Best of: 20 Ways to Market Your Program

While our bloggers take a much needed break, I will revisit this blog's most viewed posts. Check back each week!

Re-posted from July 2010

by Pamela Scott Bracey

…now is the time to begin thinking of ways to make your community aware of all of the exciting CTE changes taking place in the upcoming school year!  Not only is it important for students to be ‘in the loop’, but it is very important that parents, administrators, counselors, school board members, and legislators are also informed.

You may be thinking, “Why on earth should I even consider trying to tell people about my program and CTE?  They won’t listen anyway.”  WRONG!!!  Most non-supporters of CTE base their perspectives on the past, and simply just don’t understand all of the great innovative things that we have to offer.  Therefore, it is up to US to get the word out in an effective manner.

What can you do?  Well, I am glad you asked!  Below you will find a list of 20 different things that you can do in order to creatively market your program.

1. Have students create a marketing flyer for each CTE class.  These flyers could be posted online, in school hallways, offices, and restrooms, in grocery stores, business, doctor’s offices, etc.
2. Send mailings (or emails) to parents, and always accentuate positive occurrences.
3. Have your students conduct Career Presentations for local elementary students.
4. Meet at least quarterly with your building principal to update him/her on what is happening in your CTE Program.  Be sure to focus on accomplishments, and also express gratitude for support.
5. Invite school administrators to local and regional CTSO competitive events.
6. Give a presentation about CTE at your local school board meeting.  Some school board members do not really understand the actual benefits of CTE…you could enlighten them.
7. Host a T-shirt logo design contest, and sell the shirts as a fundraiser.  The benefits are two-fold:  raising money and marketing at the same time!
8. Decorate your classroom door. Many people pass your class every day and still have no clue about what actually happens inside.
9. Host events during CTE Month (February). ACTE (Association for Career and Technical Education) usually has special pricing on promotional materials during this time.
10. Utilize CTE Alumni as guest speakers at your promotional programs.
11. Create a “Computer Buddy” mentoring system among your students and local elementary, similar to the former “Pen Pal” system.
12. Decorate a CTE float for the annual homecoming parade.
13. Submit newspaper articles and photos whenever your students excel at competitions!
14. Get involved with 8th grade registration events.
15. Place a CTE “brag book” in the teacher’s lounge or front office.
16. Create a website for your program, and monitor it weekly!
17. Host a Career Fair!
18. Take students to visit legislators with the purpose of “selling” the importance of CTE to them.
19. Contact your local news station about doing a story on an exciting project that the class is working on.
20. Organize “CTE Information Tables” during lunch periods, staffed by students.

If any of you have any additional ideas that could be added to this list, please do not hesitate to let us know by posting to our CTE Forum at http://forum.CTE.unt.edu.  Together, we can create a CTE Awareness Movement like none other… so put your thinking caps on, and promote your programs with enthusiasm!!!  If we don’t do it, who will?

References

• ACTE:  http://www.acteonline.org/
• South Central Service Cooperative:  http://www.mnscsc.org/carlperkins/career_teched/marketing/marketing.html

Best of: Quotations for Use in Motivating Students

While our bloggers take a much needed break, I will revisit this blog's most viewed posts. Check back each week!

Re-posted from October 17, 2011
by Mickey Wircenski

Instructors who wish to have highly motivated and engaged students in their classrooms are constantly looking for different ways to promote motivation and engagement. There are lots of strategies that can be used to accomplish this. One method is to use quotations and “sprinkle” them throughout a lesson, unit or semester. These quotations can be used for class discussion, group brainstorming, individual projects and individual consultations. Posting them around a classroom can be a positive addition to a positive learning environment.

For example, on a daily basis, or at least systematically, the class can discuss the meanings of the quotations as they relate to personal projects. Students scan also keep a list of quotes that are the most meaningful to them. The class might post a list of quotes on the bulletin board and periodically update it.

 The following quotes can be used as a “starter” list:

 “The person on the top of the mountain did not fall there.” (Anonymous)

• “Without a struggle, there can be no progress.” (Frederick Douglass)
• “Genius is 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration.” (Thomas A. Edison)
• “Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after the others have let go.” (William Feather)
• “I hated every minute of training, but I said, “Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.” (Muhammad Ali)
• “I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.” (Michael Jordan)
• “Perseverance is failing nineteen times and succeeding the twentieth.” (Julie Andrews)
• “Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no help at all.” (Dale Carnegie)
• “It’s not whether you get knocked down; it’s whether you get up.” (Vince Lombardi)
• “I am the greatest. I said that even before I knew I was.” (Muhammad Ali)
• “Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.” (John R. Wooden)
• “Decide that you want it more than you are afraid of it.” (Bill Cosby)
• “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” (Eleanor Roosevelt)
• “Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors.” (African proverb)
• “Do the best you can in every task, no matter how unimportant it may seem at the time.
• No one learns more about a problem than the person at the bottom.” (Sandra Day O’Connor) 

SOURCE: Marzano, R. & Pickering, D. (2011). The Highly Engaged Classroom. Bloomington, IN: Marzano Research.
 

Best of: Student Characteristics and Self-Concept

While our bloggers take a much needed break, I will revisit this blog's most viewed posts. Check back each week!

Re-posted from January 3, 2011

by Lynne Cox

About 18 months ago I wrote a blog titled “Emotional Intelligence and Positive Self-Concept” which provided an overview for a study I designed for the purpose of investigating relationships between self-concept and participation in secondary CTE programs.

