Milwaukee Washington HS of IT has an advisory board made up of about 20 representatives from area businesses and post-secondary institutions. These members are focused on IT and engineering occupations. We meet monthly throughout the year. Based on a retreat we held last August, 2012 we decided in conjunction with the principal and several teacher leaders from their Learning Team that our focus this year would be on employability skills development not only for the students in the IT and engineering programs but for the entire school.
A committee of the advisory board worked on ideas to implement this. As a full board we had a joint meeting with the entire faculty to elicit ideas from them. As a result this committee developed an Employability Skills poster which you can see here (MilwaukeeWashingtonPoster_FinalPrinterArtwork). One key element of the poster is the bottom right area of the poster. You’ll see the logos of the organizations who make up the board. All of these organizations support the contents of this poster and in fact several even asked for a copy or two to post in their organization.
During the development, the principal and the committee wanted to make sure this poster would be highly visible throughout the school. The goal was to produce enough copies of a great looking poster so that there would be one in each classroom and also posters in the hallways, guidance area, main office, at the entrances …. everywhere.
At the suggestion of one of the business board members on the committee, a teacher idea workbook was also developed. This is a folder with a page for each of the six main employability skills areas, some examples from the business and post-secondary community along with space for classroom implementation ideas.
In early March, 2013, we had the rollout of the posters and the teacher workbook at another joint meeting of the Advisory Board and the staff. During this hour-long professional development session the teachers were divided into small groups to take one of the six areas and brainstorm ideas on how to incorporate that idea into the units they’re currently teaching.
The hour went very well. The teachers appreciated the poster and shared some exciting ideas they already had to move this forward. Since that time, another board member (a retired faculty member who like me taught at WHS) has been visiting each individual teacher. For some teachers who didn’t make the PD, she’s spent time explaining the purpose and discussing ideas with them. For others she has been encouraging their further involvement in the use of this poster with students. For all teachers she’s been working to have them plan on a speaker from the advisory board to address one or more of the topics.
While this has taken a big effort to move this forward, we are already seeing success in classrooms. I hope you’ll agree that the development of these skills are not only important for all kids but are or should be an important aspect of computer science and information technology curricula and classrooms. MilwaukeeWashingtonPoster_FinalPrinterArtwork
