 When your school offers a CTS program with multiple pathway choices, it personalizes learning for students. This does present a challenge and that it may require making significant changes to program delivery. In this video we're going to visit some schools that have implemented multiple pathways in their CTS programs and see them in action. Along the way we'll highlight some key concepts you'll need to know in order to design pathways, design instruction and to involve your community to create the capacity for more student choice. It's important for students to have choice where they want to earn their credits because you just make them earn their credits in certain places. They might not learn what they like to do. Options give you a taste of what you're actually going to be doing if you took this as a job in the real world. I come from a family that has three different welders in it and I really didn't have a passion for it. Now that I'm here I've experienced it and I actually really like it. I think it is really important that we all have those options to really be able to get a feel for it before we commit. It just keeps your future open like there's so many different trades that you can go into. So the program here at Bellrose offers a number of courses within sports medicine. Several recreation leadership courses, several health services courses. It allows students to enter into a program where they have a real strong interest and allows them to develop a passion in that direction. And as we know any time you have a passion you're more likely to stick with it and stay involved. Well in our shop the program is primarily woodworking students do. There's some welding and there's some automotives. It was designed just as a woods lab only so they did woodworking and that was it. Paul Maylin that's here now has an automotive background so we saw that as a window opportunity. He sort of followed what the kids were interested in. They try to quite often combine grade levels so we'll have for instance shop 20 and 30 combined so grade 11's and 12's. We tend to in certain courses that have safety issues will try to keep the grade 10's separate and on their own so that they can kind of get those safety skills and basics up to par. Others where safety isn't an issue like tech or design will run 10, 11, 12's all together to offer more sections and then give the kids those flexibilities. When I did my physical education degree a lot of the stuff that I'm teaching now is stuff that I learned in my first two years. This is really giving these students a head start in terms of what they're going to be taking in university and they're not going into a blind. One of the main ways that we share the information about what's available to them is through a guidebook. We put together a really, really visual, really easy to read, set out in a table format just what is available to them and what we do is we take a look at the individual and we try to figure out what direction they're going in and what courses they may have already taken and once we figure that out we sit down with the individual and we try to begin with the end in mind so what are they trying to accomplish at the end of their three years at Bellrose and we try to set them on a path based on what direction they think they're going in right now or even what their interest level is. After the courses that we are now doing in the Pathways program we had to look at professional development in a whole new way. We found that although sometimes it has to be very innovative and creative in terms of how you release teachers and we understand that that's difficult but it is important that it is a shared experience for them because the learning shared seems to triple everything that the students receive. We're allowed to get together and collaborate on professional development days and so we share a lot of information and project ideas and so you're not recreating the wheel. From the division we need support to obviously at a political level we need the board to say hey that's a great idea we support you 100% and then in a business sense we're going to need some sort of funding commitment or help along the way to establish it. If we didn't offer the choice I would predict we would lose some kids. Ultimately for us it really comes down to understanding that students are on different paths through their educational career and that we need to meet their needs rather than having them meet the needs of our timetable. It became apparent to us that traditional instructional models were not going to adequately meet the needs of students. For us it wasn't as much about timetable flexibility because we still start and end at the same times that we used to. It was the flexibility of what happens within the classrooms with those teachers. It really is a different perspective on how a course is delivered. One of the ways I manage multiple pathways, multiple credit offerings is collaborating with my coworkers early in the program we sat down and had several discussions about how we were going to tackle this. So at times we would split the group where one group would be working with say a fitness professional and one group would be working with me on something in the classroom. Delivery is the trick. I use YouTube, the internet, magazines, books. If I have different students doing different activities at once I use other students as peer teachers to help them get going in an area that's new to them. Students pick up from others just by watching. It gets to be as the semester moves on the class kind of gels and they get quite good at helping each other. Being able to manage the multiple pathways means being able to step back and see the big picture of it and not being wrapped up necessarily in all the details all the time. I've got a really good handle now on the tracking of students and which modules they've completed which courses they've completed and where credits have been assigned to those students. Knowing that that can be managed has given a measure of freedom and reduced some of the stress of feeling like you need to have everybody in the same place all the time. To get the kind of buy-in from our community and from the post-secondary schools and the professionals that we needed our kids to see we had to explain what the new pathways were going to be and what they meant for them. And then we called in favors. We asked if we had a physiotherapist we knew. If we had a personal trainer we knew. If we had a doctor who was an orthopedic surgeon we talked to them and we asked them to come and share their profession and tell kids what kinds of opportunities they had. It is a real win-win situation because they get to be part of our student body life. They get to meet our students and see that the younger generations are really interested in what they're doing and this is the future in some of their industries. The only way you can teach a pathway is to show the end that you have in mind. And so kids need to see professionals working in careers that they love sharing their passions for the careers that they have chosen and seeing the opportunities that there are. And so the bottom line for us is that you have to go out into the community and seek out those relationships. It's important for students to make that choice because really when you come into this class you don't know what you're going to do yet. You don't know your skill set. You don't know what you're interested in. I've took in this class about three times now. I started off with woodworking and I've done about two or three months of just straight welding. It seems to make my day a little better when I come in and be able to turn a normal piece of wood into something beautiful and it just makes me feel like that's what I'm going to do for the rest of my life. I just like how we can kind of go off and do our own thing and it's not like we're all doing the same thing because in some courses we start to do something that I don't like in this course. I can choose not to do that and I can go and do something that I like more with how I took the taping and strapping and all that instead of coaching. In this video we visited schools that are personalizing instruction in their CTS programs by offering multiple pathway choices to students. As the students and the teachers shared their experiences we hope you gained valuable insight and inspiration to help you implement multiple pathways in your CTS program. Ultimately you'll find the work and effort will benefit not only your students but your school, your community and you.