Alignment & Coordination: Curricula & Co-Curricula (ACCC) Subcommittee

Notes for the Meeting of May 12

Committee Chair: Dick Knight

Location: Hillsboro High School, 3285 Rood Bridge Road, Hillsboro, Oregon. 503.844.7980 -- see http://www.hsd.k12.or.us/hilhi/

Notes: posted July 7, 2006 - download the pdf

OPAS Alignment & Coordination:  Curricular & Co-curricular (ACCC)
Meeting Notes for  May 12, 2006
Tour of Hillsboro High School Technical Education facilities,
Led by Don Domes

Attendees:  Michal Young (UO), Dick Knight (Friends of Saturday Academy), Don Domes (Hilhi), Jo Oshiro (OPAS/OUS).  Dick Knight and Steve Day (Beaverton School District) visited while class was in session.

Facility Tour

Don Domes showed us Hillsboro High’s large building, in which one classroom leads to the next, with several computer labs for robotics, graphics, architecture, CAD, as well as more traditional shop facilities for metal fabrication, woodworking, autoshop, electronics, small engine work, and a greenhouse.  Most schools in Oregon no longer have these kinds of facilities.

Once again, we see what a teacher of passion, vision, and dedication can do when the system doesn’t hobble him too badly.  Don advocates for OPAS to support these types of programs and makes these points:

• metro/rural divide – rural schools are more likely to have shops
• ETIC/OPAS grants just funded Yamhill-Carlton & South Lincoln
• “shop” is another inquiry/project-based curricula for kids
• “shop” can become an academic gateway as students become engaged through hands-on work in which they experience concrete success.
• Much of the equipment comes from Don’s ability to scrounge, leverage volunteers, and write grants.  One lab has a 3D printer for quick design prototyping.

Current status of Vocational-Technical Education in Oregon

Multiple constituencies are currently addressing this problem in Oregon.  Information on two of them are included below:

• Manufacturing 21 Coalition – Center for Manufacturing and Infrastructure Engineering - 1100 SW 6th Ave, Ste 1425, Portland OR 503.802.4101 mfg21@cfmpdx.com (mentioned by Don at this meeting).

The Oregon Business Plan has launched the Oregon Cluster Network to identify Oregon’s mature, emerging, and potential industry clusters and assist cluster participants as they work to accelerate innovation and the growth of their industries. By consciously connecting industry leaders with university researchers, schools, media, venture capital, and other resources, the network will help cluster facilitators across the state share best practices and develop a regional collaborative advantage.  … www.OregonClusters.org is a joint effort of the Oregon Business Plan and the Oregon Economic and Community Development Department.  It aims to promote economic development in Oregon by providing comprehensive information on traded industry clusters that are important sources of innovation, entrepreneurship and employment growth in the state and facilitating collaboration between the public and private sector to create effective incentives to support the growth of traded industry clusters
Retrieved July 6, 2006 from http://www.oregonclusters.org/index.html

• Senate Bill 364 Workforce 2005 Task Force - The Workforce 2005 Task Force is created for the purpose of examining career and professional technical education as a unified system of education, workforce and economic development. The task force shall report its findings and recommendations to the Seventy-fourth Legislative Assembly.  See http://www.ode.state.or.us/search/page/?id=238 and expect an update to the OPAS Committee this summer.

Effects of personal evangelism – Nathia Rivera

Nathia Rivera is a dynamic young Latina who came to Don Domes’ classroom as an ELL (English Language Learner) aide.  Because she is also an engineering student enrolled at PSU, she had an excellent understanding of the subject matter being taught.  Don has previously worked to keep the struggling and behavioral-issue students out of his classrooms because he does not need the headcount nor the headaches.  Nathia’s success with her first few students, and her evangelism of the possibilities convinced Don to take the risk of restructuring how he handles ELL students and have Nathia recruit significantly larger numbers of them for spring term classes.

• Because Don’s classrooms are structured so students can be self-paced, there is little lecture.  It’s either “a hive of bees or chaos” – he went way out on a limb to get the headcount to allow Nathia to be hired on for a second term. 
• Nathia becomes an instructional aide tied to his classroom, not following a particular student(s) around as a translator.  She can understand the material, the work, the concepts and can translate those rather than be a word-for-word walking dictionary
• Don describes this as “essentially team-teaching with a mother-hen” and lists these factors as contributing to their mutual success:
• She has her own space.
• She knows at least some of subject matter
• The current structure is the cumulation of several months experiments
• Must have 30-45 minutes per day to converse with each other.
• If possible, end of each class review highs and lows
• Don and Matt Zimmerman modeled team teaching/ highs lows for her previously; they have team taught electronics for 20 years
• Nathia personally follows, and keeps files on those students she recruited for this program.  She has formed an ongoing relationship with the Latino student community.
• Nathia is awesomely dynamic and passionately dedicated to this project and these kids.
• Don spent a lot of political capital to achieve this situation because the results of winter term showed Latino students achieving greater success than previously.  The current emphasis on core subjects often leaves these programs out in the cold, without dollars or FTE.  He is also concerned that the current situation with ELL students is currently not a replicatable and possibly not scalable.  Some factors that Don and Nathia identify as necessary, but probably not sufficient, for replicability are:
• Planned time for the aide and the teacher to talk
• The aide needs to do all the assignments the kids do, because the aide is the PIC (Person in Charge).  Students quickly pick up on the “I can’t do that either” vibe and then “it is all over”.  Authority figures are more important in Latino culture than in suburban-American-princess-land.
• Consistency – can’t be switching aides all the time
• Aides be rewarded, paid, empowered – in part to be seen by the students as valued by the Powers-That-Be.
• Technical content can’t be translated by words – the aide must translate concepts into the conventionally accepted jargon from the alternate language’s culture.
• Don and Nathia are tracking percent of recruited students who get improved grades and have fewer discipline problems, and are looking at other classes as well as Don’s.  Anecdotal evidence supports the hypothesis that students who succeed in Don’s class then go on to do better in other classes.
• Don notes that one Robotics class had 44% Latino students and 21% ELL students. They achieved 93% A's and B's at the midterm and 81% A's and B's for final grades. The three highest scoring students were ELL students.

