Never Mistake Activity for Achievement

Day two at the Region II conference started early and is truly a full day of learning. The day began with Alisha Hyslop from ACTE giving an update on legislative activities. At the start of her presentation, she mentioned that right now the political environment is focused on the financial bailout/economy and the election, so not much is being done on education. She did spend a bit of time on the funding process that has been occurring since February. She also mentioned that ACTE has been reaching out to the presidential candidates but that neither of them have accepted the invitation. What she did mention was that whoever is elected, the CTE community will have a lot of work to do because neither candidate has spoken out much on education or CTE. Alisha then talked about what will be happening in 2009. Those topics included:

• NCLB
• Workforce Investment Act
• Energy Sustainability
• FY2010

If you want to keep up to date on CTE policy activities, check out the ACTE CTE Policy Watch blog. 

In other conference proceedings, Chris Colwell from the Volusia Public Schools gave a presentation on the changing philosophy of education. He joked at the start that this was everyone’s favorite class! Basically Colwell stated that we really need to look at what kids are learning and doing in classrooms and to give them credit and opportunity for what they are doing. If students are engaged by what they are doing in CTE, then they should and will achieve.

Following Colwell’s presentation, Mary Bruno, also from Volusia, gave a presentation on Global CTE. Since we are dealing with a situation about the next issue of Techniques magazine, I was in and out of this session. Luckily Bruno shared her PowerPoint slides with me. Check it out at the bottom of this post.  The long and the short of her presentation was to share what the county was doing in CTE and what gains they have achieved.

Following Bruno was Janice Scholz from Brevard Public Schools. Scholz talked about CTE program evaluations and what Brevard is doing in that area. I managed to snag her presentation also, so you will see it below. In this presentation, Scholz talked about how the county looked at certifying their programs, their teachers and their students. The purposes of this project, as stated by Scholz were:

* Establish clear and rigorous standards
* Ensure students receive a quality education
* Establish and maintain programs that demonstrate high levels of performance
* Development links and foster collaboration
* Improve articulation with postsecondary
* Recognize achievement

Scholz did mention that not all teachers were on board at first, but after they began to see a difference in the other programs and students. She did mention that they have some work to do on some of the achievement measures, but they have gotten big improvements. A lot of what they are doing surrounds the career academy model. For more information on what they are doing and to see some of the materials they use for measurement and evaluation, check out the Brevard CTE Web site.