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6 ideas for inquiry in K12 CTE

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Building on recent CLNA stakeholder assessments, several intriguing topics worthy of further examination for K12 CTE programs have emerged. Presented below as “ideas for inquiry;” these topics are intertwined and might be best implemented as "action research" in an integrated way that reinforces and compounds the overall impact. These ideas for inquiry are envisioned as the framework for action and change for K12 CTE programs, and within the control of K12 CTE programs. 

* All of these ideas are inquiries for which Futures Research is seeking clients.

1. Regional Dev Teams

The first idea for inquiry is the formation of regional K12 CTE development teams. The rising demand and potential for CTE programs in both urban and rural areas requires substantial investment, a regionally-focused commitment, and creative strategies from K12, tertiary education, local economic development authorities, and industry/employer partners. A specialized K12 CTE Development Team (Dev Team) could lead a deliberate set of initiatives, including but not limited to the collection of additional ideas also derived from the same recent CLNA stakeholder assessments. Below are five ideas a Dev Team could focus on:

  • Make CTE understandable. Enhance talking-points, descriptions, and outreach regarding CTE's mission, process, and value to make CTE more relevant and comprehensible to various audiences.
  • The 13th year. Develop career pathway engagement opportunities for K12 students that extend into a 13th year.
  • Optimize advisory committees. Improve the structures, aims, and activities of CTE Advisory Committees.
  • Regional approach to CTE development. Expand engagement, development, and resources between urban areas and adjacent rural communities
  • Fostering industry-supported WBL Opportunities. Assist industry employers in creating and providing work-based learning opportunities that link K12 students to career employment.

These five initiatives are discussed in more detail below, but they are listed here to illustrate the kinds of efforts a regional Dev Team could undertake. Obviously there are many types of objectives a Dev Team could focus on.

Regarding this initial idea to establish a regional Dev Team, the following questions could be further investigated in future stakeholder assessments:

  • How should the Dev Team be organized, funded, and evaluated?
  • Who should be included in this Team, and what responsibilities should they have? Potential institutional partners to consider include local and regional higher education, economic development leaders, industry employment partners, and others.
  • What specific goals can and should a Regional Dev Team aim to achieve over 1, 3, and 5-year timelines?
  • What sources of funding are needed (and accessible) to finance the Dev Team’s activities? For instance: grants, donations, proviso funding, and co-investment from local, state, and industry partners?

Using data from a recent K12 CLNA, the design of a stakeholder assessment project exploring the creation of a K12 CTE Dev Team might consider the following:

  • Implement a method of interviews and surveys to establish a foundational framework for the formation, sustainability, recruitment, action agenda, and evaluation of a regional Dev Team.
  • Identify and engage specific Dev Team partners to fully comprehend and address the value they seek from participating in and supporting a Dev Team.
  • Determine how regional partners from K12 CTE programs and higher education Prof-Tech programs can align, collaborate, articulate, and innovate new solutions to persistent problems.
  • Identify and utilize regional CTE strengths to build a supportive and responsive network of K12 CTE, higher education Prof-Tech, and workforce development partners.

Moving beyond the Idea # 1 (formation of a Dev Team, Ideas # 2 through 6 are presented below as possible initiatives for the Dev Team.

2. Make CTE Understandable

CTE, due to its inherent complexity, can often baffle stakeholders leading to confusion, missed opportunities, persistent gaps, and less than optimal outcomes. The distinctive feature of CTE pathways is their design, intended to offer transformative experiences leading to career employment. These pathways start as early as elementary school and involve progressions from one stage to another, making them difficult to convey, monitor, and promote. However, if K12 systems can present CTE using easy-to-understand concepts and tools that accurately illustrate a pathway's scope, value, components, and integrated elements, they can significantly simplify the task of explaining CTE opportunities. This would be beneficial to students, their families, the community, teachers, counselors, industry/employer partners, and more. 

