New P-TECH schools offer students project-based learning, career paths |
On Board Online • September 22, 2014
By Cathy Woodruff
Senior Writer
“Congratulations, you just inherited this house!” proclaimed the message displayed on the laptop computer screens of the freshmen at Troy’s new Riverfront P-TECH school.
The message was accompanied by a picture of a large, attractive center-hall colonial style home. “Unfortunately,” the announcement added, “it needs a new roof.”
So, the first day of school found groups of Riverfront students pondering what more they needed to know in order to decide whether a contractor’s $6,300 estimate was reasonable and whether it was worth going ahead with the repair project.
To make that decision, teacher Nicole MacNeil said, the students eventually will need to apply several algebraic skills and concepts. They will have to think about everything a contractor needs, make calculations, come to a decision and present their findings to the class.
“It results in the students asking me to teach them mathematical concepts,” MacNeil said.
The project-based learning assignment and the collaborative problem-solving work are examples of what students can expect to encounter at Riverfront P-TECH, one of 16 newly funded P-TECH schools throughout the state. State education officials estimate that more than 800 freshmen embarked this fall on six-year educational journeys that will offer them the opportunity to earn both a high school diploma and a college associate degree through a P-TECH program.
The extended academic experience is designed to give students a head start on their college educations and lead them, eventually, to careers in technical fields related to manufacturing, engineering, agriculture, health care and more.
State Education Commissioner John B. King Jr. was among visitors to Riverfront on opening day. As he and other guests watched, students huddled in groups of three or four to discuss the math problem posed by their new house. This was the collaborative learning environment that student Samy Benantar said he was looking for.
“I joined this program for one reason: to meet new people and do work with them,” Benantar said. “It is better to work with people than by yourself.”
GE healthcare general manager Thomas P. Feist, whose company is participating in Riverfront P-TECH, was glad to hear that. He said collaboration will be among the most important skills students can learn from the new educational model.
“Working in groups is what we do every day,” he said. “There’s this image of a scientist who toils in a lab by himself, and that’s not really what it’s like.”
P-TECH stands for Pathways in Technology Early College High School. New York’s programs all are characterized by close partnerships with local colleges and businesses, which eventually could benefit from a reliable supply of skilled workers. The approach was pioneered in New York City, where corporate partner IBM and university partner CUNY are involved in the Brooklyn P-TECH, which opened in 2011.
“This is seriously building a pipeline,” said Robin Willner, director of the New York State P-TECH Leadership Council, which raises money to support planning, professional development, technical assistance and other P-TECH needs.
Troy’s P-TECH has a designated focus on Advanced Manufacturing, with an additional emphasis on health care and medical technology. The local business partners include GE Healthcare, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and Simmons Machine Tool Group.
During his Troy visit, King noted that research supports use of project-based learning, exposure to career possibilities and early opportunities to take college-level courses. All can help boost academic achievement and graduation rates.
But because each of the new P-TECHs has its own individual characteristics, King said, the pilot schools also will help educators learn even more about what works best and apply that understanding to more schools to serve more students. Another 10 P-TECH high schools are scheduled for launch in 2015-16.
“We hope that many, many more schools will look like what you are doing here,” King told students in Troy. “We are trying to figure out what we can learn from your experience that we can apply much more broadly.”
Later, as he spoke with reporters, King listed some of the differences among programs. Some P-TECHs, like Troy’s Riverfront, are embedded within an existing high school, and others will primarily operate at off-campus sites. Some serve students from only one school, while others may draw students from as many as a dozen districts.
Just a few miles northwest of Troy, another P-TECH illustrates how individual approaches can vary and still remain true to the program’s basic design.
The Ballston Spa district in Saratoga County, which already offered an Early College High School program for juniors and seniors, has the lead role in running a regional P-TECH focused on “clean technologies and sustainable industries.” The lead business partners are the chip manufacturer GlobalFoundries, the computer networking company Cisco and TRC, which provides engineering, consulting and construction management services.
Like Troy, Ballston Spa’s P-TECH is paired with Hudson Valley Community College as a higher education partner, but unlike Troy’s P-TECH, the students are drawn from many districts throughout the region.
A major share of the Ballston Spa P-TECH classes are conducted at HVCC’s TEC-SMART (Training and Education Center for Semiconductor Manufacturing and Alternative and Renewable Technologies) building on the grounds of a tech park in the Saratoga County town of Malta. That’s where more than 70 soon-to-be freshmen gathered in July for a summer bridge program.
During their summer bridge week in Malta, students were issued their own laptop computers, and they used GoPro video cameras to record short personal biographies that they presented to other students and faculty at the conclusion of the session.
They met teachers who will use a cross-disciplinary approach that will regularly blend material from multiple fields – English, social studies, math, science and more – into single lessons, said Diane Irwin, Ballston Spa’s K-12 science coordinator and Early College High School director.
A lesson in which students collect water samples, for example, might include examination of the samples under a microscope (science), calculating the impact of population growth on water quality (math) and presenting findings in a written report (English).
“They can work on covering all three classes through one assignment,” noted Irwin.
“It’s really fun, so far,” said freshman Anthony Anglin during a break from his video biography project. Anglin said he was attracted by the program’s environmental science focus and emphasis on using technology, since his father works in the IT (information technology) field.
Students at the summer bridge session in Malta also participated in several ice-breaker social activities designed to help them get acquainted with the teens from other districts who will be their classmates for the next six years.
“Our major focus here is helping them to form a community, because they will be going back to their 11 school districts and working in the virtual world in the fall,” explained Laurel Logan-King, Ballston Spa’s assistant superintendent for curriculum, assessment and pupil services.
“They are at the starting block of this program, and we really wanted to bring home the idea that this is something different,” she said.