first line, I believe in all that has never yet been spoken. I, this is really to me like

a prayer for calling and a prayer for impact of wanting to discover gifts and talents and put them to use in ways not yet fully imagined. And I love the audacity in this, in this prayer. And it always makes me chuckle that he has to apologize for that audacity in the in the third stanza. And then I love the nature elements at the end. Those of us that live on the Puget Sound sort of love the title elements, but I really appreciate his, his desire to free what waits

within him so that what no one is there at wish for may spring clear without my contriving. Really a beautiful aspiration for the discussion that we’re going to have today about inviting every learner to find even even co create a pathway of opportunity for themselves. Anybody else appreciate this roka poem? And if you do, please feel free to unmute and share your thoughts. We want this to be a really open forum. We’ll take one or two comments. Yeah, thanks Eric.

It does. It’s reminiscent of a number of Mary Oliver poems. Yeah. And Tom, isn’t this what you are we want everyone to do with these new pathways is to think boldly and apologize later. Yeah, absolutely. And to step into opportunity with with that sense of openness. Yeah, it’s a beautiful.

Thank you, Scott. Yeah. So as you all continue to ponder this and think about how it connects to pathways and to think about what it is that you need to say and what it is the students need to hear, please continue to drop your thoughts into the comments as we continue throughout the presentation. Tom, I’ll turn it over to you to talk about this soft launch of the new pathways campaign.

I was mentioning Dr. Scott McLeod has joined us and he said he loves the line. May what I do flow from me like a river and what an awesome expression that is of what in our high school hopes are for young people. Absolutely. Today we’re launching our pathways campaign. If you’ve joined us for other town halls, you know, we’ve been preparing for this for a number of months. We last town hall, we talked about unbundling and re-bundling learning and since then we’ve decided

to add that to this pathways campaign and to run a two or three year campaign that really takes on these core themes around new pathways. And by pathways we’re talking about learning experiences really from middle school to and through post-secondary into gainful employment and being trying to be particularly mindful of entrepreneurial opportunities and emerging pathways into high wage employment and entrepreneurship. So our themes are really

unbundled learning. We want to explore the explosion of learning opportunities that’s happened in the last few years and how to make sense of that in particular through guidance and support. We’re going to talk about that with our friends from EL education today, how we can help learners credential their learning along the way so that they can capture and communicate their new capabilities in new ways. We’ll talk about new learning models

for secondary schools and beyond, how they can be more engaging and supportive and accelerated. And then finally we’ll talk about taking that to scale of how to build networks and systems that help every learner find a pathway to success. Anything else you want to add to that, Shawnee, before I introduce one of our guests? No, I think we’re ready to get started. We’ll be talking about a lot today and learning a lot.

So before we get into the guest, just want to again remind everyone as we’re sharing today, please continue to drop your comments and resources into the chat. Let me just acknowledge that Shawnee and I met when she was leading career and technical education in Kansas City. We had a lot of late night and early morning bus rides visiting schools and Shawnee and I have been talking about new pathways that unlock opportunity for

all learners for a lot of years and we’re really thrilled that she’s an important part of our team. Yeah, I love being here and we’re joined by some of our Kansas City friends from CAHPS and Kansas City Public Schools and Rapec. So super excited to continue the work. The folks in Rapec and certainly CAHPS and the CAHPS Network have been real inspirations for this work. So thanks Greg for being here.