To refresh your memory, self-concept, discussed as a scholarly topic since the time of Socrates and Plato, is an important theoretical construct in education because self-concept is considered to be a desirable trait and a facilitator of positive future behavior. Self-concept is generally considered, by researchers in the field, a multi-dimensional construct and may vary according to domain; the way we think about and categorize ourselves as a “math” or “English” person, as “creative” or “athletic,” or as “beautiful” or “intelligent” is a practical example of the domain-specific nature of self-concept. High or low self-concept in one domain does not necessarily correlate with high or low self-concept in another domain.

General self-concept, also called self-esteem, is an overall view of oneself that is not generally correlated with domain-specific self-concept.  General self-concept is based on personal thoughts, interpretations, and beliefs: “It is not how good (or bad) you really are, but how good (or bad) you think you are that determines your behavior” (Bandura, 2003, p.377). According to Bandura (2003), individuals with high general self-concept set more challenging goals for themselves and are more persistent in the face of adversity than their counterparts with low general self-concept.

Recently I conducted this study to examine the relationship between the characteristics of students enrolled in AAVTC programs and students’ self-concept scores as measured by specific subscales from the Self-Description Questionnaire (SDQ). A total of 196 male and 89 female secondary students (Grades 9-12) participated in the study. Student characteristic variables of interest were age, gender, CTE program enrollment, and participation in CTE. The self-concept subscales analyzed were General, Academic, Verbal, Math, and Problem Solving.

The study detected a relationship between specific student characteristics and self-concept as measured on certain domain-specific first-order factors. Gender and participation in CTE over time were found to be the most important contributors to the student characteristic variable. Verbal self-concept and problem-solving self-concept contributed the most to the self-concept variable.  The interaction between student characteristics and self-concept, for this study, indicates that while participation in CTE does positively relate to problem-solving self-concept, gender is still the primary variable in predicting a student’s self-concept.

Results suggest that females in arts-based CTE programs have a higher verbal self-concept than males enrolled in the same programs, which is in line with prior research in the area of giftedness and self-concept. Findings indicate that male students in arts-based CTE programs have a higher problem-solving self-concept than their female counterparts.

Results from this study, although inconclusive based on effect size interpretation, suggest that students with a high level of participation also have high verbal and problem-solving self-concepts. Considering the instructional activities required in these particular CTE programs, this is a logical outcome and is consistent with self-concept studies of secondary students in specialized arts programs.

Age was found to be unrelated to self-concept.  This lack of relationship, especially when compared to the relationship between participation in CTE and self-concept, is in line with the theory that individuals develop self-concepts as a direct result of the interactions and activities they choose to participate in over time. Because students choose to participate in activities that help them develop their verbal and problem-solving abilities, it makes sense that their verbal and problem-solving self-concepts will improve independent of their age.

These findings add to the literature concerning the area of self-concept as it relates to student participation in CTE programs. Given the shortage of research in this general area, the study represents a first step in examining a relationship between CTE students and the development of self-concept.  Stay tuned to recommendations and more information on this topic!

Reference

Bandura, A. (2003). Social-cognitive theory. In R. B. Ewen (Ed), An introduction to theories of personality (pp. 365-385). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Best of: What do the Arts have to do with STEM?

While our bloggers take a much needed break, I will revisit this blog's most viewed posts. Check back each week!

Re-posted from  March 15, 2013

by Kathy Belcher

Manufacturing and STEM Cluster Specialist

Many educators and professionals advocate including the Arts with the integrated disciplines of

Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). Including the Arts will lead to the proposed change to STEAM. Whether STEM or STEAM, the major emphasis is integration of the curricula, in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, rather than curricula taught as five isolated disciplines.

Including the Arts is a natural component that enhances and supports STEM curricula:

• Arts education is a key to creativity
• Creativity is an essential component of and spurs innovation
• Innovation is necessary to create new products and industries
• New industries, with their jobs, are the basis of future economic well-being (White)

An interesting example of the integration of Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and the Arts was recently featured in the Arts & Life section of The Dallas Morning News. The article highlights Kevin Page, a character actor in Robocop, and artist who created an innovative technology to assist him with pointillism painting. This is a painting technique in which many small dots of color are applied to the canvas to form an image. Georges Seurat, who is considered to be the father of pointillism, spent two years creating the famous painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte shown in the picture above. The painting is approximately 7-by-10-foot in size.

In only six weeks, Kevin Page created Sunday Afternoon: A New Pointillist Interpretation, his 8-by-6-foot interpretation of Seurat’s masterpiece.  How is this possible?  Page has a couple of patents pending on the robotic technology he used to apply the tiny dots of color to his canvas. The software-driven robotic paint tool, with a video camera mounted near the tool, allowed him to create in weeks the same effect that Seurat spent two years creating. 

Page reflects, “Science is the why of things, technology is the how of things, art is the meaning of things”. His occupation as an actor and artist was the creative stimulus to innovate robotic technology that assisted him in painting his interpretation of Seurat’s masterpiece in a fraction of the time. This is an excellent example of what the Arts have to do with Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. So, how can CTE teachers integrate the Arts in STEM and other disciplines to stimulate creativity and innovation needed to ensure new products, new industries, and a growing economy?

References:

Granberry, M. (2013, January 28). Character actor adds robotic painting tool to his resume: POINT MAN. The Dallas Morning News, p. E2, E6. 

White, H. (2010). Why STEAM? Retrieved from STEAM Website http://steam-notstem.com/