SPS projects bring fresh perspectives to business partners

Memes may be ubiquitous on social media, but they aren’t yet a mainstay of corporate marketing. That’s why the memes that our Student Powered Solutions team in Woodland Hills School District created proved so intriguing to staff members from Covestro.

“I like that they’re out-of-the box,” said Madeline Kennedy, a Covestro staffer in Polyurethane Advocacy and Sustainability.

The students developed the memes after Covestro challenged them to find ways of reaching a young audience to build understanding about how its products are manufactured and used.

Woodland Hills’ Covestro project was one of several that SPS teams presented this Spring. Others included a project at Penn Hills High School addressing safety issues for Carmeuse, a limestone mining company and another in which students from Blackhawk and Mohawk school districts compared alternative power sources for First Energy Corp. Two additional projects also were still underway—one between South Allegheny High School and Allegheny Land Trust that’s set for final presentation in early May and another that Pittsburgh Perry Traditional Academy is doing with ALCOSAN.

SPS projects all employ Human Centered Design (HCD) methods and Project-Based Learning (PBL). The HCD methods help students organize their work and ensure that it addresses concerns of different stakeholders. PBL techniques give teachers a pedagogical alternative to traditional classroom lectures and one that gives students opportunities apply content knowledge and develop the soft skills needed to work in teams.

In a survey of 555 students, the Woodland Hills team found that humor and entertainment are top reasons teens tune into social media. Because of that, they made most of their memes funny—often depicting a world bereft of products made with Covestro polymers such as office chairs, mattresses and automotive paint. The survey achieved a remarkable 100 percent response because team members either administered it in person or obtained assistance from social studies teachers who administered it in class. Surveys typically generate no more than a 15 percent response rate because there’s usually mailed no one standing by to see them through to completion.

“I thought the survey was really good,” said Covestro STEM Coordinator Ben Renwick.

Students said they learned a lot from the project, both about Covestro and its products and about themselves and how to work together.

“The project definitely changed my viewpoint,” said one young woman, noting that her own attitudes about plastics and chemicals initially had been in line with those the team’s survey had uncovered. The survey found a significant majority of students had negative perceptions of both.

Another young woman said she realized she liked doing the project because “I need to see things” to learn. “I don’t like it if people just tell me something.” She also said she found she really enjoyed doing a presentation for an audience.

The Penn Hills teams that investigated ways to address safety challenges for Carmeuse also took away lessons about soft skills.

“Working together as a group,” was a bit of a challenge, said one young man. “It was hard coming together around an idea.”

Nonetheless, they worked their way through the challenges of collaboration and came up with several recommendations that Carmeuse found helpful.

“There are some great ideas here,” said David Sweitzer, Director of Risk Management who listened the presentations at Carmeuse’ Downtown headquarters along with some 80+ other staff members. “I love the app and the wall of safety. Those are some things we’ll be advancing.”

Students had recommended the company supply mining vehicle operators with an app to avoid accidents. The app would tell drivers where other vehicles were located, much the same as apps used to track snow plows.

A wall with profiles of staff safety accomplishments was part of a package of ideas students presented for motivating employees to follow and improve safety protocols and outcomes.

Conference provides opportunities to explore careers and build skills

A strong science student, Evan had once entertained the possibility of studying medicine, but a part-time job at an American Eagle Outfitters (AEO) store turned his head. Because of it, he began to see his interest in “developing a personal style” as more than a passing fancy and started thinking a career in retail might be a better fit.

Our annual Student Leadership Conference for the Future is Mine (TFIM) gave the Albert Gallatin High School senior a chance to confirm his hunch.  “This is just what I needed,” he said. “I know this is really what I want.”

Evan was among a group of students who explored careers in marketing and retail at AEO, while other groups of the 300+ attendees fanned out among 16 employers hosting opportunities to investigate fields ranging from engineering and finance to urban planning and broadcasting.

After exploring retail careers at American Eagle Outfitters, students gathered outside the company’s headquarters for a photo

For Mollie, a Yough High School senior, a visit to HDR wasn’t necessary to confirm a career choice. She already knew she wanted to study engineering. Still, the chance to talk with engineers, “get a feel for the environment where they work and see the kinds of projects you might work on and the difference between the small ones and the large ones” gave her insight about options within the field, she said. “I learned a lot.”

