LearnmoreMN Blog

Helpful colleagues leave me amazed

By Tracy Zanitsch, December guest blogger

Talking about what I have learned about creating a college and career readiness program while still in the midst of listening, re-tooling and re-grouping has ended up to be a bit more of a challenge than I expected. But as educators…I mean actors say, “the show must go on.”

Developing relationships, both personal and work related, with team members in other offices is becoming a key part of my work. Nothing that is worth doing can really be accomplished by just me. But what I can accomplish with someone else or a lot of someone elses is amazing! Help and the sharing of knowledge continue to come from the most unexpected places and people.

Example 1:

Last night I sent out a request to all the folks who office here at the Plato Blvd. building, asking if anyone had a copy of the game of LIFE I could borrow. I also included a brief explanation of why I needed it.

• Five different people offered to loan me the game, and I only knew one of them.
• As if that wasn’t enough to make me smile…an offer of assistance with the project was also sent. This individual is not only an expert in the field, but also has personal relationships with outside organizations that they are willing to use to assist in the development of the project.

Example 2:

A project currently being worked on is “The Journey to College and Career Readiness Begins in Elementary School” (affectionately known as “the coloring book”). This document is a prime example of how developing relationships can increase the value of a project.

None of us dreamed that finding a few pictures (suitable for coloring) of people in different occupations, genders and ethnic backgrounds would be a tough task. We could not have been more wrong. After much Internet surfing and hours of calling co-workers, a coloring book figure was found that had a young lady in a hijab painting a picture. The drawing was copyrighted by Amir Al-Zubi. It was not exactly what we wanted, but rather the best we could find.

Amir Al-Zubi was contacted for permission to use the drawing and we explained how and why we wanted to use it. As email requests like this had been sent out before, expectations were not high. We were contacted within 24 hours and exchanged several emails to clarify exactly why we wanted to use this drawing, and how important it was to the success of the project. In the end we were offered the use of the original drawing, as well as one that was much more appropriate for our use.

So I leave you with this…

Tell people about your work. Ask for assistance. You’d be surprised how many people want this effort to succeed. And try not to be as amazed as I am about just how generous people can be.

If your organization has a college and career readiness program, please post a comment. I’d love to hear about your experience.

Life decisions must not be left to chance

By Dave Ellefson, June guest blogger

Many high school graduates have been sharing handshakes and hugs with family, friends and faculty as they celebrated their recent graduation. Two questions they most likely were asked were: “Where are you planning to go to college?” and “What will your major be?”

From year-to-year a theme may arise where many students are going to a common college or to a group of colleges in a close area. This also applies to certain majors being popular. As a high school guidance counselor, I believe that the purposefulness of these decisions is a key indicator to the success the student will have. All students need to be taught how to make a decision.

I was just talking to a college student who decided to change schools after his sophomore year. Once he started at his new college, he found out he would need to attend an extra year of schooling to complete his major. Wouldn’t that have been an important question to ask before he left one school for another?

Great decisions require students to think about all the important questions that they must answer first. Are students picking a college because a friend is going there? Are they picking a major just because it will lead to a job that may pay a lot of money? How often are high school and college students given a chance to explore their career interests and aptitudes for different careers?

Students also need to think about how they will deal with adversity if it arises. They must have a growth mindset where they understand that dedication and hard work will be needed to achieve their goals. Students need to be taught how to think this way.

What about personal decisions that can get in the way of college success? Our society tends to project an image of what it means to have fun and students may not prepared for college or success when it’s not fun or easy.

When students ask the right questions about their future, have a positive mindset, and set well-thought-out goals — their chances of being successful are greatly increased. Without these ingredients it is easy to lose your way.

High schools must provide more than just the 3 Rs. High schools need to provide the following opportunities for post-high school success:

• opportunities for students to reflect on their future,
• opportunities to explore career options,
• opportunities to access their academic strengths and weakness,
• opportunities to improve on the skills they lack.

Students need to learn and practice persistence. Finally, students must learn to be goal oriented and taught how to create a four- year plan that will help them to explore career options and prepare for post-high school plans.

What ways have you found that help young people to navigate through life’s decisions?

Good outcomes start with a good plan

By Todd Bloom, October guest blogger

During the 2012 legislative session, Minnesota took an important step toward every student in the state having an individual learning plan (ILP) for college and career success. With strong bipartisan support, the Legislature passed and the governor signed, a provision that “strongly encourage[s]” school districts to support students in developing plans for transitioning to postsecondary education or employment.

If districts were to follow policymakers’ guidance, beginning in ninth grade, every student would have an academic action plan for completing high school and for preparing for college and the workforce. These plans would emphasize academic rigor and would help create for students supportive networks of educators, families, community organizations and employers. During the planning process, students would gain insights into their learning styles and would have opportunities to explore postsecondary and career options.

The legislation was motivated, in part, by a recommendation by the Governor’s Workforce Development Council that “all high school students should have a Career and Postsecondary Plan that helps them prepare for success after graduation.”

