Thank you, Dave! The connection to industry is a key component of the pathways, intended not only to bring authentic experiences to students, but to ensure that the skills they are learning are matched to what is actually needed in the workforce.

Thanks for your question, Gerhard. One of my colleagues may be better placed to answer your question, but I will take a first stab based on what I know. During the planning stages for each pathway, we have first lined up lead corporate and higher ed partners. These partners have contributed a number of things: (1) representatives on an advisory board, (2) feedback on program and curriculum design, (3) teacher externships at their organizations, where teachers can interact with professionals and learn about the workplace demands, (4) student internships and/or other work-based learning opportunities, and (5) in some cases other in-kind or financial support. So there are different engagement points with industry for the school, staff, and students.  In hiring pathway faculty we also have tried to find teachers who have prior industry experience, though they can be hard to find (e.g., a computer teacher who did work for a game design company, a physics and robotics teacher who had been a practicing engineer). So, they do bring personal experience from industry, although that experience might have been quite a few years ago. One of things we are trying to document to some extent is some of the challenges and opportunities our teachers face when the are asked to help design curriculum that is not what they are used to. 

Oh, also, for the game design course, our computer science teacher enlisted industry professionals to mentor the various project teams. Students would videoconference with a programmer or designer from Ghost Story Games, or communicate with them via Slack. Professionals would come play the games students had created, provide feedback, and ask questions about their work. As we gain more experience implementing the pathways, we have encountered a new challenge. The type of project-based learning we are designing for students can be quite different from more traditional modes of teaching and learning in community college or 4-year colleges. So, when our students take early college course, they sometimes get a bit of whiplash. Which connects with your observation that some community colleges might not have strong connections with industry or be teaching in ways that develop the real-life skills companies are looking for (team work, communication, project management, technical skills). 

Hi Mercy, Kristen answered your question in another post, but I'd add that she and her team at the school have been strategic in staging the development and implementation of the pathways. In Year 1 of the project, the focus was on designing only 1 of the 3 pathways (Computer Science). In Year 2 (this year), we implemented the 11th grade curriculum for CS pathway and continued to design 12th grade curriculum. At the same time, Kristen launched new teams at the school to start designing the two other pathways (Engineering and Health and Life Sciences) for launch next school year. So, we didn't try to launch and implement all three pathways at the same time. And as Kristen noted, we have limited the number of partners at the start. 

Yes, we limit the numbers to 2-3 partners maximum

For Computer Science we have had Microsoft, Ghost Story Games (local Game Design Company), and Rapid7 (cybersecurity firm)

For Engineering - Gillette, MIT Media Lab

For Health Science - Mass General Hospital, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Harvard Med Science

Our higher education partners have been: Wentworth, UMASS Boston, Bunker Hill Community College and Roxbury Community College

Hi, Albert. Thanks so much for your enthusiasm about our project. It sounds like you are doing similar work. How exciting! I will try to get my colleague Kristen Almquist-Cevallos to respond and/or connect with you. She is the director of the college and career pathways at the school, and also developed similar programs at her prior school.

We're in year 2 of the project and first year of implementation, and, yes, we are starting to learn  about the types of support we need to put in place (or tweak) to help students navigate different environments, from regular high school to professional workplaces and college campuses. We've collected but not yet systematically analyzed our data, but Kristen might be able to speak about initial learnings and planned adjustments. 

I do think we are fortunate that the Boston Private Industry Council runs a robust summer internship program and offers a lot of professional development workshops for students before they embark an internship. So, we try to leverage existing programs and develop partnerships with them when possible. 

BTW, since you're in Richmond, do you happen to know Hollee Freeman, the Executive Director of the MathScience Innovation Center? She was a former colleague here at BPE. 

Hi, Albert.   I am happy to talk anytime about our programs and others I have worked with.  Feel free to email me at kalmquist@bostonpublicschools.org

Thank you both Ed and Kristen for being so gracious with sharing your project. I will definitely reach back Kristen, maybe invite you to a zoom with our team attempting/embarking on the same journey, and we are happy to share back as well!

