The Practical Practicum

By Holly B. Smith

Cluster Specialist

Business Management Administration and Finance 

Have any of you taught your practicum in the last year?  Will you be teaching it next year?  If so, pull up a chair because I think your life is going to get easier very soon. 

For 18+ months, we, on the UNT Educational Excellence grants, have been working on an entire year’s worth of practicum lessons.  They are all alike and all unique, sharing many of the same attributes you’ve come to know and love with UNT lessons while differentiating themselves within each cluster’s specific content requirements.  

If you are in Health Sciences, then you already have a practicum that easily laps most others, including the Practicum in Business Management.  I know it’s been sorely lacking for a long time, and that makes me even more excited and eager to share the new practicum with you.  In fact, Kristin Firmery Petrunin (Marketing) and I are going to present the socks off the practicum project this summer at our July conference.  Go to this link to learn more about the TCEC Summer Conference:  http://tcecconference.com/summer.   

The layout of practicum looks like this:

1.  Introduction 
2. Prep (classroom tips, useful websites, a general practicum, house keeping details, training station orientation) 
3. Curriculum

Each cluster’s curriculum will look different from this point.  For instance, Business will cover the History of Office Administrators; then, our lessons will lay out according to the scope & sequence document.  This is traditionally how our lessons flow and that will continue through the Practicum lessons.  We have worked in some presentation opportunities, some projects for both individuals and groups and both Leadership and Advanced Leadership lessons. 

Additionally, you will find useful supplemental lessons.  We used an “above-and-beyond” approach to rounding out practicums.  Our Business practicum doesn’t have any TEKS that specifically talk about a digital portfolio, how to search for scholarships, how to understand and work in a global marketplace or understanding general project management, time management and personal management.  

YET, we know that these are vital skill sets for out students.  For that reason, we included them.  We spent a lot of time, on this project, putting down the basics and then asking “what else?” What else do practicum students need to know, need to practice, need to understand?

 

I, too, kept asking myself, “What else? What else is there to offer students during practicum?”  I suggest reading some of Jeff Haden’s submissions, as Contributing Editor, to Inc.  He has written insightful articles that fall in the “soft skills” arena.  My particular favorites are:  “7 Traits of Exceptionally Charming People” and “Habits of Remarkably Giving People”.  

www.inc.com is full of useful articles written from a young and fresh perspective about the trials of the workplace.  Any practicum teacher can use one of these articles on a weekly basis to preface an upcoming unit of study.  (Please preview any articles or videos prior to using them in your classroom.) 

Here’s to a practical, “above-and-beyond” practicum for us all!

Finding “IT” at Texas Tech’s College of Architecture

by Dr. Jennifer Smolka
Architecture & Construction
Cluster Specialist

As a parent, there are few rights of passage which can be more fun ... and more stressful than college visits with your senior year in high school.  My second son, Mark, is a senior at Waxahachie High School and he had figured out what he wanted to be his major:  Architecture. This wasn’t a complete surprise since Mark always had this incredible eye for spatial reasoning and was a whiz at building with Legos when he was younger.  That spatial eye has allowed him to excel at pool and golf where it’s all about the lines and angles.  But as he was growing up he went through several career choices.   There was the police force and more specially a K-9 officer that combined his sense of justice and his love of dogs.  Then for a long time, I thought he might do something like a game warden that continues along the justice path but layers in his pastimes of hunting game and birds.  But when he decided on Architecture, it really seemed to fit and since I had just become involved in CTE & Architecture at UNT, I couldn’t believe the synchronicity of it.  

Last year, we began looking at the eight different universities that had Colleges of Architectures and he narrowed down where he wanted to go:  Texas A & M or Texas Tech University.  This Red Raider mom couldn’t be more excited to think that one of our four boys would attend the school where I met my husband.    We scheduled our visit to be able to attend a football game on the same weekend and the three of us headed out in November for a college visit.  

The campus tour was a nostalgic walk down memory lane for me and I could just envision Mark walking the same paths that we had over twenty years ago.  With the campus tour over, we made our way across campus to the Architecture building that is one of the tallest buildings on campus giving the department on the top floor the impressive view across the West Texas Plains.  (Yes, it really is flat!)  

