Education: the 21st century collaboration station

I feel like a dork for writing it, but lately I've been thinking a lot about Frank Parsons, "The Father of Vocational Counseling." In the early 20th century, Frank Parsons led the charge of vocational guidance. Society celebrated vocational guidance as way to eradicate “poverty and substandard living conditions spawned by the rapid industrialization and consequent migration of people to major urban centers at the turn of the century.”
Industrialization caused a huge shift in the needs of our workforce. People moved out of agricultural and rural environments into the city, where they needed to know how to be creative to meet the needs of a quickly changing society. Through career guidance and education, we had to build an internal capacity in our workforce. We also had to physically build the infrastructures like transportation and buildings, to support our cities.
I’m fascinated by the similarities between those times and these times. Our current workforce need has pushed for a more direct relationship between educational institutions and the community. I love being a counselor right now, and I love being a core counselor because I very much feel like my work is about developing pathways from education to the community. More than ever, education is being built on routes students can take to becoming strong contributers to a 21st century community.
The new common core standards include collaboration as a 21st century skill, which seems like an expectation that educators model collaboration as a style of community leadership. The state’s definition of school readiness includes the following: “Readiness is enhanced when schools, families, and community service providers work collaboratively to ensure that every child is ready for higher levels of learning in academic content.”

Our best educators have collaborated with the community for decades, bringing students on field trips and inviting exciting guest speakers to talk to their classrooms. Now, there’s support from the state to do this intentionally. Sometimes, I think of these pathways as vacuums.
The new Postsecondary Workforce Readiness (PoWeR) endorsed Diploma, which you can learn about here [click on the ppt given by Matt Gianneschi at the CACTA midwinter conference], will allow more flexibility for students to graduate. Criteria for receiving the diploma include:
*Students shows academic excellence in three of seven content areas (I’m excited about the possibilities for students who are twice accelerated in an area).
*Student does not need remediation in a content area to continue onto a postsecondary institution
*Lastly, the new PoWeR Endorsed Diploma will place an emphasis on the role of Career and Technical Education
˜ CAREER AND TECHNICAL EDUCATION
˜ a) High School Courses: student receives a course grade of B or better in at least three years (or equivalent) of coursework in Career and Technical education, two of which must be from a single area of focus.

There has also been some work done to align CTE program standards with content standards. It’s exciting to see some content area teachers asking about our CTE programs in D11. And to see our CTE teachers so integrated into our local workforce. I’m happily supporting these conversations and collaborations between our district, the community and postsecondary institutions. I’m looking forward to deepening our collaborations with our local library district, arts community and maybe even our local media outlets. These organizations have equally vested interest in developing and supporting our community. I’m also calling on help from Gully Stanford of Collegeincolorado, the CDE's collaboration guru.
The 20th century brought us cars, Bakelite, quantum theory (O.k, maybe Bakelite was not that impressive... but you get the picture). It seems like if we got enough passionate community members in a room with some passionate educators, we could inspire our students to create something so new and so profound, it is beyond what we grownups have ever been able to imagine.