To investigate this idea more deeply, a stakeholder assessment could explore questions such as:

  • Which complex CTE aspects pose the greatest barrier for understandability?
  • What essential elements about CTE need to be included in outreach tools?
  • How can complex CTE concepts be simplified into easy-to-understand terms?
  • In what formats could a conceptual CTE map be developed, utilized, and disseminated? (i.e., printed, audible, interactive online versions)
  • Which aspects of the CTE journey need to be highlighted?
  • What are the most coherent ways to describe K12 CTE’s connection with higher education Prof-Tech programs and other industry-sponsored career-training programs?

Data from stakeholder assessments identified several approaches for making CTE more understandable: 

  • Undertake a comprehensive review at the state, national, and international levels of similar "complexity-reduction" initiatives aimed at simplifying complex systems and processes to engage a wider audience.
  • Conduct targeted inquiry with chosen stakeholder groups to pinpoint confusing CTE complexities, essential components to include, messaging subtleties, design parameters, and to identify opportunities for similar/complementary approaches with pathway partners.
  • Formulate a set of design parameters, assemble a team to develop content, and develop intuitive maps for showing CTE pathways. Creation of a map could provide an opportunity to partner with educational programs that focus on information and communication design.
  • Implement a sustainable process for ongoing revisions and updates to concepts and tools used to present, explain and promote CTE.

3. The 13th Year 

K12 systems often appear constrained by a schedule focused on state-enforced graduation requirements, yet a student's journey doesn't end at graduation; in fact, graduation is where most students’ career journey really starts. K12 plays a crucial role in preparing students for their future, but unfortunately, many 12th graders finish high school without a well-prepared plan for their next steps. A 13th year option could bridge this gap. The competing demands on public education can create barriers for schools to enhance their focus on post-secondary preparation during the regular K12 schedule, and a 13th year option could help alleviate this pressure. With dwindling local, regional, and statewide labor forces, a 13th year experience could provide a robust opportunity to guide recent graduates towards potential career paths, bypassing work-based learning age restrictions for students under 18 years. Implementing a 13th year could also offer a compelling opportunity for collaboration and co-investment by local and regional industry and higher education partners. Ideally, a 13th year model could become a replicable solution for students in rural communities.

Below are several important questions that could be explored through additional stakeholder assessments such as the CLNAs required by both K12 districts and higher education Prof-Tech programs.

  • What kind of opportunities should a 13th year provide?
  • Who would be the beneficiaries of a 13th year option and in what ways?
  • How can a 13th year option be financially sustainable?
  • What are the essential indicators of a successful 13th year experience?
  • How can a 13th year option be integrated into a “high school and beyond plan?”

Input from previous CLNA stakeholder assessments offer some initial insight on ways to explore the 13th year concept.

  • Examine national and international instances of the 13th year concept in action.
  • Conduct comprehensive interviews with local and statewide stakeholders to establish a set of components, structures, and objectives for a 13th year experience.
  • Organize focus group discussions to fine-tune the 13th year concept with stakeholder groups such as recent K12 graduates, current K12 students, parents of K12 students, K12 professionals, industry partners, and higher education partners.

4. Optimize Advisory Committees

CTE programs rely heavily on advisory committees for curricular insights and networking opportunities. A recent stakeholder assessment suggests ways to improve these committees by increasing meeting efficiency, fostering closer collaboration with similar committees (in both K12 and CTC settings), and consolidating committee activities by pathway cluster. While some advisory members express fatigue with current practices, enhancing committee management could boost committee functionality and provide more value to members and the CTE program. As the structures, demands, and expectations of the workforce evolves, so should the management practices of CTE advisory committees.

Several questions could help K12 systems explore ways to improve and optimize the management of their CTE advisory committees, such as:

  • What aspects of CTE advisory committees are currently effective, and which areas need improvement?
  • What are the fundamental values sought by each type of advisory committee member, such as employers, industry professionals, higher education professionals, local and state government professionals, community members, and K12 professionals?
  • What are the shared objectives for all K12 CTE advisory committees? How do these objectives align with the advisory committee goals of higher education Prof-Tech programs?
  • What alternative advisory committee management options could be considered? What are the potential advantages and disadvantages of these options?