The annual Conference, which took place April 11-12, was TFIM’s 19^th.   Even for students who don’t have a career in mind, the 2-day event always provides invaluable exposure.  Working professionals often give advice applicable to almost any job and Conference workshops help prepare students for job searches and the workplace.

At AEO, for example, one staffer gave tips for building resumes even without landing coveted internships. Others used personal stories to illustrate how willingness, adaptability, diligence and perseverance also can set candidates apart whether applying for jobs or seeking promotions.

“If you want it on your resume, do it yourself,” advised Stephanie Campbell, a Social Media Manager for AEO’s Aerie brand. Campbell said she demonstrated marketing ability to her first employer with a blog that she launched and promoted with Facebook ads.

AEO Director of Customer Systems Steve Schaab told students he’d positioned himself to rise through the ranks at AEO with a willingness to make lateral moves and learn more about the business. He also said his career trajectory was far from smooth or straight up. With insufficient family resources “college was out of the question,” when he left high school, but he eventually got there taking any job he could get and saving until he could enroll in Community College of Allegheny County. Along the way to his degree and his technology career, he was a stock boy, a cashier, a shoe salesman, a forklift operator and a bartender, before getting his first technology jobs with Adelphia Cable and RPS, the predecessor to FedEx Ground. He eventually earned a Master’s degree at Point Park University.

“Regardless of how you get there, it’s about the effort you put in,” Schaab told students. “Just have little goals—little goals can take you a lot of places.”

Schaab also was one of numerous professionals to expound the benefits of networking. As a case in point, the lead for his programmer’s job at RPS came from talking to a customer at the bar where he worked.

In addition to AEO, employers hosting workplace visits were: ALCOSAN, Allegheny County, Allegheny General Hospital, Carnegie Museum of Art, Covestro, Dollar Bank, Duquesne Light Co., Google, Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank, HDR, Jefferson Hospital, Production Masters, Inc. (PMI); United Way of Southwestern Pennsylvania, Urban Design Associates and the Waterways Association of Pittsburgh with Gateway Clipper Fleet.

Following their workplace visits, students visited Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall and Museum where they browsed the exhibits and participated in mock interview sessions organized by Pittsburgh Brashear, Yough and Woodland Hills high schools.

Afterward, the students gathered at the Pittsburgh Marriott City Center for dinner, a networking session, a dance, an overnight stay and a second day of career related workshops,

Different TFIM teams organized a number of the workshops. Among others, there were sessions on resumes hosted by Springdale High School; on business etiquette, hosted by Greensburg Salem High School; on diversity hosted  by Pittsburgh Brashear High School; on job search skills, hosted by Yough High School; on the importance of kindness by Monessen City High School and on the Pittsburgh region’s employment outlook by Bethlehem Center High School.

Community organizations and other volunteers also hosted breakout sessions. Among them were sessions hosted by Carnegie Mellon University researcher and psychologist Julie Downs, PhD about decision-making; by YouthWorks on nonverbal communication; by Chaz Kellem on diversity; by the YMCA on STEM skills; by Robert Morris University on networking by UNO’s Pizzeria on resume writing; by Consortium staffers on Human Centered Design; and by Ariana and Julia Brazier, who helped students assess their leadership styles.

Sponsors helped make the Conference possible. This year, they included: American Eagle Outfitters Foundation; Comcast; Covestro; Dollar Bank; Duquesne Light Company; Highmark Casualty Insurance Co./HM Insurance Group; Huntington National Bank; NCDMM; NexTier; Pittsburgh Marriott City Center; Pittsburgh Penguins Foundation; Pittsburgh Pirates; Schell Games; Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall; UPMC; Wells Fargo Foundation and individual benefactor Amy Winokur.

Conference highlighted models for collaboration between employers and schools

Calling them “a wasted resource,” PNC Financial Group’s top executive said our region’s high schools and their students must figure prominently in our region’s employment picture to avoid the kind of talent drain his own company began heading off nearly two decades ago.

