Let's Get Real: Deeper Learning and the Power of the Workplace

• In Event: Deeper Learning: How Internships, Civics, and Digital Teaching Platforms Can Prepare Youth for Adult Life

Abstract

While the phrase “college and career readiness” pervades current policy debates about high school improvement, “career readiness” often seems like an afterthought, tacked on as if to suggest that an academic, college prep course of study will automatically produce better job prospects. In the United States, we tend to assume that young people should become educated and then go to work, as though the two were entirely separate stages of life. But this dichotomy blinds us to the fact that work itself can be a powerful means of education.

Indeed, the workplace is where many young people become most engaged in learning high-level skills and content, insofar as work gives them opportunities to apply academic subject matter to real-world problems. The workplace often pushes adolescents to grow up, challenging them to conduct themselves appropriately, regulate their own behavior, follow difficult assignments through to completion, work in teams, solve unscripted problems, and communicate effectively with colleagues of differing ages and backgrounds. In short, the workplace is an excellent place for young people to develop the range of academic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal capacities that are referred to, collectively, as “deeper learning.”

Researchers and practitioners alike have demonstrated that we can promote deeper learning and better support the transition to working life if schools mix in-school learning with out-of-school, work-based experiences that gradually increase as students advance toward the completion of high school. Providing teenagers with exposure to the workforce isn’t just an economic necessity; it also provides a critical opportunity for them to grow up. In recent years, leading psychologists have argued persuasively that the nation’s high schools are failing to engage adolescents in ways that respond to their developmental needs. Studies have shown that many young people find school to be terribly boring and often irrelevant. A wealth of evidence suggests that many apparently disengaged students are, in fact, lively and engaged thinkers in their lives outside of school. Often, students who seem listless and uninterested in math or social studies turn out to be self-taught experts in computer programming, civil war history, music, or some other field of their own choosing, which they pursue with passion and commitment. School may fail to grab them, but they certainly are looking for things to grab onto, and which can help them define themselves as adults.

This paper/presentation argues that the current discussion about deeper learning in the nation’s high schools ought to be reframed to acknowledge that career readiness isn’t just an outcome of the K-12 curriculum but a process through which young people learn deeply and prepare for working life. To accomplish this, the treatment explores a nationwide vocational education and training system in Switzerland, highlights exemplary career readiness models in US high schools, explains some of the challenges in establishing workplace apprenticeships and internships, and provides specific policy implications that teachers, administrators, and legislators need to consider as they move this effort forward.

Author

• Nancy Hoffman, Jobs for the Future