That advice is gaining popularity across the country. In April 2011, Hobsons published a report detailing policies on ILPs for every student. A key finding was that more states are moving toward a required planning process: When that report was published, 25 states plus the District of Columbia mandated ILPs for all students.

Some districts in Minnesota do have ILPs for every student in place already. Minneapolis Public Schools’ My Life Plan, a graduation requirement for the class of 2010 onwards, has middle and high school students reflect on, explore and respond to key questions:

1. Who am I?
2. Where am I going?
3. How do I get there?
4. How do I function effectively?

In the 11^th and 12 grades, every student develops and executes a plan to transition to college and/or a career. And Minneapolis is just one example.

What is driving the popularity of ILPs? One of the main reasons is that the planning process engages students and gives them ownership of their learning and outcomes. Students find that planning enables them to transition from one part of the education system to the next with greater confidence and success. With improving college completion high on the public policy agenda, educators and policymakers are drawn toward tools that help students set and accomplish that goal.

Looking ahead, ILPs are likely to expand:

• Beginning planning in sixth grade or earlier
• Connecting with student information systems for data analysis
• Incorporating curriculum about the planning process (the University of Minnesota’s Ramp Up to Readiness is an excellent example)
• Promoting deeper family engagement

So, what do you think? Should every student have a plan for transitioning to college and/or the workforce? What are the important issues to consider?

Developing innovators by design and experience

By Steve Kelley, September guest blogger

I was in Potsdam in July, standing next to my friend Aleksandar as he quietly said, “My college (Heidelberg University) wasn’t anything like this!” He couldn’t help commenting after we had seen student presentations on the projects they had completed during their 12 weeks at the Hasso Plattner Institute School of Design Thinking. Surrounded by slogans like “Don’t Wait, Innovate,” I had to agree that my college and the University of Minnesota, where I now work, didn’t create anything like the higher education experiences of these design thinking students.

One team was demonstrating new ideas they had developed for a sponsor who owned facial recognition technology (it knows you smiled at the box of Cheerios) and wanted to use the technology in non-retail settings. Another team had created large foam cubes that played the sounds of different musical instruments when you sat down (a 7-year-old girl and I had fun playing the violin and clarinet parts of an orchestra). The cubes were part of a design for the Potsdam Symphony’s effort to reach a low-income neighborhood in the city.

Young people from all over the world came to Potsdam to learn new skills — design thinking — and to learn them in a new way — solving real-world problems for a real sponsor in a diverse team.

The School of Design Thinking wasn’t my first time learning about this new approach to higher education. I had read about the Stanford Institute of Design and The Laboratory at Harvard and I had listened to instructors from Denmark’s KaosPilots and from Amsterdam’s Knowmads. The latter two organizations may use and teach design methods for solving a wide range of problems but they also explicitly teach leadership and how to make change in the world.

Students and society need much more from higher education than we have been delivering. The new approach represented by these educators gives us an opportunity. We could teach new skills that integrate across disciplines, combining analysis, intuition, science and aesthetics into a new, innovative whole that solves real problems. Student teams could work on problems presented by external sponsors or ones they identified. In Minnesota, this happens now in some courses at some schools, many of them in graduate school. It doesn’t happen on a sustained basis, over multiple years, so students could practice complex skills and address really complex problems.

We don’t have to abandon courses in disciplines like chemistry, literature and economics. We could enable undergraduates to work on both projects and a major. We could put undergrads and grad students on the same teams. We wouldn’t have to give up on getting students to graduate in four years. We could enable them to graduate with new problem-solving skills and the sense of leadership and power to change the world that would come from having done it in school.

Then innovative Minnesota higher education would really be leading the nation.

Preparing for and entering postsecondary education

By Lesley Lydell, January guest blogger

As in many other states, Minnesota postsecondary education faces an array of challenges, from decreased funding and rising costs to rapidly expanding worlds of knowledge transmission, the changing demands of the “knowledge economy,” and an uncertain employment world for graduates. Within these challenges, one central concern we focus on in my office is whether students participate in postsecondary education and what helps them succeed, both during their education and beyond. Although students increasingly enter postsecondary education at various times throughout their lives, the transition of recent high school graduates into postsecondary education offers one lens on how educational systems can collaborate to serve students.

In the revised edition of Minnesota Measures: 2011 Report on Higher Education Performance, data on students’ preparation for and entrance into postsecondary education illustrate positive trends but also point to ongoing challenges.

Growing Participation

Postsecondary Preparation: Minnesota high school students overall have strong participation and achievement in challenging academic courses and assessments. Minnesota students received the highest scores in the nation on a standardized college entrance exam, and increasing numbers of students are participating in college-level courses through Advanced Placement courses, Postsecondary Enrollment Options, and other programs. The number of students participating in Postsecondary Enrollment Options programs has more than doubled since 2000, and the number of students taking Advanced Placement exams rose 8% between 2009-10 and 2010-11.