I want to dive right in by inviting Dr. David Shuler from Township High School District number 214 just north of O’Hare Airport in Illinois. I’ve had the chance to work with Dave as a commissioner for the Superintendent’s Association Learning 2025 Commission and I’ve known Dave for a number of years but our more intensive work together over the last year on that commission just really impressed me that Dr. Shuler and D214 might be

the best example in America of a district really committed to making sure that every learner is on a valuable pathway. David, thanks so much for joining us and tell us why you did that, how you did that. Give us a quick overview of how this works in D214. Yeah, thanks Tom and I think you know the why we did it goes back to the poem, right? Our job is to create personalized pathways of choice for every child to get them to realize dreams that they

didn’t even have when they walked through our schoolhouse doors as freshmen, right? And our kids can only dream what they can see and so in the north corners of my district or the south corners of my district where I have multiple families living in a one-bedroom apartment or a manufactured house on the south side, it’s our job as educators to plant dreams in the student and their family’s minds because they know that their job is to make enough money to pay rent so they can stay there

and take advantage of these great schools that we have. And so it became incumbent upon us as a system to really rethink and redesign our approach to allow students to be co-authors of their journey to ensure that we’ve built out pathways and I’ll show a couple of those and how we build out our pathways in a second. But just for some context, we have 11,000 students in our district, we’re only a high school district so we have seven high schools and every student in our district will

experience an external work-based learning experience before they graduate and that’s not designed to indicate just what students do want to do but also what they don’t want to do and provide them with access and opportunities and so all of our students identify a career area of interest by the end of their freshman year. We have on-ramps and off-ramps so if students change their mind that’s awesome but if they change their mind more than twice it’s going to kick a red flag to the school

counselors so that they can engage in some more career exploration work with them. So let me share my screen and I’ll just kind of share with colleagues on the call how we built this workout. And so I firmly believe that it is schools that have the opportunity to change lives and change school communities for the better or the worse and I was at a site visit earlier this week visiting a school and there was an architect there who said there’s no neutral spaces and that really

really hit me as far as how we had to be really intentional about designing our learning spaces. So we completely re-envisioned our programs of study. We no longer have any class that is not on a pathway. We eliminated all singleton classes. Everything in our district is on a pathway and must lead to a post-secondary credential or early college credit. And so part of the reason why we did this Tom what you talked about is we have to be thinking through the lens of ensuring that our

graduates are able to access an upwardly economically mobile life for themselves and their families in a world that’s changing so fast that we don’t even know what jobs are going to exist in the next five years. I mean think about this right. I hopefully everybody on the call can agree that the world is transforming at a pace faster than it ever has in the world’s history. And yet it’s the slowest it will ever transform in the future of our lives. And so we have to

redesign what our educational systems look like to ensure that students have that opportunity. If you think about this statistic in 1940 a child born into the average American household had a 92% chance of making more money than his or her parents. For students born in 1980 so today’s 36 year olds that figure dropped to 50%. We have to produce graduates that can access an upwardly economically mobile world. So we know work-based learning experiences have

tons of benefits just a few are on this page and I’m happy shiny to share the deck with you to send out to anybody on this call. But for us it was about this opportunity for discovery, empowering self-efficacy and igniting momentum. Yet friends I’m all about action-oriented work. I don’t want to talk about future thinking and future focus. I want to be future driven right. I want us to act on making the change that we want the world to be. And so for our career

pathways model here are the three tenets sequence of courses beyond high school, work-based learning experience and a capstone early college or industry credential. Dave that slide just makes me want to cheer. Yeah that’s awesome. It’s so simple, it’s so powerful, it’s awesome.

Thank you. So here’s how we develop our pathways. Ideation is first we always and you guys those of you that are in school settings right now the last two years have been really hard on all of us and we’ve been doing a lot of managing. I am here by giving you all permission to take time out of your day to dream and ideate because it’s the only way the positive change is going to happen. And it’s so easy to get sucked into the day-to-day management my friends and that

is not going to transform our future. Give yourself permission and your team’s permission to ideate and dream. So once we ideate and we have an idea and we have just again for context we’ve built out over the years we have 44 personalized pathways of choice in the 16 national career clusters. So everything from aviation to to HVAC finance legal services you name it there’s a personalized pathway of choice for every student. So once we have the idea we then