Stakeholder data outlined a few concepts to consider when looking to optimize CTE advisory committee management approaches:

  • Conduct interviews with key members of CTE Program’s advisory committees to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of current practices and to explore innovative approaches to maximize the impact and value of committee work.
  • Hold discussions with selected higher education professionals who can provide insights on the current and potential intersections of Prof-Tech advisory committees with those serving the K12 CTE Program’s.
  • Examine alternative approaches implemented by other K12 CTE programs in the state and throughout the country.
  • Develop new strategies for efficiently and effectively managing advisory committees.
  • Survey a diverse range of stakeholders to gather feedback and ideas on a list of potential changes to the way a K12 CTE Program manages its advisory committees.

5. Regional Approach to CTE Development

Urban K12 districts often have larger and more diverse CTE resources to offer more comprehensive CTE programs than their rural counterparts. Rather than a district-by-district approach, urban and rural CTE programs could collaborate in a regional approach, leveraging the region's economy, community interdependence, workforce trends, and infrastructure. This would particularly benefit rural students, who often lack robust CTE programs yet stand to gain the most from pathways leading to living wage careers. A regional approach for CTE development serving all communities could offer significant mutual benefits to schools and employers while balancing student equity in access to opportunity.

Areas for additional inquiry in developing a regional approach to CTE include:

  • What are the current gaps among a region’s rural CTE Programs and how do these align with the strengths of the region’s other CTE Programs?
  • How could a regional strategy enhance urban and rural CTE Programs and address regional labor demand?
  • What kind of activities and resources could an urban CTE Program extend to neighboring rural CTE programs that would provide mutual value and benefit?
  • How could regional K12 districts, higher education partners, regional employers, and communities support a regional CTE development strategy? What are the opportunities for co-investment? 

Stakeholder ideas for exploring a regional CTE development approach include:

  • Conduct a review of state, national, and international examples of regional CTE development efforts, with a particular focus on enhancing rural CTE programs.
  • Define the region that would be served by a development effort. Many state-level K12 systems already have identified regions.
  • Identify and interview key stakeholders within a defined region about the current and desired state of CTE program development.
  • Develop a progressive sequence of actions to foster regional relationships, identify regional needs and opportunities for CTE programs, recruit a diverse range of stakeholders for support and co-investment, and outline regional actions that provide equitable CTE opportunities for all students in the selected region.

6. Fostering Industry-Supported WBL Opportunities

Recent stakeholder assessments highlight the need for innovative industry-supported Work-Based Learning (WBL) initiatives as a key strategy to address workforce shortages by engaging K12 students in career pathways. Scaling industry-supported WBL programs presents challenges, including determining what’s possible, who will provide leadership, and how the opportunities can be sustainable and on-going. K12 students need better preparation for post-secondary opportunities, and WBL offers a solution. However, K12 systems alone cannot support extensive WBL; industry investment is crucial. K12 CTE programs could help industry partners understand why and how to support high value WBL opportunities.

Questions to consider when developing approaches to foster and enable industry-supported WBL opportunities:

  • Which industries in a given region are in need of and supportive of innovative workforce development suitable for K12 students?
  • What successful strategies can be learned from existing successful WBL programs elsewhere in the region, state, or country?
  • What are the essential components needed for a successful, comprehensive, and industry-supported WBL opportunity?
  • Which specific organizations (or industry collaborations) are interested and capable of sponsoring robust and ongoing WBL opportunities?
  • How can K12 WBL efforts align and integrate with similar efforts by higher education partners?

Approach

  • Examine local, regional, state, and national examples of successful industry-funded WBL programs.
  • Identify local and regional industries where a comprehensive WBL program could support both K12 and workforce development objectives.
  • Collaborate with state-level K12 leadership, local and regional employers, regional school districts, and regional higher education partners through a series of futures-oriented interviews to explore needs, opportunities, regulatory and practical considerations, as well as innovative solution ideas to connect K12 students with industry careers and higher education opportunities.
  • Develop a flexible framework to recruit and guide industry organizations in creating industry-supported WBL opportunities.
  • Establish an evaluation model to monitor progress, pinpoint issues, and promote awareness, access, and engagement locally and across the region.