Co-curricular Programs: Structure, Essence, Leveraging

We do not have a handle on how many co-curricular programs there are, how much money is spent, how many students are served, or the geographical availability.  Attempting to quantify money spent through Guidestar and IRS 990 forms did not work out, because STEM-related enrichment is often too small a piece of the pie.  We’d like some data.

• Jo sent emails out to OPAS committee members asking for data 7/6/06.
• A phone call to the Portland Children’s Investment Fund, 7/6/06 reveals that the current jargon is “OST – Out-of-School-Time” and there is ongoing national research, some of it centered at Harvard University’s HFRP (Harvard Family Research Project).  Further inquiries underway.  Their website is at http://www.gse.harvard.edu/~hfrp/ and includes a database of OST programs.
• Dick talked to Tamra Busch-Johnson BEC; they still actively support the Techno supersite – see http://www.businesseducationlinks.org/technosciencess/website/index.html
• Don is wary of statistical comparison because of the broad spectrum of audiences served – Saturday Academy self-selectors vs. at-risk kids that must be pulled in.  Some prerequisites for recruiting the non-self-selectors –
• Transportation - pay for the buses,
• Professional staff – pay the teachers,
• Continuity - have an ongoing program,
• Familiarity - involve the schools: Sometimes school is the only place the at-risk students are available to us.
• Dick, were you going to add to this list?
• Rane’s idea, via memo to Dick – should OPAS consider an annual sci/tech expo for 9th grade students with activities, program publicity, careers?
• Jo found this reference for the Northwest Youth Careers Expo, which has ETIC member companies as sponsors -http://www.pdc.us/new/releases/2006/0504.asp

Best Practices

• Dick – One Best Practice often associated with Cocurricular programs is inquiry-based teaching.  We need to look at barriers to using inquiry-based teaching more extensively in the formal classroom environment.  It is a uniquely successful practice with at-risk students if combined with other modalities – there is a whole underlying structure to successfully implementing inquiry-based curriculum.  Use the term “hands-on.”
• Don – Use the word “multi-modality.”  Care must be taken in how inquiry is implemented, because pure inquiry may miss critical content.
• Effective learning requires more than spot demonstrations. The tactile-kinesthetic stuff is the most fun stuff at school – dance, sports, art, hands-on technical education & science. Our suggestion is to adopt hands-on learning as a gateway to learning rather than saying students must read and write before experiencing STEM subjects.
• The Oregon Standards Assessment and Content for Science Panel has been convened by ODE;  OPAS committee members Bill Becker (PSU) and Steve Day (Beaverton School District) are on it.  Jo notes their report on this work is available at http://opas.ous.edu/Committees/OPASS/SACPS-SummaryMay2006.pdf
• All – We need further discussion & articulation: what is the balance between inquiry and structure?

• Dick – Another Best Practice commonly seen in the Cocurricular world is reduced class size; decreasing student:teacher ratio is very beneficial for at-risk students if combined with language accessibility, hands-on learning, and subject matter concepts. Contact hours are critical.  Are events the best way to achieve this?
• More important than class-size is the number and intensity of contact hours.  Jo notes that during a focus group with MESA teachers on June 20, 2006 they identified class size as critical because of the chaos level; more & better opportunities for effective learning in a class of 24 with one teacher than in a class of 40 with 1 teacher and 2 aides/volunteers.  In part the physical size of classrooms is limiting.
• Don - How to leverage contact hours?  The Cocurricular model is not it.  We must capitalize on where the resources are already at – the schools.  How can we leverage the few resources we still have?  Replicatable models must be created –  piggybacking on existing resources/assets/programs maximizes the multiplier effect on each marginal dollar.
• Don and Steve can provide us with success models to put some money at to study.Ask Bruce if funds are available for high impact experiments.

Teacher Preparation:

• All teaching certificates are 5 year programs.  Is that the best model?
• Don – more than learning how to teach than in one year.

• Michal:  the teacher in the classroom makes a huge amount of difference.  I imagine an apprenticeship model.  There needs to be a teacher development component that cannot be done in a college classroom.

• Dick – what are they pathways for technically based teacher?

• Don has talked to John Marsaglia at WOU about running the Technical Education teacher program out of his (Don’s) classroom, not just student teaching.

• No one in Oregon currently certifies Tech Ed teachers.  Don suggests that perhaps OSU would be an appropriate owner of such a program.

• Michal:  Cannot now earn a degree in CS and then go get certified as a teacher in Oregon.  Flag this future discussion.

• All – we need a model to take paraprofessionals (instructional aides) from para to teacher.

Next Meeting:  To be scheduled in June, to follow up on Focus Area 1, the facilitation of networking among co-curricular providers.

For questions or information regarding this webpage, please email Jo Oshiro or call (503) 725.2910.