techdirections January 2010 : Page 31
teacher externships Connecting the Classroom to the Workplace From R&D Alert F OR many educators, pro- fessional development brings to mind workshops, night courses at a college of education, or perhaps meeting with colleagues for lesson study. But teacher externships offer a very different kind of professional development experience, one that is often transformative for educators and their students. Externships—spending time in a workplace outside the classroom to learn how a discipline is applied in a career setting—“provide a peer- to-peer learning environment,” says WestEd senior research associate Svetlana Darche. Externships range from a day of simple job shadowing to full externships that are usually project-based and last as long as two weeks or a full summer. In a program and guidebook on teacher externships Darche devel- oped for the Alameda Unified School District, she writes that externships “offer teachers exposure to the most current workplace practices, tools, and information, and an ‘on- the-ground’ understanding of future WestEd. (2009). Teacher Extern- ships: Connecting the Classroom to the Workplace. R&D Alert, 10(2). San Francisco, CA: Author. Adapted and reprinted by permission of WestEd. Reprinted from The Education Digest, December 2009. For more about The Education Digest or to subscribe, visit www.eddigest.com. www.techdirections.com economic and career trends that will affect their students. . . . They pro- vide teachers real examples of the kinds of teamwork, planning, deci- sion making, problem solving, com- munication, and creativity employed in successful ventures and organiza- tions.” California has invested in teacher externships through com- munity grants that are part of the state’s Career Tech- nical Educa- tional (CTE) Pathways Initiative. To ceived grants to pursue 10–12 weeks of original research projects with senior scientists at NASA’s Jet Pro- pulsion Laboratory (JPL) at the Cali- fornia Institute of Technology. Glendale Oceanography instruc- tor Laura Faye Tenenbaum used her externship to develop a general Externships offer teachers exposure to the most current workplace practices, tools, and information, and an ‘on-the-ground’ understanding of future economic and career trends that will affect their students. understand how these externships have worked in the field, WestEd con- ducted interviews and focus groups as part of an ongoing evaluation for the California Community College Chancellor’s Office in collaboration with the California Department of Education. The CTE initiative funds teacher externships for high school and middle school teachers and counsel- ors as well as for community college faculty. From her evaluation of the initiative, WestEd senior research associate June Lee-Bayha cites Glen- dale Community College’s experience as an exemplary model of teacher externships. In the summer of 2007, four Glendale faculty members re- education college course on climate change. Working with climatologists, she studied recent changes in sea level and sea ice distribution. As a re- sult, “we’re rewriting the lab manual we use and updating our informa- tion,” Tenenbaum says. “What we used previously was from textbooks; this is from scientists themselves. The students were really inspired; some changed their majors, and oth- ers became more involved in intern- ships and research.” The externship also led Tenen- baum to write an article on JPL’s ocean surface topography missions for NASA’s newsletter, and to host Glendale Community College stu- dents on tours of the lab, a kind of cte 1
Teaching Externships—Connecting The Classroom To The Workplace
R&D Alert
For many educators, professional development brings to mind workshops, night courses at a college of education, or perhaps meeting with colleagues for lesson study. But teacher externships offer a very different kind of professional development experience, one that is often transformative for educators and their students.
Externships—spending time in a workplace outside the classroom to learn how a discipline is applied in a career setting—“provide a peerto- peer learning environment,” says WestEd senior research associate Svetlana Darche. Externships range from a day of simple job shadowing to full externships that are usually project-based and last as long as two weeks or a full summer.
In a program and guidebook on teacher externships Darche developed for the Alameda Unified School District, she writes that externships “offer teachers exposure to the most current workplace practices, tools, and information, and an ‘onthe- ground’ understanding of future economic and career trends that will affect their students. . . . They provide teachers real examples of the kinds of teamwork, planning, decision making, problem solving, communication, and creativity employed in successful ventures and organizations.” California has invested in teacher externships through community grants that are part of the state’s Career Technical Educational (CTE) Pathways Initiative. To understand how these externships have worked in the field, WestEd conducted interviews and focus groups as part of an ongoing evaluation for the California Community College Chancellor’s Office in collaboration with the California Department of Education.
The CTE initiative funds teacher externships for high school and middle school teachers and counselors as well as for community college faculty. From her evaluation of the initiative, WestEd senior research associate June Lee-Bayha cites Glendale Community College’s experience as an exemplary model of teacher externships. In the summer of 2007, four Glendale faculty members received grants to pursue 10–12 weeks of original research projects with senior scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at the California Institute of Technology.
Glendale Oceanography instructor Laura Faye Tenenbaum used her externship to develop a general education college course on climate change. Working with climatologists, she studied recent changes in sea level and sea ice distribution. As a result, “we’re rewriting the lab manual we use and updating our information,” Tenenbaum says. “What we used previously was from textbooks; this is from scientists themselves.
The students were really inspired; some changed their majors, and others became more involved in internships and research.” The externship also led Tenenbaum to write an article on JPL’s ocean surface topography missions for NASA’s newsletter, and to host Glendale Community College students on tours of the lab, a kind of Job shadow that inspired one of her students to apply and be hired for a position at JPL. Many of her students had previously taken a dim view of science, seeing it as “cold, hard, intimidating,” says Tenenbaum. “I hope the relevancy of the global climate change topic and its broad level of interest in our society will change their views and attract students to this course who may not otherwise be interested in the sciences.” Not all the Glendale grantees were scientists.
Photography instructor Joan Watanabe worked at JPL’s Image Processing Lab to create a digital presentation of the journeys of the two Mars Rovers, Opportunity and Spirit. Watanabe also developed a curriculum on creating content for use in digital planetariums. In addition, some of her students received JPL internships, and Glendale students from different disciplines collaborated in a team project to create planetarium content. Art students instructed science students on imaging techniques and the aesthetics appropriate for planetarium shows.
Together, they worked in a state-ofthe- art facility at JPL, gaining skills suitable for employment at other digital planetariums or for related software development.
Lee-Bayha has heard similar cases of an externship becoming a careeraltering experience: “It energizes faculty. It gets them to think about how what they are teaching can be applied when students leave the classroom. It also changes the classroom dynamic when faculty become more like students and see what kind of world their students are entering.
It raises the stakes of what’s being taught and can make teachers more empathetic to their students.” According to Darche, the core ideas behind externships are rooted in a constructivist approach to education and in tenets of adult learning theory: Adults learn through doing and problem solving; they need to understand why they are learning something; and they learn best when the subject is of immediate use to them.
A defining moment for Darche came while working at the Marin County School to Career Partnership.
Darche participated in a teacher job shadow at a local hospital. “I spent the day with the director of the cardiac catheterization unit,” she recalls. “It turned out that not only did she run this amazingly sophisticated high-tech unit, but she had been a teen dropout who had risen up the ranks of this hospital, taken it on herself to get a Masters in human resources, and in 1997 was making over $100,000 a year.” Darche recalls that when she visited the hospital, “computer technology was just taking off. Today, we take it for granted that there’s absolutely no way you can be a medical technician without being comfortable around technology, but back then it just hit me like a two-by-four on that job shadow. Not only did the experience help me understand how skills in technology are used, but it also was so powerful to see how this woman rose to her level of responsibility.
It was one of the most inspiring days of my life.” For more information on teacher externships, contact June Lee-Bayha at 858-530-1076 or jlee@WestEd.org, or Svetlana Darche at 510-302-4304 or sdarche@WestEd.org.
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