A Second Idea to Enhance the High School Learning Experience
Last week I wrote about my experience on a recent education-focused panel titled “Future of Ed-Tech: From Personalization to Machine Learning”, and I shared how our esteemed moderator asked a doozy of a final question:
“What’s one suggestion you have that would improve education?”
In last week’s post, I argued that one way we could improve high school education for all involved — students, educators, and even parents — would be to eliminate (or at least dramatically reduce) the reliance on standardized testing as one of the main qualifiers for access to higher education. In that post, I also highlighted that my panel response included a second idea that might enhance the high school education experience.
Thus, my second concept designed to support high school education and improve the odds of post-secondary success would be to formally incorporate work experience — in the form of paid internships — into the curriculum for students starting in the junior year (and perhaps earlier?). Given how the modern workplace continues to rapidly evolve, there’s a growing risk that the gap will only widen between the needs of employers compared to the skills and capabilities being developed by potential employees. By adding real work experience opportunities to a student’s transcript, internships help students in at three important ways and therefore might help narrow the otherwise widening workplace divide:
A real-world work experience for a high school student delivers a powerful dose of reality for a young person. By taking the time to incorporate an internship into their weekly routine, high schoolers learn what it’s like to be responsible to a manager and ultimately to the goals of something larger than themselves. The workplace environment definitely feels foreign to young workers — we all remember the first time we worked in an office with adults. And this dynamic is indeed a big part of a student’s growth and learning e.g. being able to communicate with people you aren’t familiar with in a context that is new and different. Understanding how payroll and taxes work, why projects need to sometimes be completed over the weekend, and how to partner with someone who works in a different department are all valuable lessons that would augment a high schooler’s academic training.
Working in a formal workplace environment helps instill in teenagers the crucial work ethic that will ultimately contribute significantly to their long-term success. By working in an organization — for-profit or non-profit — young students quickly learn the importance of time management and how to prioritize projects and initiatives more broadly. High school students who are given the opportunity to work closely with role models who have been along a similar journey provides a powerful blueprint at an impressionable age for young people to incorporate. Further, marrying work experience while in the full speed learning environment of high school helps instill in these students an ethos of life-long learning and skill development which will serve them well as the future workplace evolves.
Finally, real work experience in the high school years creates a powerful reference point for students to determine early on what they like — and of course, don’t like — in the context of a potential career path. Do they like working in an office? Do they enjoy working with data or with people? Does this draw them to wanting to write code and build things, or go out to meet with people in other settings to sell or build partnerships? For most teenagers sitting in a high school classroom, much of what they think happens in a “career” is a figment of their imagination. Why not provide opportunities — before college decisions are made — to give young people exposure to many aspects of what actually happens “out there” so that their imagination becomes more connected to reality?
The good news on this front more generally is that programs are popping up to help provide vital connections between the high school learning experience and exposing students to career opportunities. More importantly, these programs are doing so in a way that’s accessible to every student. For example, here in the Bay Area programs like “Pathways, Exposure, Academic Connection, Knowledge (PEAK)” and Genesys Works enable high school students an opportunity to engage in meaningful internship opportunities. However, as we open the doors for students to powerfully expand their learning through internships, we must do so in a way that’s truly available to every student. Ultimately, this means these internships must be paid work experiences so that every student can participate, not just those who could afford to intern for free in exchange for this valuable learning opportunity.
Originally published on Medium on July 15, 2018. This Substack version is maintained as the canonical archive.