form an advisory team of experts we create the research and evaluation and then the pat we develop the pathway and then we look at implementation and funding. So it’s one two three four five and part of that ideation and form advisory team one and two ask your local employers what skills they need employees to have and build from there. So we just have a huge data center coming into our community and I went to the mayor we have seven communities and villages that feed into our

district. So I went to that village as mayor and I said you tell me what kind of computer skills and technical skills and what industry credentials you need your your employees to have and I will build your talent pipeline around those skills. And so that’s a different approach than saying we’re going to teach what our teachers think are the right things to teach. No if we’re creating talent pipelines build what our employers need for us to be able to produce graduates that can

enter the workforce then research and evaluation pathway development implementation funding. So for us over the years and again this didn’t happen overnight but we now have 1500 industry partners we’re adjacent to O’Hare so we do have some large industrial parks but it’s it’s absolutely critical for us to be able to produce people that can then work for in those settings. So a pathway sequence how do we develop that pathway we identify potential courses develop

the new course proposals share the drafts course sequence with our stakeholders which will include those industry partners and then everything has to have extensions so summer opportunities co-curricular experiences field trips what are the bridges between secondary and post-secondary I really want to gray that line every student in our district every student in our district unless they have significant significant special education needs graduates

with a minimum of six early college credits over 80% of last year’s graduates graduated with over 15 early college credits engaging in curriculum development providing the teacher PD sending them out wherever they need to go to see the workplaces when possible data centers obviously don’t allow people in and then partnering with industry for potential work base learning experiences and opportunities and when you’re thinking about that never think about one experience

so I hate the term job shadow you guys I mean really you want someone to stand in someone shadow and just walk behind them no I want it to be about learning right so if somebody provides an opportunity for somebody for a student to come and see what happens that’s awesome I want that to be positive sorry but then I want next year that opportunity to be a 30 hour micro internship and so you have to once you find a partner you have to look for ways to scale that partnership

to provide more and more opportunities so what does that mean and what does that look like for our kids we’ve completely reimagined how our student course sign up looks like so instead of listing everything by disciplines remember all the words we used to have when we were looking to pick courses for next year I know it’s designed art was first and was all alphabetical science social studies we’ve gotten rid of all of that our academic programs and pathways guidebook takes a look at

identifying what are the career pathways that you want to explore your personalized pathway of choice and then what does that look like from what courses you must take and you should take an elective opportunities you might have and then it’s wise to celebrate so here’s an example of our multimedia what it would look like for freshmen sophomores juniors and seniors so you can see as freshmen we talk about orientation classes sophomores and juniors we’re talking about skill development

and then that senior year really talking about capstones so you can start with introduction to multimedia communication it’s a semester long course you could then take advanced or the following year you could go to multimedia up through media multimedia storytelling advanced multimedia storytelling then senior year you have a bunch of options you can take some dual credit classes if that’s of interest to you you can do a practicum or you can be part of the multimedia academy

which is a college intro to mass communication and then you can see those post-secondary options in addition we also have an opportunity for youth apprenticeships and so if you haven’t explored the possibility of registered youth apprenticeships I strongly encourage you to do so at least I know we have some international folks joining us but in the US it’s a wonderful opportunity from the department of labor and if you’re struggling with finding external partners be your own employer

so we’ve gone through the process of being our own registered employer so we have students we’ll have we’ll have 27 next year we have 18 this year that have registered apprenticeships and everything from HVAC to cybersecurity to technology and and we just had one in in multimedia so it’s just an example of what kind of that pathway could look like let me go back just for a second here we go the career pathways so the guidebook that I talked about so here’s an example of what it looks like

you can see if you want to go into health sciences right we have every one of them starts with a picture then you can see in that lower left hand column we have a recent graduate who has a story and a quote of what they got out of the being part of the health sciences pathway and then you can see ninth tenth and eleventh grade the different subject areas English and I’m happy to share a QR code if anybody would like to see the details of how we built this out and then you can see