“If the region’s corporate community doesn’t get actively engaged and figure out how to harvest this resource, we’re going to have a problem,” PNC’s Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer Bill Demchak told attendees at our Future Ready Partnerships Conference in April. In turn, he added that means helping students understand that enrolling directly in a four-year degree program isn’t their only option and may not always be the best choice.

Demchak was one of several presenters opening the Conference with examples of partnerships between businesses and schools that both prepare students for the future and strengthen the region’s workforce. Among others were Mascaro Construction Co.’s chief executive; a Greensburg Salem School District administrator and a Mon Valley state legislator who delivered video remarks. 

The presentations sparked discussions throughout the day—in breakouts and networking sessions—about how businesses can partner with schools to give students content knowledge and soft skills that employers need.

For its part, PNC ramped up efforts to recruit younger employees 18 years ago, when Demchak joined the company and it took a sobering look at its own demographics and hiring patterns. Instead of recruiting talent away from other banks as many competitors were at the time, PNC undertook measures to develop talent in-house. The company bolstered college recruitment, internships and other training at the entry level. As a budget line item, it looked expensive, but it’s paid off handsomely, Demchak said.

More recently, on the heels of a workforce shortage projection from the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, which Demchak chairs, PNC began piloting PartnerUP with help from the Consortium. The program takes pre-employment training directly into high schools and gives students a chance to interview for entry-level jobs at PNC or other participating employers including Allegheny Health Network, Comcast and Peoples Natural Gas Co.

It gives students alternatives, Demchak said, adding “We tend to teach kids their goal in life is to go to college” and high schools are judged on how many they send. But going directly into the workforce doesn’t preclude getting a degree later, he emphasized. “It’s not this binary thing.”

“Working at a public company like PNC can open your eyes to opportunities that are out there and steer you to smarter choices,” Demchak added, noting said that students and their families need to discuss “the costs and outcomes” of different choices.

Like PNC, Mascaro Construction also has begun reaching out to high schools, said President and Chief Executive Officer John Mascaro, Jr. His company realized six or seven years ago that its industry would face workforce shortages and that there were “multiple pathways” into its careers, including some that students could pursue without degrees. The company is now trying to interest more high school students by educating teachers about its business, including as host last fall for the kickoff event of the Consortium’s Educator in the Workforce program. Additionally, Mascaro is working with Community College of Beaver County to create a “High School Academy,” through which students can earn credits toward a one-year associate’s degree.

Just as businesses have recognized the need to connect with public schools, so too have our region’s school districts begun looking to employers for help creating the opportunities students need to explore and prepare for careers.

Greensburg Salem has adopted a multi-faceted approach that relies heavily on connections made through intermediaries like workforce investment boards, the Consortium and others, the district’s Coordinator of Secondary Education Ken Bissell, Ed.D., told attendees. By doing so, the district has brought in partners like PPG Industries to provide classroom speakers and workplace exposure to teachers; Excela Health System, which is helping train students for entry-level employment in environmental and dietary services; Westmoreland County Art Museum, which has provided exposure to nonprofit and arts careers; and tool and die makers, which are helping create a pre-apprenticeship program. Additionally, Greensburg Salem has connected with post-secondary partners like Westmoreland County Community College to help students earn college credits and with industry partners to plan a tech-math course for students interested in skilled trades.

To underscore the impact community and business partnerships have on students, state Rep. Austin Davis (D-McKeesport) delivered video remarks crediting the beginnings of his career in government and politics to a job-shadow he got through the Consortium’s own career exploration program, The Future Is Mine (TFIM). Now marking its 19^th year, TFIM was a pathbreaker in connecting schools and businesses.

Breakout sessions at the Conference gave attendees yet more insights into partnerships that might serve as models. Among those showcased were the Consortium’s  Student Powered Solutions  and Educator in the Workforce  programs; PNC’s PartnerUP program; Covestro’s education outreach programs; apprenticeships available through the German American Chamber of Commerce, Goodwill, Duquesne Light and the construction industry; and initiatives educators are leading such as an employer fair that South Allegheny School District offers students, parents and community members and an internship program Franklin Regional School District has developed for students.

“We don’t want this to stop with presentations,” The Consortium’s Director of Organizational Advancement Jackie Foor said. “We want you to go into these breakout sessions with your questions and bring your own thinking to them as well. Most importantly, we want you to take home ideas for your own partnerships.”

