2024 CTE Works! Summit

Teacher Externships: A key to reaching more students with effective pathways programming

Teachers have a great influence on the decisions students make about their futures, from the courses they select to college and career decisions. Yet, many educators are using outdated paradigms of the opportunities and requirements for the new economy in which we live. Teacher externships expose teachers to in-demand, high wage career options and the skills needed for success while building relationships with local employers. The knowledge and networking gained through an exciting summer externship is one of the best ways to motivate staff (and employers!) and prepare more of your students with avenues for success after high school.

This is a practical session that encourages interaction, sharing of ideas and knowledge. You will learn what a teacher externship is, how it can inspire teachers and local employers to collaborate on career readiness programming in both core and CTE classrooms and provide your pathways programming at scale.

Session Objectives:

1. Discover how externships can help connect more students to employers and pathways programming
2. Gain a framework, tools and templates you can apply to your teacher externship program
3. Learn strategies for connecting and communicating with employers and teachers
4. Be inspired and prepared to create your own awesome summer teacher externship program!

This session is canceled. Please select another session. 


Maybe You Should Fly a Jet, Maybe You Should Be a Vet. Dr Suess emphasized nontraditional occupations more than 40 years ago! …but so much has changed. This interactive session details the results of a comparative study on the motivational influences of nontraditional career seekers in Wisconsin. Topics for this session include the impacts of stereotypes on career choice, real and perceived barriers to entering a nontraditional occupation, and what can schools do to incentivize youth into nontraditional gender programs and vocations. Also, this session seeks to understand what impacts nontraditional gender roles have today on secondary students.

The target audiences for this presentation are secondary and post-secondary teachers, administrators, school counselors, career guidance personnel, and other post-secondary and career advocates curious about motivational factors and passionate about understanding the challenges students face today with career choice.
This interactive session will allow participants to discuss their current practices in incentivizing students into nontraditional programs and vocations. This session will also allow participants to analyze their current practices and identify strategies to engage students interested in nontraditional pathways.

Attendees will be given advanced graphic organizers to triangulate strategies and identify institutional barriers to engaging students interested in nontraditional pathways. Attendees will also be provided with an infographic detailing the results of the study.

After this session, you will be able to:

• Discuss occupational gender stereotypes.
• Describe some of the barriers to students entering nontraditional programs and vocations, and
• Develop strategies to incentivize students into nontraditional gender programs and vocations.

Walking a mile in someone’s shoes may help you see and experience what they do, but it may not give you insight into the full experience. Afterall, it’s only a mile – not a lifetime. From this lens, Beth Pitchford will discuss the first person experiences of neurodiverse students, staff, and faculty.

Learning what these challenges are can help lead the way to identifying solutions that actually work and increase confidence. To support students with executive dysfunction, we must go beyond the standard recommendations of planners, lists, and reminders to identify creative, individualized solutions. Meanwhile, lack of access to credible diagnosis continues to be a devastating barrier especially to people of color. Faculty and staff who are neurodiverse have the potential to be the strongest advocates for neurodiverse students as they have first-person experiences of many of these challenges. Yet, they also face the same challenges as the students often needing better executive function support, access to diagnosis, and empathy.

This session will educate you about neurodiverse learners among us, share creative solutions, identify barriers these individauls face, and present how Dakota County Technical College is addressing this with the intent of improving access for students. The Double Empathy Problem will be introduced.

This session will outline multiple facets of the partnership between the Spring Lake Park High School Opportunities in Emergency Health Care (OEC) Program, and the Fridley Fire Department. FFD's contributions include: in-class presentations, skill evaluators, storage and training space, advisory committee presence, an explorer post, ride-along opportunities and paid internships for Emergency Medical Responder and Emergency Medical Technician students. The Fridley Fire Department gives Spring Lake Park OEC students interested in the Health and Human Services pathway, an opportunity to directly see what a career in Emergency Medical Services, the fire service or healthcare really looks like when you're part of the squad.