after 12th grade we also list post-secondary experiences opportunities jobs you might be able to pursue and then if you look down at the course descriptions we have a list of all the different courses but it’s not all words right we put graphics in there too because we want to appeal to our students and our families to spend time looking at it so we have an overall booklet but then we also have it just by career pathway so you could pull out the health science section

and just look at that or you could pull out finance and just look at that and so I mentioned our orientation skill development capstone partnerships employment and higher ed so for us the way we built this is we’ve created a career center for career discovery we didn’t take extra dollars for this we reimagined the use of our Perkins dollars and we branded it I brand everything in district 214 because I think just think it goes so much further if you have a

name and a brand for it and so you notice I haven’t been talking about cte right I’m talking about personalized pathways of choice for every student and sometimes when we talk about cte everybody gets pictures in their head that it’s cte over here and the core over here right the reality is it all has to turn meld together and it has to be whatever that student wants to do after high school so you’ll never hear me talk about cte right I just said we reimagine the use of our Perkins dollars

right to create the center for career discovery and they’re the ones that are really um uh tasked with finding industry partners making sure students have great opportunities um and that our industry partners are thanked and appreciated for providing that value add back to that and I know I’m running short on time time give me just two more minutes here are just some of the services that we provide that career discovery owns career days and nights zoom is wonderful facebook live

is great for getting to parents and grandparents um and then internships and again I’ll share this with you um for us a work-based learning experience has to be a minimum of 30 hours um that’s how we define it in our district here are some of our embedded internships these are things that happen within our school day that people can take advantage of if you don’t have a grow your own teacher program start one now it’s the only way we’re going to have enough teachers and the only way we’re

going to find a more diverse teaching staff is if we grow our own youth apprenticeships just what that looks like 1200 hours at an employer on the job training these are the types of apprenticeships we offer in our district from vet tech up to athletic training assistant and I am happy to answer any questions and I talked super fast I’m super passionate about this we have to embark on this work as a country and I know people that are outside the country you should do it too because

it’s it’s inspiring to kids it’s engaging they love it and it provides a huge value add to them their families and the businesses with whom they’re interacting so thanks Tom and sorry I went a little bit over that was super awesome um two quick questions one is um there was a question of how porous this is for students and can and do students change pathways and then a related question is how do you make sure the pathways stay you know really relevant and dynamic and connected to

what’s happening in industry that’s awesome so first answer yes you are not you’re not focused on a pathway for your entire career that’s why the first courses are all orientation so if you take an orientation course and you’re not happy with that then we want you to take a different orientation in different pathway instead of being stuck in a pathway in which you know you don’t want to pursue so absolutely you can take different orientation courses in different pathways based on your

interest the second question I already forgot Tom but I had an answer for that too um pathways dynamic yep dynamic so every year we have we go back out and have an advisory team meeting with industry folks to make sure our content and our curriculum is is um relevant to their work so that happens annually there were a lot of requests in the chat for your guidebooks so we’ll make sure we include links to resources from from Dr. Schueler and the 214 Dave I want to just close

by saying there there are times in history when people do work at a local level that just is of greater importance and it feels like the work you’re doing there is is a national model for relevance and the the idea of putting kids on pathway to opportunity so we really appreciate your your local and national leadership thanks so much Tom I appreciate it they’ve also started Trancio which is a terrific app to help manage work-based learning opportunities we’ll also

include links to that thank you Dave right thank you I want to shift gears and introduce Shatira Weaver the second part of our pathways campaign is really around supporting learners and and providing high quality guidance that happens in most high schools in in an advisory system and the very best example of that is from our friends at at eleducation eleducation.org they produced about a year and a half ago a terrific set of resources called We Are Crew

and published both a book and a beautiful set of online resources I just dropped a link to that in chat it’s an extraordinary library of resources for how to do advisory well it’s in addition to being a terrific way to help every learner be intentional about their pathway it’s the best example of creating a culture of mutuality and mutual support Shatira thank you so much for joining us tell us about crew thank you so much for having me