Consortium Program Director Debbie Pixton, who served as the Consortium’s point person in organizing the Conference, encouraged attendees to borrow from or build on the examples discussed during breakouts. “These were meant to provide you with strategies you can adopt or adapt,” she said.

Attendees wasted no time taking up the challenge; conversations overheard during the networking sessions hinted at partnerships in the making.

One school administrator talked with a peer from a nearby district, for example, about collaborating on a business fair for students and their families. Two officials from yet another district described plans during a table discussion for engaging local businesses in a co-op program to provide internships for students with nearby businesses. A small business owner, in turn, mentioned his interest in bringing students into his company to build skills in CAD-CAM (computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing).

The interest expressed in business/school partnerships was a “joy” to The Grable Foundation’s Executive Director Gregg Behr, but it came as no surprise. Behr, who also is the founder of Remake Learning and chair of the Allegheny Conference’s K-12 Business Engagement Committee, portrayed partnerships developing in southwestern Pennsylvania as part of an evolving mix of innovations that has brought the region national attention.

“You’re already making this happen in truly extraordinary ways,” he said, noting  that thought-leaders in education “are constantly pointing to the Pittsburgh region because of the ways we’re wrestling—and have been wrestling for more than a decade—with issues about the future of learning and work.”

Collaborations showcased at the Conference represent “an opportunity to capture the hope Mr. Demchak described and get more businesses plugged in.”

Exploring opportunities for school-business collaboration

Our upcoming Future Ready Partnerships Conference will feature two of the region’s foremost proponents of collaboration between businesses and schools. Also on the agenda are speakers who already have engaged in the kinds of school-business partnerships that are helping better prepare students, while strengthening the region’s workforce.

PNC Financial Services Group’s Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer Bill Demchak will give the morning keynote and The Grable Foundation’s Executive Director Gregg Behr will speak after lunch.

The Conference takes place April 2 at the auditorium in the Tower at PNC Plaza. Attendees are invited to share insights via social media using the hashtag #FRPC .

With workforce challenges looming, Mr. Demchak, who also chairs the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, has been quoted as saying that businesses must become investors in talent as well as consumers of talent.

Mr. Behr, who chairs the Allegheny Conference’s K-12 Business Engagement Committee, has championed the kinds of innovative learning experiences needed to prepare students for a world where the velocity of change is greater than ever and where technology is profoundly changing both lives and livelihoods.

Among other speakers, John Mascaro, President and Chief Executive Officer  of Mascaro Construction, will discuss his own experience in a partnership that connected him with educators as a means of conveying information about in-demand jobs to students. Greensburg Salem School District’s Coordinator of Secondary Education, Dr. Ken Bissell, will talk about the ways business engagement is benefiting students in his community. And addressing conferees via video will be state Rep. Austin Davis (D-McKeesport) who plans to share his own story of a job-shadow that put him on his political career path.

The day also will feature breakout sessions designed to help educators and businesses learn how they can tap the power of partnerships themselves.

TFIM Conference features new site hosts and workshops

Some 300 students will converge Downtown when our career exploration program, The Future Is Mine, holds its annual two-day Student Leadership Conference April 10^th-11^th.

The Conference, themed “Cheers to 19 Years” in celebration of TFIM’s  19^th anniversary, gets underway as it traditionally does with career explorations hosted by 16 different employers. Following the workplace visits, students will visit Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall and Museum to take in a little history then head over to the Pittsburgh Marriott City Center for dinner, a dance, an overnight stay and a second day of career-related workshops.

“We’ve got some new worksite hosts this year as well as some returnees that haven’t hosted visits for at least several years,” said TFIM Program Director Gina Barrett. “We’ll also be offering some outstanding workshops, including a number that were student-driven and organized by TFIM teams.”

The Conference is TFIM’s culminating event for the school year, bringing together students from nearly 30 high schools.

New to the event as career exploration host sites are Covestro, a polymers manufacturer and HDR, an engineering and architecture firm. Returning after a number of years are the clothing retailer, American Eagle Outfitters; filmmaker and post-production services firm, PMI and Duquesne LIght Co.

