 In order to make CTS Pathways programs truly relevant and effective for students, it's sometimes necessary to take the classroom out of the school and into the community. In this video, we're going to visit some schools offering off-campus experiences in their CTS programs. Along the way, we'll highlight the philosophy and rationale behind moving learning into the community, look at opportunities arising from off-campus experiences, identify the roles and responsibilities of the participants, and list some CTS courses that are specifically required or recommended prerequisites. I can't really be, like, sitting behind a desk. I want to be able to go out and do something for a career. It was really an eye-opener on my EMT practicum. I'm in the registered apprenticeship program here, and so right now I've just gotten my electrical apprenticeship. So this course is going to benefit me in a lot of ways. We wanted to do a little program for the kids, because we noticed that, like, 18 percent or something of the kids' population weren't doing anything after school. So we wanted to see what we could do in our own community. So we decided to start an after-school program at the elementary school. For me personally, without going to the navigate system, I probably wouldn't have thought of going to Nate and doing water studies and stuff like that, as when I went to the conference and I witnessed their, like, proposal, I guess, it was really interesting and, like, it's really intrigued me now. I enjoyed working with other people in the community, like, you know, being able to leave our school and going to talk to... Like, we went to Bonnie Lodge in extended care and we got to talk to the seniors there. So what we did was we went to the continuing care in the hospital, and we worked, we shadowed a nurse, and I really enjoyed it. It was really fun. My project, I'm hoping again just to put a little bit of sense of awe in these kids when they're out on the West Coast and they're seeing C-Life up close and from the perspective of a true marine biologist that that will pique some interest in them. And if not that career, but just, again, some passion that people have in other careers. It is absolutely worth it because the kids are motivated. I do not have issues motivating my kids. I do not have discipline issues. They also enjoy not being lectured to the majority of our kids. These days are either visual or kinesthetic learners. We have very few auditory learners. And lecturing to visual and kinesthetic learners doesn't work very well. Within CTS there are a lot more options in how pathways can be set up. We moved from using a rather stationary pathway the first year to offering much more differentiated pathways within our second and third years. This year, for example, we have about 30 different community organizations in Bonneville and Cold Lake that are supporting our pathways. When students decide that they want to choose off-campus education as part of their high school diploma requirement, it's part of the registration process that happens in the spring for the upcoming year. So the kids get to pick and choose whether they want to be involved in off-campus education, which kind of off-campus education they want to be involved in. The students, they can pick anything. There's a couple of students that wanted to do some stuff in leatherwork. We can't offer leatherwork or we don't know how to offer leatherwork at our school. So we were able to hook them up with somebody that had the knowledge and the expertise. And they came up with their own learning plan, the outcomes that they wanted to achieve and what they wanted to learn by the end of it. And as a result of that, you know, they're putting time in, they're demonstrating what they want to do. And then they had the exhibition at the end of the day to show that they've learned it. Making the connection with industry for the kids to see what's really going on out there, to see the people and know what they want. Just even talking about it as a worker, what are the characteristics, it's just an individual, what are the skills that you need for job retention, let alone what are the opportunities out there and to see. Because again, when these kids are able to talk to these guys live, wow, what a difference it makes in their lives. And when I see it as a teacher, they say, yeah, whatever. But when you hear from an industry guy, all of a sudden they can't wait to do it now. And that's simply literally because of conversation they would have with somebody out there in the field. It gives them hands-on learning, gives them the opportunity to experience a variety of different locations and a variety of different career pathways. Involvement of community has been really pivotal in the success of our program. And it's really, I would say, the number one best practice that we have initiated and used throughout our pilot. And it's one that we look to in future programming for CTS. We have a smaller school district and it is rural. And so we are limited sometimes in terms of space and student numbers and instructors or teachers. And so when we engage our community partners, they provide opportunities for students to use specialized equipment. They provide opportunities for students to complete field placements with them. For the most part, the relationship we have with industry is with Coal Lake Ambulance Service. We also have been trying to forge, have been forging relationships with our extended care. Students have an opportunity because we're offering some advanced credit with the EMR program. Students are eligible if they choose to go through with it for a practicum, an advanced practicum placement where they can earn credits while doing on-the-job work. There's other learning opportunities outside of this building with somebody that's an expert outside of this building that we can't deliver to students. These are careers that students are really getting interested in. They see these careers in their communities. They believe that these careers are good opportunities to go into in the future. And it allows them to have a brief taste test of what it would be like to do that career in the future. So we have kids actually going out into the hospital and seeing what a lab tech does. And that kind of learning, you can talk about it in the classroom, but until you see it and you actually do it, you're not going to get a really good indication of what that career is actually like. Offering the off-campus experience to the students in our school gives them the opportunity to first of all be able to earn credits outside of the regular classroom. Plus it also allows them the opportunity to gain the CTS credits that they need for their high school credentials for their diploma. I think the value of having students being able to participate in these off-campus experience, it really goes beyond the classroom. It goes beyond, you know, the academics for many students. It gives them an opportunity to explore possibly some other opportunities that are out there without having necessarily a lifelong commitment to that, but they can also see some of those other opportunities and helping them to figure out maybe what they want to do down the road. There were some concerns around confidentiality. There were some concerns around just how do we coordinate it? How do we bring in that volume of students and work that through? And that was a challenge for us at the schools as well in terms of transporting our students to those various work sites and just, you know, so there was some organization obstacles to overcome. And the other obstacle that we had to work really hard at was how do we build the community partnerships because all of these programs require students going out into the community and doing some hands-on type of work. It took a lot of legwork. There was a lot of dialogue and a lot of meetings and, you know, trying to help them to understand what we wanted to do. But now, you know, this is our third year of working with it and so now those partnerships are there. They're strong and they're very open to having our students come in and work with them. I went to their practices and observed them coaching so that I could give them positive feedback on what they were doing well but also point out things that they needed to work on and so I was providing the link to the theory that they were getting from the coaching manual to the practical of actually working with kids in a gymnasium or on the ice. Kids really do have a good opportunity to evaluate themselves and, you know, nine times out of ten they're really a lot harder on themselves than what we would be giving them for, for a grade. Don't think of just the school as being your four walls that you're stuck in to learn, go out, meet people, doing investigations that way or to the parks or like we're doing here, we're heading out to the coast and we're going to expand it as far as we can. Some CTS courses are required prerequisites. For example, HCS 3000 is required for work experience and AGR 300 is required for a green certificate. Some courses are recommended prerequisites such as CTR 1010, CTR 3010 and HCS 3010. Now that you've had a chance to see the benefits of including off-campus experiences in a CTS program we hope you're encouraged to explore opportunities for off-campus learning in your community. We're sure you'll find the effort will benefit your students, your community partners, and you.