and thank you for dropping that link from EL that is something I was going to base our discussion in naming that we are crew so that is our structure with EL education that is a like advisory but you know speaking from my bias a little better I’d say a little deeper and more connected really creating that crew so the tagline of phrase we use with students and staff is that we are crew not passengers and the idea is that we are on this ship together

each of us are responsible and as vital as one another having various strengths and challenges and really working together to create that crew and so those groups are started at the very start of the school year very often schools will hold off on content and really start to develop and deepening that crew structure first and the largest crew is about 16 students ideal is about 10 because you’re working to create a family an intimate space within the school day where

you’re able to as I would put it just be I think students have to have their student hat on all day whether they’re being mathematicians or scientists or writers in one room or another and crew really allows them to be themselves their whole selves and bring those academic strengths and challenges with them but then also the personal the social things that are a part of human beings not just students and so to me the best part of crew is the idea that every student

in the building has a deeper connection with at least one adult and so I’m hailing from New York City where we have very large schools and a hustling bustling streets surrounding those schools and it’s very easy to go into the classroom walk into a school building and kind of fly under the radar throughout the day and that can be a good with your like a very high achieving student or a lower achieving student when it comes to grades and I’ll put grades and quotes

that’s a separate conversation but crew does not allow any student to fly under the radar someone in that building knows you knows your family speaks to your family communicates openly sets goals with you checks in on those goals and of course classroom teachers are continuing to do that in their content spaces but crew really provides the dedicated space for students to do that work with one another collaborate with their peers learn about themselves become self-aware

and then of course turn key that self-awareness into a more community-based awareness and all hands on deck is really what we would call it when we’re talking about crew it is my favorite part of the EL model EL has tons of core practices from you know delivering effective lessons to fostering a cohesive school vision teaching in and through the arts all very important core practices in having a successful and sustainable school model but my again speaking from bias

my favorite is building the culture and structure of crew and it is named that way purposefully it is not just a structure but it is building the culture of crew every student should walk into that building and have what I refer to as a home place that comes from bell hooks my personal hero who describes a home place as a safe haven where again you can be yourself take off the armor take off the student hat or the athlete hat if you’re on a team or whatever it is and just

be yourself with the people in the room and so that is the power of crew I’ll add to that by naming something that we’re leaning towards is having what is called courageous conversations about race about sexuality about all the all the taboos all the things that us adults have trouble talking about but honestly students are like oh you want to chat let’s do it um and so crew helps set the stage for that in a classroom like social studies where it is very

important to discuss those topics absolutely because it is social studies if we don’t have that base of trust of the ability to be vulnerable with one another to say that thing that might come off a little different to someone else’s perspective and understanding one another you’re not going to have the success with those conversations at that you aim to it is not to say don’t have the conversations it is just to say that having the structure of crew really does

provide the cushioning necessary for people to feel safer to engage in those conversations they’re called courageous for a reason and it does require that and crew helps to embolden every participant’s positioning in that in that space so I’m open to take any questions I do not have a slide deck for you but I can talk all day about crew how it differs from advisory and EL education so Chatera this is typically in in the 100 plus EL schools around the country this

typically needs every morning yeah it’s the beginning of the day at a at an EL school so it it’s a structure that uniquely creates a sense of belonging and attachment for every EL learner right absolutely this is my home place this is where I belong and if I don’t feel that belonging in the math classes seeking for myself I still feel it in this school in this building and it’s really important to transfer that it is not always in the beginning of the day the

structure is planned that way but again the best part of crew is catering it to the people in the room of that crew so some schools have it right after lunch because that school has discovered that that’s the best time to sit and decompress with your family your school family you know half the day has gone by you eat in and now let’s settle for crew and get back to the second half of the day so morning is where it started but I will always encourage schools and districts to