Also hosting visits are: ALCOSAN, Allegheny County, Allegheny General Hospital, Carnegie Museum of Art, Dollar Bank,  Google, Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank, Jefferson Hospital, United Way of Southwestern Pennsylvania, Urban Design Associates and the Waterways Association of Pittsburgh with Gateway Clipper Fleet.

Among more than a dozen different workshops will be sessions using: an Escape Room to build STEM skills; Human-Centered Design techniques to improve organizational and collaborative skills; research from Carnegie Mellon University’s BrainHub to build social and emotional skills; mock-interviews and other activities to improve job search skills and business etiquette.

As in past years, the Conference has a blue chip roster of sponsors including: American Eagle Outfitters Foundation; Comcast; Covestro; Dollar Bank; Duquesne Light Company; Highmark Casualty Insurance Co. HM Insurance Group; Huntington National Bank; NCDMM; NexTier; Pittsburgh Marriott City Center; Pittsburgh Penguins Foundation; Pittsburgh Pirates; Schell Games; Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall; UPMC; Wells Fargo Foundation and individual benefactor Amy Winokur.

Special tributes to be given at 2019 Champions of Learning Awards celebration

Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild founder William Strickland will receive the Consortium’s Special Tribute for his lifetime contributions to education at this year’s Champions of Learning Awards celebration.  United Way of Southwestern Pennsylvania, our partner in the awards, also plans to announce a Special Tribute at the presentation ceremony on May 2. 

The awards ceremony will honor individuals who have gone above and beyond to support youth in our region, whether in their professional lives or as volunteers. Awards will be presented to winners in six categories: Community Partners & Providers; Educators, K-6; Educators, 7-12; Leadership; School Staff; and Volunteers.

Earlier in the year, we announced three finalists in each category. The deadline for making reservations  to attend the awards ceremony is April 19. Tickets can be ordered online via Eventbrite.

TFIM Conference features new site hosts, innovative workshops

Some 350 students will converge Downtown when our career exploration program, The Future Is Mine, holds its annual two-day Student Leadership Conference April 10^th-11^th.

Themed “Cheers to 19 Years” in celebration of TFIM’s  19^th anniversary, the Conference gets underway as it traditionally does with career explorations hosted by 16 different employers. Following the workplace visits, students will visit Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall and Museum to take in a little history then head over to the Pittsburgh Marriott City Center for dinner, a dance, an overnight stay and a second day of career-related workshops. 

“We’ve got one new worksite host this year as well as a couple of returnees that haven’t hosted visits for at least several years,” said TFIM Program Director Gina Barrett. “We’ll also be offering some outstanding workshops, including a number that were student-driven and organized by TFIM teams.”

The Conference is TFIM’s culminating event for the school year, bringing together students from nearly 30 participating high schools.

New to the event as a career exploration host site is HDR, an engineering and architecture firm. Returning after a number of years are the clothing retailer, American Eagle Outfitters and filmmaker and post-production services firm, PMI.

Also hosting visits are: ALCOSAN, Allegheny County, Allegheny General Hospital, Carnegie Museum of Art, Covestro, Dollar Bank, Duquesne Light Co. Google, Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank, Jefferson Hospital, United Way of Southwestern Pennsylvania, Urban Design Associates and the Waterways Association of Pittsburgh with Gateway Clipper Fleet.

Among more than a dozen different workshops will be sessions featuring: an Escape Room to build STEM skills; Human-Centered Design techniques to improve organizational and collaborative skills; research from Carnegie Mellon University’s BrainHub to build social and emotional skills; mock-interviews and other activities to improve job search skills and teach business etiquette.

As in past years, our thanks go to a blue-chip list of sponsors for making the Conference possible, including: American Eagle Outfitters Foundation; Comcast; Covestro; Dollar Bank; Duquesne Light Company; Highmark Casualty Insurance Co. HM Insurance Group; Huntington National Bank; NCDMM; NexTier; Pittsburgh Marriott City Center; Pittsburgh Penguins Foundation; Pittsburgh Pirates; Schell Games; Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall; UPMC; Wells Fargo Foundation and individual benefactor Amy Winokur

Employers give insights on skills students need

Learning about career paths available at ALCOSAN was “eye opening” for Clairton City School District’s Tom McCloskey, as were visits a week earlier to PNC Financial Corp. and several others last year that he made through Educator in the Workforce.