This session is designed to assist attendees with a road map to help generate valuable CTE-industry partnerships. The relationship between the Fridley Fire Department and the Spring Lake Park H.S. OEC Program goes back to the early 2000's. The relationship started with station tours and ride-alongs, but has evolved to the point that the fire department provides the following services/opportunities to students:
-In-class lecturers and presentations
-EMS evaluators including; skill testing, scenario evaluation, EMS and HOSA competition judges and volunteers. This includes curricular and extracurricular training.
-Advisory committee members. Currently there are two and Chief Zikmund is the current SLP OEC committee chair.
-Evening continuing education sessions for Fridley Fire personnel and OEC students. Fridley FD provides instructors for these seminars designed to mix professionals and the high school students.
-Training space. This includes classroom and tower space for OEC's Fire Rescue and Firefighter 1 courses taught at the fire station during the school day.
-Storage space for OEC's rescue truck used for training and community events
-Opportunity for students to join their Firefighting Explorer Post accredited through the Northern Star Council
-Ride-along opportunities for OEC EMT students on the rescue squad. Students are mentored by FFD firefighters and assist on medical and trauma 9-1-1 calls.
-Paid internships for students who become certified Emergency Medical Technicians. The 2023-24 school year was the first year of the internship. One student was hired in the fall of 2023 and still works for the department.
-A grant allowed four additional students to be hired in the summer of 2024, two for the summer, the other two will continue for the 24-25 school year as they will be high school seniors.

The presentation will focus on how schools can reach out to industry to connect students with real-world opportunities.

After this session, you will be able to:

• Identify one industry partner in their community who can be contacted about partnering with their school CTE program.
• Identify three potential industry members to tap for an advisory committee.
• Create a list of ways to develop a constructive partnership.

Whether you think of them as employability, professional, or soft skills, these are the skills employers, colleges, and teachers desire in the workplace and classroom. Discover how you can integrate employability skill development into your curriculum. Through the development of these skills, students gain practical experience and confidence, making them more competitive in the job market, and/or better prepared for college.

Learn how one high school leveraged its advisory boards to identify the skills most valued by employers. With the help of work done by others (State of Indiana Employability Skills and MyWays Competencies Domains), a group of teachers, administrators, and community/business representatives worked together to further develop the 10 employability skills of emphasis: adaptability, communication, critical thinking, independence, initiative, perseverance, problem solving, professionalism, team work, and time management. Teachers are encouraged to embed some or all of these skills into their classrooms and assess student achievement using a grading rubric for each skill. Those who are successfully embedding the skills are finding not only surprising results, but are also happy to have a common language to use with students. Each employability skill is accompanied by two “Can You…?” questions. Consistent exposure to these skills helps students not only build a stronger foundation of skills, but also equips them with the language to use when describing their skills.  

After this session, you will be able to:

• Follow a process for developing employability skills of emphasis leveraging advisory board and teacher input.
• Examine how employability skills can be integrated into classroom instruction.
• Systematize assessment of employability skills in their students.

In a fast-paced environment where it is challenging to keep up with all of the advancements in the field, Trade and Industrial Technology (T&I) teachers seek to keep their skills and knowledge base up to date. Many T&I teachers are also asked to teach in more than one program area, which requires additional training beyond their primary expertise.

This session is offered as an opportunity for members of the Trade & Industry community to contribute the development of additional, targeted professional development experiences.

The session will principally be a chance for attendees to provide perspective to the topics to be pursued, the optimum delivery methods of those topics, and suggestions for potential partners from high education and industry.

By the end of this session,participants will be able to contribute feedback and share best practices for the Trade & Industry community around student-built structure programs. They will have the opportunity to

• Contribute input to the resource
• Help develop professional development opportunities
• Build a cohort of teachers running house building programs.

The purpose of this session is to inform the community about the resource, improve and expand this and additional resources, and help new programs to be established. The information gathered will be used to enhance the resource, identify new assets, and expand the districts offering programs.

To support schools to effectively implement components of the Solar for Schools legislation, a solar energy company partnered with a science educator to design hands-on educational modules for elementary and high school students to support solar energy career readiness and interest in STEAM learning and careers. Join us to learn about this collaboration and how CTE educators and industry professionals can partner to prepare K-12 students for high-wage, high-skill, high-demand careers.

This presentation will focus on the collaborative efforts of industry and education professionals to design interdisciplinary educational modules focused on solar energy concepts and careers for 5th grade and high school students.  Presenters will share information about the legislative process that inspired this work, their process for working together to understand and meet the diverse needs of interested parties, and the benefits of this collaborative effort for the solar energy company and industry, schools, and students.  They will also lead discussions with participants to brainstorm ideas for future industry-education partnerships to support CTE teaching and learning to prepare K-12 students for high-wage, high-skill, high-demand careers.

Participants will be able to:

• Describe connections between legislation and innovation in Career & Technical Education.
• Describe connections between the strengths and needs of both industry and education.
• Explain the importance of collaboration between industry and education to support career readiness in CTE fields.