Meeting notes: October 27, 2011
October 27, 2011 – Morning
Carolyn: Before the meeting, these areas of interest were shared by team members:
- Higher education and career training
- Middle/High School
- Early learning (pre-K)
Themes
Higher education and career training
- Helping educators & learners prepare for the actual jobs of the future
- People who are already in the workforce need new skill sets for the job.
Dan: However, kids don’t know what they need to study in order to be ready for the jobs of the future. Schools, children, need to know what to start study before HS.
Bridgett: Students need to graduate with the skills for the actual jobs that are there. We need to support connections with the tech schools for the real skills for when they graduate. At my workplace, the bulk of positions (200+) we need to hire are entry level, and its hard to fill them.
Sue: The MDF has an active employer initiative, but it’s not as successful as it could be. What are the barriers for employers (strings attached for tuition improvement, we don’t have ways to track credit)? What are the reasons why employees don’t take advantage of those programs? We don’t know what’s in the way of this being successful.
Jay: We need a better knowledge of supply (students) and demand (available jobs) and how to better match them together. There are too many silos between Career Training Centers in the Department of Labor and Career and Technical Education in the Department of Education. People don’t know what’s already available, from training/education opportunities to funding programs.
Middle/High School
- Real world learning goals and curricula for the 21st century
Carolyn: We could support Jobs for Maine Graduates and mentoring programs.
Julie: As to the classroom piece. There used to be a class about the history of Maine. We all need to learn this history and how it relates to current events. And then we need to adapt and look to the future.
Jay: We need to prepare students for basic 21st century skills: critical thinking, communication, collaboration, creativity, above and beyond the 20th-century content areas they have to master for standardized tests.
Sue: There are also several important state policy debates underway we should all know about: the Education Commissioner’s Early College initiative and the plans to eliminate Head Start.
Julie: Teaching financial literacy is important. An example: in order to get the education they need, students are convinced to take out loans without the capacity to pay down the debt. How will the next generation going to be able to learn and grow with the costs as they are, with the financing issues as they are. Even dual income families can’t make it work.
Early learning (pre-K)
- Helping our youngest citizens love learning
Stephanie: People aren’t being trained to work, for actual jobs. The first six years, people play. Next six years, they learn basic skills. From 12-18, you teach them about their options in the economy. Pre-K is critical for learning. I don’t think we need to duplicate initiatives that are already funded, such as the MDF Leadership work. As to Pre-K, we could do an investigation about organizational barriers for universal Pre-K. We could analyze economic feasibility. We could put together a business plan.
Family
Don: The family is critical, too. Parents need to be providing guidance for their children. We need to teach families about what will actually be needed when their children enter the workforce.
Jay: We need to find ways to help students find what they love to do, starting early, and help them keep that internal motivation for learning and matching it with what’s needed in the real world.
Process
Bridgett: We have a limited amount of time. Let’s find something, simple, and work on it. An important goal should be our process, to learn from each other.
Jay: I think there is a lot happening out there that we don’t know about. For example, I’ve learned so much from people around the table, and realize I know so little that it would be hard to pick one detailed program or project to support.
Why don’t we consider pulling together knowledge about our areas of passion related to workplace education? A clearinghouse or environmental scan of what we each know is already happening, what is available, what is missing. What are the questions that need to be asked? We can each study and surface what we know.
Sue: We have a unique opportunity. Around the table, we have business people, educators, people from different sectors in Maine.
I like the idea of supply and demand, an environmental scan including: what are the questions, what is already being done, what is missing?
Julie: I like the simplicity of this. A document that pulls things together, could provide tremendous value for people.
Sue: An environmental scan makes sense. We can educate each other in the group about what we know.
Dan: If we all only work individually, I could see how it would become splintered off.
Stephanie: How about working in teams of 2 or 3? I could see Sue and Dan looking at the research and the programs that help workers retrain for new professions. Newell and I could work on the political issues around state support for PreK, such as Head Start funding. Jay and Julie could look into breaking the boundaries of out-of-date curricula.
Jay: I’m suggesting that we pull together references to existing groups and documents to briefly introduce people (each other and the public) to what’s already being done in each of these areas. I’ll bet there are dozens and thousands of people already working on these issues. There would be real value to raising awareness of those activities, and then identifying what could be done next.
Bridgett: It would help is each team had the same set of questions to ask for consistency.
Notes for Afternoon meeting
Notes by Sue McCullough – suzemac@me.com
Blue Team meeting on [Wednesday] November 16, 10 am to 2 pm, in Augusta. Julie will be taking care of logistics including sending address of meeting place, arranging lunch, etc.
Here are the questions we identified last week as being relevant to the topic below. There may be others.
- How do we prepare Maine’s Future workforce for tomorrow’s skills?
- How do we know what those jobs are?
- How do we know what skills are needed?
- How do we get there from here?
- What knowledge is out there now and how is it disseminated?
- What role do employers play in this?
- What are the incentives/barriers for employees?
- What role does/should education play?
- How do government, employers and educators integrate, collaborate, cooperate?
See you on Nov. 16 in Augusta.