Curriculum Director's Meeting (January 2009)

I recently attended KSDE's Curriculum Director's Meeting in Topeka. The hot topics were: Career Technical Education (CTE) and 21st Century Learning. Below, you will find the meeting highlights and the possible impact on learning at Valley Center:

• State committees are working on integrating the CTE/21st Century Learning Skills with the academic standards. Their hope is to build the assessments along with the standards and have the math and reading done by July 2010. As we have conversations about curriculum integration, we will learn more about Career Technical Education and the 21st century learning environments and skills. What are we currently doing to create a 21st century learning environment?
  
• Career Technical Education is the new "Vocational Ed" under the Perkins Career and Technical Education Act of 2006. The goal of this initiative is to help ALL individuals have a strong academic foundation and the ability to apply academic and technical skills to real-world situations. This will require our schools to continue utilizing project-based learning (integrating technical and academic skills), emphasizing 21st Century Learning environments where students are more self-directed and collaborative, and creating systems of support for varied learning styles, abilities, and interests (MTSS).
• The state has adopted a CTE model that emphasizes 16 career clusters and over 80 pathways. The state department is working closely with the industry to determine the high skill, high wage, and high demand jobs so that Kansas schools can emphasize these pathways in their schools (i.e. health field, education, etc.). KSDE recommends us asking the following questions: 1) Why does our program exist? 2) What is it doing for economic growth?
• The state emphasized the difference between OTL and Second Opportunity. Reading and math are the only subject areas where students get a second opportunity to meet standards. Opportunity to Learn refers to ALL subject areas and it allows each HS to determine when to give the science, history/govt., and writing assessment. Students do not get a second opportunity to pass these assessments.
• There are science and social studies formatives on the CETE Formative site.