In the summer of 2002, SoundOut presented a series of professional development sessions on Meaningful Student Involvement in Career and Technical Education in a Western Washington school district.
Scott LeDuc, a master teacher/trainer with SoundOut, and myself spent two days with teachers in Spanaway, Washington, covering this powerful integration of new roles for students as partners with lifelong learning and livelihood education.
Here are the descriptions from the district’s professional development catalog. Participants may attend both sessions, but it is not necessary to attend both because they are not sequential.
Engaging Students as Partners in CTE
This session introduced participants to SoundOut’s nationally-recognized “Frameworks for Meaningful Student Involvement.”
Participants explored the main elements, principles, key characteristics, and barriers to engaging students as partners in CTE. Participants used our popular “Strategies for Meaningful Student Involvement” and learn about our evaluation tools.
Throughout the session, participants examined real classroom case studies where students were powerfully engaged through Meaningful Student Involvement to meet 21st century learning goals through CTE. Hands-on and interactive activities, practical exercises, and meaningful examples allowed participants to draw on their own knowledge and experiences to enhance student engagement in their classrooms.
Integrating Student Engagement into CTE
Participants in this session explored the relationship of Meaningful Student Involvement to 21st century learning goals. Focused on SoundOut’s nationally-recognized “Frameworks for Meaningful Student Involvement” and 21st century skills, participants identified how to practically incorporate these skills into existing classroom approaches.
The session were very interactive, emphasizing classroom applications and shared knowledge. With Meaningful Student Involvement as a recognized high-quality standard in schools across the US and Canada, participants explored how to infuse practical standards into their classroom design and implementation.
By the end of this session, participants gained new abilities focused on teaching 21st Century Skills, discovered new avenues to promote positive, powerful student behavior, and learned effective ways to integrate feedback from students into classroom activities. They also began focused planning to apply this new knowledge.
As SoundOut moves further into CTE, we learned a great deal from these workshops. Scott’s experience as a CTE teacher for over a decade matched a passionately commitment to move the field forward. These workshops built on past CTE and STEM-related work we have done, including working in the fields of technology education, student leadership organizations, and others.
SoundOut has always been about real world and real life skills, and we look forward to connecting schools to the tools and training they need to bring students on board as partners in this field.
SoundOut Education Consulting 