More schools are providing career-connected learning opportunities to better engage students, especially as districts grapple with chronic absenteeism, lower academic achievement, and growing social-emotional and mental health challenges.
Building out those opportunities requires significant planning and commitment, from securing buy-in from educators and families to developing partnerships with local businesses and organizations.
Principals, who often lead much of that work, play an important role in ensuring that those experiences are successful and sustainable, said Ronn Nozoe, the CEO of the National Association of Secondary School Principals.
But principals often lack the support and the resources they need to bring these experiences into their schools, Nozoe said.
That’s why NASSP launched a new professional development course on Aug. 18, designed by and for principals that provides a step-by-step framework to help them create career-connected learning experiences using existing teams and resources.
The self-paced online course includes planning tools, templates, and examples from principals who have implemented similar efforts in their schools, according to NASSP. It covers topics around identifying local resources, engaging stakeholders, overcoming implementation challenges, and sustaining long-term progress.
In an interview with Education Week, Nozoe discussed the course and the challenges principals face in ensuring students have meaningful, real-world learning experiences.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why did NASSP decide to create this course?
It is really in response to a need, in response to this push for career pathways. Principals say, “Well, we’re going to bring this to our environment.” But how do you even think about which pathways are right for us, what pathways are of interest to the business community, what pathways are of interest to the students and their families?
We believe strongly that the answers are within our membership, and we believe strongly that people should involve principals and assistant principals in the highest levels of decisionmaking, because they’re the ones who actually carry it all out.
We found a group of school leaders who have done this work or are doing this work, and had them open up their brains, if you will, and talk to us about the things that they thought about.
That’s the genesis of the project—really seeing a need for the true principal and assistant principal practitioner story to open the doors for other folks who are thinking about bringing this kind of work to their communities.
What are the common challenges principals face when thinking about career-connected learning?
There’s a leadership dimension. How do I start to think about these things? Who do I involve? What questions should I be asking? How do I know that these are the right things to do for kids? Am I really listening to the students, the business community, and the school community?
There are the technical questions. How do you secure agreements with industry partners for internships? How do you do master-scheduling or make sure that all the kids’ needs are met and that there’s plenty of time for the faculty to develop and learn as well?
[For the course], we did not focus so much on the technical because there are other organizations, who we value, that do that work. They’re the ones that we look up to when it comes to technical expertise. The course was more about a leadership disposition.
Why is that disposition important to focus on?
Let’s say you had a business community [that’s] got plenty of resources. They’re very supportive of the school district. They have potential partners hanging in the wind. If the principal doesn’t believe that this is a necessary thing for the school or for the students or the community, and they don’t lead every day with this, then the chance of that effort being successful in that building is less likely.
Let’s say you were a principal, and you were passionate and driven and fired up about this. And I was a principal, and I wasn’t. Same district, same supportive business community. The chances of you and your school being successful are much higher because you’re committed to it. It’s connected to your why.
That’s what we’re trying to open up [with the course]. How does a principal connect this to their why?
What other support do principals need in this area?
The peer-to-peer component is really important. It takes somebody who’s done the work to be able to really help others find their own way to that destination. If you’re a member of NASSP, we have an online community that’s also just launched. That community is designed to work with the academy so that people have an exchange space where they can iterate and toss ideas into the ring. There are other people somewhere in the United States who have done this work, and we can guide and help connect a member who’s asking those questions to other members in our orbit that we know have done this work really well.
The second component is having the support and having amazing leadership at the central office. I say our job at [NASSP] is to make the job of superintendents much easier. If you’re the superintendent, and you’re the lone person trying to lead your district down a path that it has not been down before, the best help you can get is when your principals are armed with a bunch of ideas from experienced and successful principals and schools who have navigated it.
The support [principals] need sometimes comes in the form of just a “yes, try it, go ahead.”