We were able to have scheduled a visit with the department to learn more about the program.  Encourage your seniors to visit with departments and faculty of the actual programs at the university.  Each campus and each group of faculty will have a different culture and you’ll want to make sure that you fit in to the entire environment.   

Our guide discussed the programs and the various options for an academic degree program that best fit each learner.  Students can combine engineering, business, and construction as possible double majors and there is even a five-year program that combines the undergraduate and graduate degrees.  As an administrator and faculty member in higher education for the last twenty years, I was impressed.    

We were shown different design projects that students at various levels had been creating and we heard about how much effort and rigor went in the program studies. 

Students had been known to build hammocks under their drafting tables in order to catch a little sleep while working on big design projects.  In fact, the building is known as “Motel 6” because there is always a light on.  The building is set up with 24-hour security guards and keypads so that students can always have the access to the design spaces.  

The department has thoughtfully considered what an architecture student needs to be able to create authentic design projects to include in their design portfolio in a professional way.  The College of Architecture at Texas Tech is really like it’s own little island which may make one of the largest physical campuses seem just a little bit smaller.   

Within the 10-story building, the COA has its own two-story Library with books, materials, and a reference librarian to help students on course projects and research. 

The COA also has their own Print Shop that can do professional posters, publications, presentations – you name it they can print it in any format and any size.  

Just around the corner, a photography studio has been set up with the space and tools for digital photography of models and 3-D projects.  The have SLR cameras and video cameras that students can checkout or use in the design space to create artifacts for their portfolios.  

Finally, they have so many different types of Workshop spaces that you could create anything from anything including wood, metal, and even plastic 3-D printers.   

Perhaps one of my favorite elements of the program is the study-abroad requirement in the summer between the junior and senior year.  On my own travels abroad, the architecture of the churches, castles and museums that have lasted hundreds or thousands of years is awe-inspiring.  It makes me wonder what would an archecture program be without the opportunity to study first hand the historical aspects and the cultural influences in the field. 

It’s clear that if you want to create and design “art that we live in” (CITATION), this would be an incredible opportunity to learn in an authentic, hands-on, design environment.   

At some point in the tour, I realized that I was more engrossed in the program offerings than my son was.  As we were walking, he was working on a small box puzzle that our guide had given the two potential students.  Figuring out how it worked enthralled Mark.  How do you put the six-notched pieces together to form a cube?  

But he was somewhat quite and not asking questions like dear old mom.  Something was amiss.  What was this boy of mine thinking?   

This right of passage for a parent taking their child on college tours (and even to their own alma mater) is heavy.  It means our children are getting ready to leave the nest.  Have we given them all of the skills, knowledge … and dispositions… to make it this world today?  But even more critical is this right of passage for our children.  They are preparing to leave their safety net and venture out where they have to make their own decisions and they get to take those first steps towards the rest of the future.  For some, deciding what to study and where to go may have been part of their family destiny.  For others, it takes really knowing yourself and examining the possibilities.   

We could tell at dinner that night that something wasn’t sitting well with Mark.  This was an incredible place to go to study Architecture, but it wasn’t clicking and he couldn’t quite express why.   It was hard as parents to not push and prod.  But given some space and the quiet of a hotel room in the middle of the night, Mark figured it out.   

Remember those design projects that we saw at the very beginning of the tour?  That was the key.  Mark doesn’t feel the creative juices to design boxes that flow; he has the mind of the puzzlemaker figuring out how to make everything work.  While he still wants to design, he wants to do it from the structural side of things and it clicked for him to begin looking for Structural or Civil Engineering programs.   

He asked if I would be disappointed if this took him to someplace other than Texas Tech University since I was so excited to be sharing our history with him.  I told him, that Texas Tech would also be an incredible special place for me.  Without it, I would not be who I was today.  My love of higher education was definitely planted in the culture and community of Raider Land.  And I met my husband there and our dreams and family will always have roots on the campus of Texas Tech.  

But all we really want for our sons is to find their place in this world.  While I found “IT” in the windy West Texas plains of Lubbock, I let Mark know that where he found “IT” was fine … as long as it was his very own “IT”.