Yes Ed, I know Hollee well. She's a very driven, motivated and gregarious leader! Small world! Years ago (to many to count) early in my educational career, I actually taught at the MSiC Governor's School for the Gifted in the Summer (rocketry and supercomputing). Great history there, good organization doing meaningful and impactful work.

Happy to join whenever you feel it could be useful.  Also happy to provide materials to your team. Once you get further along my teacher team is AMAZING and would be happy to share their experiences if that is at all useful to you :)  I look forward to hearing from you in the future!

Hi Albert, Thanks so much for your comment. As Kristen and Ed have said, we'd love to connect and hear more about what you're working on. In answer to your question about which types of pathway support are most effective, our research is in the early stages, but we are finding that the connections to industry and the alignment of the interdisciplinary classwork to industry are particularly engaging for students. During the game design project, students easily interacted with industry mentors, asking questions and revising their games in the process. Group work also mirrored the workplace in that students took on roles and were responsible for different aspects of the game design. This enabled them to build skills based on their strengths and interests. As Ed mentioned, the background of the teachers may also be an important factor as this so far has enabled deeper knowledge about and connections to industry.

Hi Lisa, to add to Ed and Kristen's replies, several students in the CS pathway have told us that they are not planning to major in CS, but that they know in that any career they will benefit from having an understanding of CS. Some students have also told us that the project management and design skills will benefit them in their careers or future studies. 

I would add, Lisa, that the Dearborn is a non-selective, open enrollment school, and still has a strong identity as a neighborhood school. Although we have students that come from across the city, most are from the surrounding neighborhoods. Moreover, as the pathways are new, not every family chose the school because of them. As Kristen noted, even those students who aren't specifically interested in pursuing CS majors in college talk about how useful learning CS will be to their futures. As one pathway student who is interested in law noted, even if they become a lawyer they will have to know about how technology works to adequately serve some of their clients. 

Thanks. I viewed your video earlier and was so impressed about how you have engaged so many employers. The paid internships and tuition reimbursement are such great opportunities for your students, and I imagine allows them to devote more time to the pathway (rather than take on unrelated jobs to generate income). 

Absolutely. One of the learnings we've had through this whole COVID crisis is just how much our students rely on their stipends for paying their everyday bills and supplementing their family's income. We are figuring out how we can best support the students for those whose internships are on hold.

Hi, Jeremy. That's a very good question, and I don't know the answer to whether there is an extensive research base about industry-K12 partnerships around STEM learning. We didn't do a lit review prior to starting this project. We did, though, hire Kristen, who had extensive experience building pathways and partnerships (industry and higher ed) in Chelsea, MA. Your question does make me think we do need to do more to document and analyze how BPE and Dearborn built the partnerships over the past couple of years, and capture the approach to partnering we took. And also capture the perspectives of our partners. We are planning to interview industry mentors and other participants, but now I'm thinking we need to collect more data. Thanks for getting me thinking on this. I do think industry has been eager to reengage with K-12 education. In the latter years of the standards and accountability reforms of the past couple decades (culminating in  Common Core) I think industry may have struggled to find obvious places to engage with schools. College and Career readiness became a mantra, but the career part never got much focus until very recently. And in some ways some of what we are doing runs contrary to traditional school accountability systems (or doesn't get captured or rewarded in the metrics focused upon).

Hi Jeremy, Thank you for the suggestion about a primer! We're learning a lot about what is needed to implement career pathways, and what it could mean for teachers and students. You're right that disseminating some of our lessons learned seems like a worthwhile contribution, especially as more schools consider creating career pathways. 

Thanks for the kind words, Leigh. Good to know there are similar initiatives up north in Maine. I do think we need to start thinking about high school in new ways that prepare young folks for both college and career. Career pathways is one model; there are many others. But I think seeing the relevance of what they are learning, and developing "soft" as well as "hard" skills are both really powerful. The level of engagement is really different. 

We would love to collaborate if that is something you want to discuss.  I have discovered that model does transfer school to school in urban settings.  I imagine it would also apply in any school but it would be great to talk about.

Leigh, not intentionally holding out, but now that you mention it, there are so many connections that we should explore here. It's great to hear about the workforce development survey-- I'd love to hear more and to think about how this model might apply to other settings. Let's get this on an agenda soon. 

Thanks, Cindy!