really do its best for them because again that would be the point so I I love crew because it it does a lot of different jobs for EL high schools it creates belonging and attachment it sets the cultural tone it creates this uniquely strong sense of mutuality I’ve never seen another high school where you have this sense of collective success most high schools are individual success at EL high schools it’s about collective success that’s a beautiful thing

you also do career and college awareness and and preparation inside of crew is that fair yes crew is the space where all of the things that schools want to do in content classes can happen in a more focused space and very more often a safer space so we’re talking about college and career prep which is a very difficult topic and especially again in New York City with diverse diverse experiences with that and being able to do that with your crew only is a better means to

the end so it is still those same goals that I would say most schools have which is high achieving students who are career and college ready but being able to get there in a deeper more intimate fashion mark lang said it sounds a lot like a big picture advisory mark that’s true both the EL and big picture user advisory periods also to help identify and manage work-based learning opportunities so it is a multi-purpose central hub to every EL school is that fair shatira yes it is the life

blood of our school is how we would put it also the structure through which students do their own conferences so student-led conferences is a structure that comes from crew in which students are able to talk about their own learning their own progress and their own challenges rather than a teacher and a guardian having a conversation about someone who is very rarely even in the room for those conferences but crew really sets the place where students can take charge of their

own learning and to reiterate what you were saying of each other’s learning because it is a crew and discuss in a more apt fashion more confident fashion I love that my team is going to add a link to a podcast that we did with Ron burger a half ago right when the resources came out if you haven’t checked out crew please please check out the links that we’ve shared it’s an extraordinary set of resources by the book but check out the videos they’re terrific as well

we’re working on oh sorry I was just gonna say we’re working on our next project that works in tandem with the we are crew initiative which is crew curriculum one of the things we’re finding with crews that is like the best thing that schools have ever adopted and they love it and then teachers are like yeah but this wasn’t in my teacher program y’all taught me how to teach science um as so now we are developing curriculum to go along with crew so that those discussions that

I mentioned earlier can happen in a structured fashion and all teachers can feel apt to facilitate those things that is super awesome I would say that most schools that do advisory often leave it to chance and you know some advisory systems are really good and some are some classes are haphazard so I think adding more structure and more support for teachers is really terrific thank you I know you’re in the middle of a busy teaching day we super appreciate you dropping

in and talking about crew you’re awesome thank you thank you so much for having me truly my pleasure all right we’re gonna jump to my friend Lydia Logan um Lydia I saw you somewhere like a couple weeks ago was it in Tennessee at AASA maybe uh South by at South by I saw you last week in Austin and I hadn’t realized that you had moved over to IBM that’s so cool yeah um Lydia um ran Chiefs for Change a terrific group supporting um reform and innovation minded state chiefs as well as system

heads and she has joined the awesome team at IBM um we have featured IBM as a real pathway leader on our podcast our team will drop a link to um uh some chances we’ve had to feature their work um Lydia why why did you join IBM and what what are you excited about in terms of their support for pathways well IBM has been in this pathway space for over 10 years with PTECH so I know a lot of you are aware of the PTECH model it’s an early college high school model it’s

been ahead of its time and that it was an open source idea where the state adopts the model and the funds become available it’s a partnership between industry a school district and higher ed so that students have work-based learning so we we talked a little bit about that already today they have the connection to employers and mentors and then they earn college credits while they’re in high school and ideally finish the program with an AA degree we’ve been doing that for 10 years

there are over 300 PTECH schools around the world now not just in the U.S. many of those IBM is the industry partner but or one of many industry partners working with a school and there are other models where they’re you know collective groups that where IBM is not part of it so that’s really taken root and grown which is fantastic but IBM is also looking forward to this idea of what we call new collar jobs so what are the jobs that are have family sustaining wages in the

tech industry that don’t require a degree and how do we make those more accessible to people in the U.S. and around the world by providing them access to free training and content tied to credentials and it’s really an economic opportunity initiative for us which is global last year our CEO pledged to skill 30 million people by 2030 and so we’re work we’re hard at work on that we do that in partnership with school districts and with higher ed institutions and

