Coaching the Hampton High School students who participated in our Future Readiness Lab last year helped Scott Stickney take a few new tools into the Career Explorations Class he’s teaching this year.
The Consortium piloted the Lab last year in collaboration with The Heinz Endowments and eight school districts as a novel framework for supporting students in planning their post-secondary paths.
In addition to working with kids around the questions our Lab helped students answer—Who Am I? Who do I want to become? How do I get there? How do I continue to learn? and How do I give back to my community?—Stickney said he’s also using methods picked up when the Lab students worked on their team project.
“I have kids working on all sorts of different aspects of trying to answer those questions for themselves,” Stickney said.
Noting that his students range from freshmen to seniors, Stickney said “they’re all at different points and it allows them to kind of look at the questions that are most relevant to where they are.”
Seniors, for example, might be most focused on steps they need to take to get into a career they’ve already chosen, he said, whereas a freshman might still be asking “Who am I?”
Stickney also is leading a group of his students participating in a program the Consortium just began piloting this year called Future Ready Leaders (FRL).
As part of it, they’re working with educators to identify ways they believe their schools could improve future readiness programming. Each district team chose projects from one of three focus areas: skill-building; career exploration; and work-based learning.
Stickney’s students chose to focus on skill-building.
Just as Lab students did, FRL participants are developing projects aimed at filling needs they perceive.
The Lab students worked on ways to make their school’s course offerings and the skills they develop more understandable. The FRL participants are taking aim at what they see as too few opportunities for students to develop creativity.
Stickney said they haven’t yet agreed on their approach, but have bounced around ideas ranging from a mini-course to an infographic or playbook.
