Educators: Listen up

Let's face it: Teaching's a great profession, but only a handful of students choose to make a career out of it. Most follow their hearts in other directions -- business, medicine, construction and the thousands of other careers. So it only makes sense that as a teacher, you should have an in-depth understanding of what's involved to make it in the jobs many of their students will land in. That's why part of the success of Education That Works depends on getting teachers out of the classroom and into the board room, courtroom, emergency room and elsewhere.

Education That Works helps this happen in a variety of ways: through externships -- typically summer internships for educators that allow them to work at local businesses -- job shadowing, visits to work sites and business visits to their own classrooms. Through these activities, teachers not only gain new skills, but they often find themselves with new ideas for lesson plans and curriculum when they get back to the classroom with their students.

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Teacher Leadership Program

Sending teachers out of the classroom during the school day is a teen-ager's dream. In the eyes of the East Texas School-to-Careers partnership, it's also an investment in the future. For the last two years, Tyler Independent School District middle and high school teachers have been spent time out of the classroom, participating in a job-shadowing program, much as their students might do.

Called the Teacher Leadership Program, the program sends teachers out into area businesses, where they learn about a career that one -- or several -- of their students might find themselves in. The teachers then develop lesson plans based on what they've learned, and pass the knowledge along to their students.

The teachers' career explorations have taken them to local gas companies, hospitals, appraisal companies, hotels, manufacturing businesses, churches -- even solid waste services. You name it, they've done it.

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Counselors in Industry Tour

Counselors serve a critical function at schools, helping students decide on what to do after high school, which classes to take and what careers they might want to pursue. Often, a counselor is the first guiding light in a student's preparation for life in the real world.

In the Counselors in Industry Tour, counselors in the South Plains Region in the Lubbock area recently spent a day immersed in the major businesses in their community. From a trip to a local steel company to the bureaucratic goings-on at City Hall, the counselors got an in-depth look at the inner workings of different industries.

Armed with the knowledge of what goes on in those businesses, the counselors say they're better prepared to guide students in appropriate career directions. In that way, the Counselors in Industry Program is benefiting the people who need it most -- students.

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Educator Internships

Thirty-four teachers spent the summer of 2000 at businesses in the Rural Capital Area, and now their students are hearing about it. In an intensive four-week internship program, the teachers from school districts including Round Rock and Hays and others were paid to work at local employers such as Dell Computer Corporation, KXAN-TV, Temple Daily Telegram and Texas Parks and Wildlife.

The experience was fun, but it wasn't easy. Based on a model internship program developed by the BellSouth Foundation, the teachers worked right at the businesses, and are now incorporating what they learned into their lesson plans.

While on the job, the teachers explored at least three different departments and interviewed at least eight employees about their career path, providing a broad view of how people went from school to their current job.

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