Educating Wahpeton students for the Twenty-first Century
Recently members had the opportunity to hear from Wahpeton High School’s new principal who focuses on the innovations being introduced at WHS to adequately prepare the students for the twenty-first century. He opened by admitting that historically the high school has done a poor job of exposing students to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (the collective STEM fields). Bright motivated students have found their own way but in many instances due to a lack of exposure students have no idea what STEM fields are and that they might like one of these fields as a career. This is not unique to WHS; Clooten pointed out that there is now a gap in available candidates for technology jobs and that gap is predicted to get worse. His other major point is that it is not inexpensive to give students this exposure correctly. A side benefit is that it saves parent’s college money as the child has a better idea of their interests before they arrive in college. The program is also vital as STEM jobs are going to grow by 17 % by 2018. The non-STEM curriculum prepares students for jobs that went away ten to twenty years ago. At the moment there are six to eight jobs for every unemployed person in North Dakota in STEM fields with most of the population not having the skill set to do these jobs. There are 1.5 jobs for every unemployed person in North Dakota in the non-STEM fields.
Thus came the start of the adaption of the “Project Lead the Way” (PLTW) program at Wahpeton middle and high school. Currently this program is at various stages of adaption in high schools in Fargo, West Fargo, Grand Forks, Detroit Lakes and now Wahpeton. At the middle school level these programs are called “Gateway To Technology” and “Pathway To Engineering” at the high school level. At the high school level there are foundation courses; engineering courses and bio-medical courses and computer science. The complete program runs K-12 and Clooten hopes to ultimately adopt the whole program.
Project Lead the Way is a not for profit 501(c)3 program based in Indianapolis, Indiana that started in 1997. The genesis of which was a series of courses offered at the Shenendehowa Central School District in upstate New York offered beginning in 1986. The PLTW programs are all aligned with the Common Core Standards of English and Mathematics and other national standards. Teacher certification is on a national basis.
The programs are not didactic lecture courses but hands on laboratory courses where students are challenged to think creatively and to problem solve. Members saw videos of the teachers and students in action where clearly the students were up moving around and actively involved with the project there were working on.
Currently at the Wahpeton Middle school all eighth graders take at least one PLTW course and in high school all students take at least two each year. Also at Wahpeton High School it has been notable that at each garde level a wide diversity of ability from students who lead the class to students’ ranked ninety-ninth sign up for the courses. While in no way intended as a course to assist Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) students an unexpected consequence has been that these students can do well in the courses as they are so interactive and not the typical expectation of sitting quietly at their disk listening to a lecture.