As Principal of the district’s Cyber School. “All I know is education,” he said. But as a regular participant in the Consortium’s Educator in the Workforce program, McCloskey feels he’s not only broadened his understanding of employers and jobs in the region, he’s learned to his surprise, “how much on-the-job training is available,” including for students with only a high school diploma.  “We heard about it here at ALCOSAN, we heard about it at PNC and we heard about it at NEP Group.”

Clairton City School District Principal Tom McCloskey works with his team to organize learnings from visit to PNC

McCloskey participated in two program sessions in March—the one at ALCOSAN, where he took time between activities for a brief interview, and another at PNC Financial Group. He also had participated in several sessions last year, including a daylong immersion at NEP Group.

Like McCloskey, most participants in Educator in the Workforce are looking to increase their knowledge of employers outside of education so that they can support students in learning what they’ll need to know as they enter the workforce. In some cases, the participants are teachers who want to be able to connect the subjects they’re teaching with real-world needs and applications. Others, whether counselors or classroom educators, want to be able to serve as sounding boards for students trying to connect their own interests and skills to possible occupations.

At both ALCOSAN and PNC, human resources specialists and others on staff took pains to point out that even entry-level jobs can be stepping stones to many opportunities that not only provide on-the-job training, but in some cases, tuition reimbursement for obtaining degrees.

PNC employs 56,000 and “on any given day, there are 3,000 jobs open in this bank,” said Executive Vice President Caitlin McLaughlin, who oversees the financial firm’s talent and compensation programs.  “Just because you don’t have a finance major doesn’t mean you won’t be a good fit for PNC,” she said.

In fact, even lack of a degree doesn’t rule candidates out at PNC, where jobs might range as far from finance as information technology or human resources, or ALCOSAN, where many of jobs are technical, involving water testing and the like.

“You can start here as a janitor,” in the unionized segment of ALCOSAN’s workforce and use seniority to hopscotch through a spectrum of jobs and training opportunities, said Tara Prince, an analytical chemist who has gone through several job changes there, including to one that enabled her to earn her degree. She noted that there are numerous apprenticeship opportunities within ALCOSAN that teach skilled trades like plumbing and HVAC maintenance as well as other opportunities for students “who don’t see college as part of their future.” Additionally, ALCOSAN offers a range of administrative and managerial opportunities.

PNC staffers also emphasized the importance of soft skills. In addition to the 4Cs—communications, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity—that schools increasingly are trying to incorporate into lesson planning, students also need to gain an appreciation of constructive criticism, McLaughlin said. PNC interns facing mid-summer reviews often misinterpret the process, she adding that some who haven’t ever been through it “melt down.”

Like all performance evaluations, the summer review process entails discussion of areas where employees “need improvement” as well as areas where they’re meeting or exceeding expectations. Learning that the process is intended to assist professional development, “is a huge skill,” McLaughlin said.

As valuable as the insights offered by employers during some Educator in the Workforce sessions are those offered from an employee perspective, especially when the employees are just starting out. Participants at the PNC’s session, for example, heard from recent PNC recruits, including one who joined the firm just out of high school as an alumnus of PartnerUP, a pre-employment training program that PNC organized with help from the Consortium.

Among other things, these young people gave attendees the benefit of their hindsight on what gaps high schools might fill in curriculum. One young woman said she wished she had had a chance to learn and practice PowerPoint. Similarly, another said she found that during and after college, she had to catch up with and learn from peers who had apparently had had more opportunities to practice presentation skills. Yet another said she wished she had learned some coding and almost all the young people said they wished they had learned more about personal finances.

Self-exploration is critical to student career planning

Now that Pennsylvania public schools are tasked with helping all students create career plans, they need to go a step further—have them create three.

While they’re at it, schools also should make sure that kids don’t begin career planning without having first explored their interests and assessed their skills, said Boston University Professor V. Scott Solberg. PhD. Solberg spoke in March to a group of educators gathered at the Consortium for a workshop presented in partnership with the Mid-Atlantic Regional Educational Laboratory. 