nonprofit organizations around the world as well as ministries of education skillsbuild.org someone can drop that in the chat I’m on an iPad due to some technical issues but that has modules and resources that can be that are free and can be used to all of you on the call immediately there’s no fee associated with them so hopefully you go and check those out but really the work that IBM has done is known for doing and is looking forward to doing over the next decade

are the things that made me really want to join the team here. That’s awesome how long have you been there six months it’s August August wow I dropped the link in for P tech P tech is a terrific model we really appreciate IBM’s support for that um Lydia I also dropped in a link um on IBM digital credentials IBM is as really of all the tech players the longest maybe the most important contribution to the field of digital credentials

meaningful pathways of digital credentials can you say anything about that absolutely we have a very rigorous internal process for what we allowed to have a credential so whether that’s a badge and then you know clusters of badges leading up to certifications if it isn’t resume worthy we don’t issue it so I think that’s something really important for people to know uh and when you’re looking at what kinds of training and uh access to to content you want for

your students I think that’s really what helps hold the IBM certification branding at high quality in the marketplace so when you think about students right we used we have traditionally thought about a straight path from high school to college to a degree to work but we know that that’s not really the way things work anymore and that we need an ecosystem right where students have choices they have access to employment they have certifications and degrees that they earn

along the way they’re lifelong learners they go in and out of school and in and out of work and we need those equivalencies and the portability of those credentials uh so one thing that I’m very proud of is the work that we do acknowledges that and leans in and I just came out of a three-day meeting across the teams at IBM responsible for learning to make sure we collaborate we have you know tight systems for quality that we’re also thinking about where our gaps are and what we

need to offer in the marketplace for you know for free and it’s important for you all to know the certifications that we offer publicly are the same ones that we as IBMers earn internally so there isn’t a difference there and I think that’s something else that people should know right this idea that I know you all are working on or you know part of this movement of electronic records that you have a digital what we used to call backpack or wallet or you know however you

choose to think about it and that you earn these credentials and you take them with you wherever you go and that they have equivalencies tied to them whether those are college credits or credit for for experiences earned but that you it doesn’t require a degree so we now have translated a lot of our job roles at IBM to being skills based and 50 percent of the openings that we post in the U.S. don’t require a degree. Lydia um well first of all thanks for bringing your

awesomeness to IBM we really look forward to your leadership there we hope through our pathways campaign to highlight the work that you’re doing and that a number of other tech leaders have in the last few years introduced new learning pathways and many of them credentialed we don’t think high schools and colleges have really begun to appreciate the resource that they present we’re going to try to provide some guidance on how to incorporate those into high school and

post-secondary pathways so more from Lydia over the next two years in this campaign. Absolutely my pleasure. I know there are some additional questions in the chat but I wanted to make sure that we talked just a little bit about this before our time was up today we really wanted to make sure that pathways are accessible for all and really truly understanding this broad definition of equity it’s not just about race and gender but it’s also about abilities

so Tom we were able to surface a few questions that I would like for you to just to give a little bit of voice to about articulating the learning goals and replacing like the terminology that all learners are college ready etc. Yeah we surfaced a couple of questions we’d love to have more from you you heard Dave Schueller say we don’t talk about college ready and career ready anymore we don’t talk about that college pathway and cte pathway we’ve pushed them together and we just

help kids go where they need to go I love that idea and I’m vexed by the challenge of doing that equitably how do we do that without retracking schools where some students are on a college going pathway and and some aren’t how do we help parents understand that there are some new pathways alternative higher ed or earn and learn ladders that are much more lucrative than traditional higher education so I think how we express learning goals is interesting and challenging