High School to Postsecondary Transition: Compared to the national average, Minnesota high school students have a high four-year graduation rate at 76% for 2010. Minnesota also has a higher-than-average percentage of high school graduates who go on to enroll in a postsecondary institution within a year of their graduation.

Unlike in states with a high percentage of high school graduates who enroll in a postsecondary institution but also a higher rate of students who drop out of high school before graduation, a larger proportion of Minnesotans stay in high school, graduate, and enter directly into higher education. For all Minnesota high school graduates, the number going on to college has increased by 15% between 1996 and 2010 to 71% of recent graduates enrolling in college. There have also been sizeable increases in the numbers of recent Minnesota high school graduates of color enrolled at a Minnesota postsecondary institution, with a 49% increase in enrollment between 2004 and 2010.

Achievement Differences

• Although all groups of students had higher graduation rates in 2010 over the previous year, with a 1% increase in high school graduation rates for white students and a three percent increase for students of color, the four-year graduation rate for students of color was 30 percentage points lower than the rate for white students.
• State-level proficiency exam scores in 2011 for 10th and 11th grade students indicated achievement differences for students from low-income backgrounds and some students of color, with approximately three-quarters of students from low-income backgrounds and American Indian, Hispanic, and African-American students not fully meeting grade-level standards in math.
• College readiness benchmarks on the ACT college entrance exam indicated just over one-third of Minnesota’s ACT test-takers for 2010-11 scored as academically prepared to succeed in higher education. Although there has been some improvement in ACT benchmark scores since 2007, Minnesota students of color overall scored as less prepared than the state average.
• The percentage of Advanced Placement exams that received scores eligible for college credit (scores 3-5) increased at a higher rate between 2010 and 2011 for Minnesota test-takers of color than the state and national average increases, with the largest increase in higher-scoring exams taken by Hispanic test-takers. Overall, however, the percentage of exams taken by American Indian, African-American/Black, and Hispanic test-takers receiving a score eligible for college credit was below the state average of 65% of all exams taken.

Although there are positive trends in improving preparation for and participation in postsecondary education for all students, there are areas for added focus and collaboration as we work to better serve students and smooth the transitions between high school, postsecondary, and the workforce.

What are the most promising strategies you’re aware of in improving students’ postsecondary preparation and participation — locally, nationally, internationally?

Citizens League takes on higher ed reform

By Lindsey Alexander, July guest blogger

In January, the Citizens League began a multi-phase project looking at higher education in Minnesota. Higher education, as we define it here, includes post-secondary education of any kind (certificate programs, two- and four-year programs, public, private, for-profit, etc.).

The initial research, conducted as part of the project’s first phase, has included conversations with people involved in all aspects of higher education. Through these conversations a number of issues have emerged. They include:

Preparedness
Many people are concerned that a rising number of students are not adequately prepared for college-level coursework. A 2010 study by the University of Minnesota and MnSCU found that 40% of Minnesota public high school students entering a public college or university had to take at least one remedial course in math, writing or reading, up from 30% in 2000.

How can our current system of K-12 education better prepare students for the rigor of post-secondary education?

Link to K-12
Advocates of better overlap between K-12 and post-secondary believe earlier and more effective K-12 career counseling could enable students to chart a personalized path to a career, which would allow them to more efficiently acquire training, credits and experiences in ways and at institutions most relevant to their future. Helping students to identify their aptitudes and interests early on helps them to focus on–and stay interested in–the classes and programs that are most relevant to their future.

How can we create and enhance K-12 and post-secondary connections to create a more cohesive approach?

Connection with employers
Many stakeholders interviewed said that it is important to bring employers into the discussion of any reform strategy and for employers to better articulate the skills and abilities graduates need to be workforce ready. Can employers adequately articulate what they are looking for in new employees? Can institutions — both post-secondary and K-12 — measure whether students are graduating with those skills and abilities?

Much of the growth in jobs over the next decade will be in positions that require less than a bachelor’s degree, including jobs that require little post-secondary education but some degree of on-the-job training. How can we prepare students to enter the workforce after graduation from high school?

Online innovations
Numerous stakeholders voiced concern that the higher education business model has not evolved well. Many believe online learning is a major innovation in higher education.

Advocates of higher education innovation argue there are two particularly valuable characteristics of online institutions, such as Western Governors University. First, they are separate from traditional systems of higher education. There’s no pressure to fit into the traditional model of higher education so they are freer to innovate than traditional bricks and mortar institutions. Second, online colleges and universities focus solely on teaching and learning.

Critics question the rigor of online education and whether online courses can truly impart the critical thinking skills employers value. What role could and should online education play in Minnesota’s higher education system?

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What do you think of the above issues? Please post a comment to share your views. To learn more about this work go to www.citizing.org/projects/highered or read the full story on these issues in the May/June edition of MN Journal.