Implementation Strategies: Teachers
Teachers and other educators are critical to the success of pathways. When teachers personalize learning in their own classrooms, students learn to show what they know in many different ways. When teachers support and encourage education that moves beyond a traditional curriculum and work with students to connect their learning to critically advanced and durable skills, students learn to think about their own education differently. They learn to demonstrate and justify learning both within and outside of a single classroom. When teachers are involved with community and workforce partners, they can support those partners in working with students to help them grow as learners and as people. When teachers are involved in evaluating pathways, they can ensure that those pathways do more than recover academic credits or prepare students for low-end or transitory jobs.
For role-specific resources, please visit our appendix.
By teachers, we mean:
Strategies for Teachers
- Model flexibility and personalization in your own classroom. When students learn to demonstrate and justify complex learning in multiple ways, they are better positioned for greater independence in pathways.
- Advocate for time in the school schedule for educators to approve, support, and evaluate student demonstrations of learning outside the classroom. Teachers will play a major role in ensuring that pathways are rigorous, accessible, and equitable and those responsibilities should be valued in teacher assignments.
- Help students tie their learning back to course standards, but be flexible about content. Requiring pathways to include content identical to courses essentially eliminates or restricts access to pathways.
- In your role as an advisor, help students understand the range of available pathways (career and technical education programs, internships, apprenticeships, work-based learning, self-designed learning, etc.) and how to learn more about them.
- Align career certification and licensure standards from career and technical education pathways with academic graduation requirements.
- Ensure that the needs of students with special needs and English learners are addressed in pathways.
Equity Check
- To what extent do pathways available to students in my school reinforce tracking? For instance, are students funneled from low-level courses into career and technical programs, or do pathways outside of these programs exist mostly for credit recovery?
- What data do I use, beyond graduation rates, to evaluate the learning outcomes of pathways and ensure that students graduate with the skills and knowledge needed to succeed after high school?
- Does school and district leadership support me in holding students accountable to rigorous learning outcomes?
- Do accommodations for students with special needs and English learners follow them into pathways programs?