“Interest inventories often go straight to careers, but we want kids to find first out how they relate to the world,” Solberg said. When they connect careers to personal interests and goals, they’re much more likely to “take ownership of their learning.”

Identifying more than one career plan not only gives students a fallback, it also makes them think more deeply about their interests and skills. The magic number seems to be three because research suggests students with three different plans both do better in school and are happier later in life, Solberg said.

With schools relying too heavily on test scores as benchmarks of progress, too many students go off to college with no plan, or plans that didn’t adequately take account of who they are. It’s why too many drop out or change majors, Solberg said. “We need educators to realize they’re not just teaching subjects. We need to think about those next steps, not just subjects.”

To ensure that kids have the chance for self-exploration, Solberg suggested they do written reflections on what they’ve learned about themselves and what tentative career and life goals they can envision.

Additionally, he said the interest of a caring adult can be critical in starting the process. One common way of ensuring this access is pairing students with adult mentors in their schools. But some schools even are bringing in retirees to help kids, he said. Additionally, schools can bring business people in for career explorations, panel discussions and other activities.

Among the highest priorities for many educators at the workshop was helping students connect with real-world experiences and role models outside the classroom.

Baldwin Whitehall School District’s Assistant Superintendent Denise Sedlacek, M.Ed., for example, said her team would like to see more job-shadows for students in middle school and, at higher grade levels, more internships and cooperative education arrangements, in which kids combine classroom time with jobs.

“Our bullseye is face-to-face,” agreed South Allegheny School District Superintendent Dr. Lisa Duval. “For our kids, career exploration has to be more than logging onto a computer and researching a career. We have to get them onsite.”

Duval said families in her district can’t necessarily provide exposure to the kinds of careers that their kids might want. “We have to be the catalyst to say, ‘If you want more, you can have more’.”

Alliance presentation sheds light on teen behavior

Remember the billion-dollar, 1970s advertising campaign warning young people about the dangers of drugs—how they’d fry your brain like an egg, among other things? It had no effect. Drug use didn’t decline at all.

Despite reaching millions of people, the campaign likely failed its intended purpose because of the way our brains work, Carnegie Mellon University Professor Julie Downs, PhD. told educators gathered for a Future Ready Alliance session in March.

Instilling fear ultimately isn’t a strategy for changing teen behavior, she said. “You can’t live in a state of fear.” Instead, the brain responds more to actionable information.

With support from The Heinz Endowments, Dr. Downs gave special presentation on social and emotional learning as part of a series of Alliance “target” sessions, when participating teams and others focus on a topic related to their ongoing work improving college and career readiness in their schools. Dr. Downs talk covered a range of troublesome teen issues, ranging from risky behaviors like drug use to not studying enough.

Although it may not seem so at times, teens are just as capable of making rational choices as adults, Dr. Downs said. And they make bad choices for many of the same reasons as well. But they’re also more susceptible to what she terms “hot states,” when actions are driven more by the primitive, limbic regions of the brain that are responsible for feelings.

In cooler states, she explained, teen decisions are driven more by reason. Feelings still play a role, but a proper one—augmenting judgement.

Because kids have feelings of wanting to be liked and accepted, peer pressure often influences them to engage in risks that reasoning would tell them to avoid. A dire warning might not help them resist, because it’s not actionable, Downs said. “It doesn’t give them any tools. It’s not behaviorally useful information.”

Downs illustrated the emotional pull peer relationships can have on youngsters with the story of a young woman who’d been the victim of cyberbullying so severe, she received death threats. To escape her tormentors, the girl withdrew from social media.  But ultimately, “safety and wellbeing felt less important than being left out,” so she went back, Downs said.

To help kids avoid being pulled into behavior they know they shouldn’t, it’s best to talk about coping strategies in “cool” states, before the need arises. Contingency plans are among the “tools” that help kids avoid risks, Downs said. Other aids in in resisting temptation include environmental cues. For example, putting salad at the beginning of a buffet table can encourage more healthy eating.

For adults to understand teen behavior and guide decisions, it’s also helpful to understand the drivers of intuitive choices. Among these, people tend toward overconfidence and toward an “illusion of control,” both of which can play into taking chances like driving too fast or not studying enough for a test.