how we express our goals for all learners is an interesting new challenge I don’t know Greg from CAPS I’d love a thought on from you on on how you and the folks in the CAPS network are thinking about these equity questions. Tom thank you for the opportunity can you guys hear me okay yeah yeah let me hard act to follow these other presenters what a great set of topics I compliment you guys for always organizing such great discussions in the industry

no we have worked very hard number one I think is you got to set as a clear goal right I mean I think we can sometimes easily say that like we’re going to include everybody but I think you got to make it a goal and I think you have to take specific steps to make that happen one of our and I put this in the in the chat room too our most recent playbook that we created try to capture that essence of that is like how do we get these this awareness made for students to show that there are a lot of

opportunities in career paths out there and that they’re cool you know I think you and I’ve had the conversation that in the past we’ve overemphasized the four-year degree as being the option and not to take away from a great option and we would certainly not exclude and promote that for anybody but at the same time there are just so many growing opportunities out there for students and we want to make them aware of it so I like the comment you’ve made we are trying to make a more concert

effort with parents to get that knowledge out there we were also trying to see in the earlier ages because our focus has been in high school the earlier ages is getting exposure to these different types of careers and different types of skills so one of our most recent ones and it’s going to be a topic of our summer huddle is you know how do we how quickly can we start exposing kids to different types of pathways in careers and then the skill sets that are involved so they

can kind of pick and choose and gravitate to what they they want to do and what they’d be good at Greg here’s another equity question that you guys really wrestle with at CAPS 99 of career awareness in America is about how to get a job not how to make a job we we still suck at that teaching and developing entrepreneurship I think the CAPS network is is closer to getting this this right but helping young people think about career opportunities that there are jobs that you

can get and there’s jobs that you can create and that most young people today are going to spend some time in both of those roles of where they take a job or make a job but promoting entrepreneurship equitably I think is another new challenge you do by that absolutely no in fact it’s entrepreneurial thinking is one of our key five core values and no matter what discipline or we call them strands for pathways no matter which one you have even if it’s something that’s you know

like accounting right which there’s one right to do it we also want kids to be thinking entrepreneurally how do you make it better don’t just accept what it is but how do you make that better and indeed we want kids of all backgrounds to know that they can start businesses so a lot of our growing strands a lot of our growing number of of disciplines and pathways now within the CAPS network are focused on that entrepreneurship not just on starting a business

but also developing products and services that can be turned into a business couldn’t agree with you more buddy super appreciate that I’m on Greg’s board the national network I just dropped the link in your CAPS network it’s a great place to start 140 districts across the country have joined CAPS this can be a terrific entry point for updating your district’s approach to cte and thinking more constructively and dynamically about pathways

one more closing thought shawnee yeah um right before we get to the what’s what’s next I will just kind of surface the question that I know that our team and and others are thinking about because you brought up that notion about entrepreneurship and pathways and difference making and how how do you go about making sure that those are included so that students continue to have a sense of agency yes we will try to deal with that we’ll also try to to look at learning

differences inside of pathways particularly learning differences with access into and through uh post-secondary um Shawnee tell us what’s next yeah absolutely first I just want to thank everyone for joining us today and a very very special thanks to some of our guests Chatera and Dave and um Lydia thank you so much for joining us today and and all our attendees so like we stated we will post this town hall as a

podcast for our feed and then we’ll post a recap blog with the links mentioned on the event there were tons and tons of information shared today and lots of good questions and thoughts and some of our guests dropped their emails so if we weren’t able to really get to everything today please continue to reach out to them please continue to reach out to us because this is a conversation that we’ll be having for a very long time so even though this might be kind of the first iteration of it

we invite you to join us throughout this journey of realizing what new pathways are and how they will truly be of benefit to our students um so again thank you we appreciate you showing up and enjoy the rest of your day thanks for tuning into the Getting Smart podcast today we want this podcast to be actionable and insightful and a great way to learn about what’s next in learning in order to stay on the cutting edge we need people in the field to tell us what they’re hearing what they’re wanting

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