Rebranding Vocational Education: Developing Innovations in Career and Technical Education

There is a resurging interest in career and technical education (CTE) from business leaders, policy makers, and educators who have discovered, and in some cases rediscovered, the benefits of authentic applied learning embedded in career pathways that address a robust mixture of relationships, relevance, and rigor. Despite the growing interest, many policy makers, parents, employers, and the community at large—even many educators—continue to view CTE as a second-tier program for those students who are not realizing success in the traditional, first-tier college-prep high school program. In Big Picture Learning’s current work, however, we are trying to change that perception and create CTE program designs that have substantial implications for all students in all high schools, perhaps even middle schools.

 

Quantitative reasoning is one of the five Big Picture Learning Goals: How do I measure or represent it? We believe our designs can contribute to a much-needed re-branding of CTE as a first-tier program of choice while also serving as a catalyst for fundamental secondary school redesign. By developing and promulgating innovative variations of existing CTE designs, Big Picture Learning will contribute to the revitalization of CTE and its extension to a much larger secondary school population. We believe that developing and testing these new designs will position high school programs as an essential component of the nation’s workforce development system while simultaneously preparing all students for postsecondary learning, personal fulfillment, and civic participation.

Goals and Objectives

Big Picture Learning has two goals for this proposed work:

1. Develop new approaches to CTE that provide customized and personalized learning for each student.
2. Develop new designs for existing CTE program components that enhance and extend their applicability for a majority of secondary school students.

To achieve these goals, we will address these objectives:

1. Restructure the career academy design by, in effect, creating an academy for each student.
2. Develop industry-specific certifications that schools can use to design innovative and customized programs of study that can be implemented with interested employers.
3. Establish new forms of internship and collaborative work programs.
4. Promote the development of student-driven ventures (both social and entrepreneurial) that allow students to tinker and develop real prototypes.
5. Develop real-world assessments embedded in and/or directly associated with contextual, real-world integrated units that far surpass the depth of current assessments. Incorporate assessment of non-cognitive variables as part of that assessment (see Performance Assessment Innovation page).
6. Develop career/life learning plans that guide students’ postsecondary learning and work experiences.

Major Tasks

To accomplish these objectives, Big Picture Learning will:

1. Partner with specific businesses in selected industries to establish settings in which students can work in teams and side by side the designers in the corporate world to produce new prototypes and designs.
2. Develop structured processes and structures for both students and businesses that result in good matches for students and internship sites, clear understandings about the student’s role, essential learning objectives, and quality assurance.
3. Work with experts in assessment to ensure that performance assessments effectively measure depth of student understanding of multiple concepts in a way that promotes student interest and formal connections to the real world.
4. Develop and disseminate designs for seamlessly integrating academic skills and workplace skills in real-world contexts that lead to success in postsecondary schools and workplaces. Target the Big Picture Learning network as well as the Alternative High School Initiative (AHSI) network, which together serve more than 300 alternative schools in the country.
5. Develop and provide training and support for principals and teachers in implementing all or selected elements of the new CTE design.

Resources Required
Big Picture Learning has already committed its own resources to this work but needs additional resources in order to refine, document, evaluate, and disseminate its alternative career academy design within its own network as well as to the national CTE community. This work will require approximately $.765 million over two years. Big Picture Learning will provide training and support on a fee-for-service basis beginning in the second year of the project. The project will be self-supporting beginning in year three.