Another year another Sweet 16
My apologies. I couldn't resist in an enticing headline to pique interest.
No this blog isn't about this years NCAA tournament. Part of my focus is the Workforce. Because of the end of the first half of the year, the classes at the high schools transition and change gears.
At the John Harris Campus, there is more emphasis on Career Readiness. At the SciTech Campus students have college and jobs on their minds. As a pull together Making within the upper levels, I'll be connecting it back to careers and work.
STEAM Making @ John Harris Campus High School
TECHNOLOGY:
STEM Lab (Mr. Gigac)
The end of the Second Quarter happened on January 12th, and it signifies a change of focus for the students in the STEM Lab. For the first half of the year they looked at building STEM Readiness. This involved the understanding of various hands on modules from the CLS Learning Launcher. During the second half of the year, Mr. Gigac is shifting to more book focused work where students will dig deeper into the 16 Career Clusters - from https://careertech.org/cctc:
Agriculture, Food & Natural Resources
Architecture & Construction Arts
A/V Technology & Communications
Business Management & Administration
Education & Training
Finance
Government & Public Administration
Health Science
Hospitality & Tourism
Human Services
Information Technology
Law, Public Safety, Corrections & Security
Manufacturing
Marketing Science
Technology Engineering & Mathematics
Transportation, Distribution & Logistics
At the Foundry we will be helping the students draw connections to what was completed in the first half. The hope is to also connect with other teachers in the building so that the students who have learned how to do 3D printing on the Dremel or 3D carving on the Carvey, could further increase their skills in teaching other students.
All of this study is meant to build into the K-12 Pathways for 21st Century Learning in part of the ROAR Academy - Reaching Our Academy Responsibility through College and Career Pathways. And https://careertech.org/cctc To help better connect mindsets from Middle School to High School, I found a great resource by DK Publishers called Careers.
The Careers book, is a fantastic book that has a two page spread of over 400 careers. This book is so helpful because of the accessibility in dissecting each career in the same way - At A Glance, Skills Guide, Career Paths and Related Careers. I recommend this book for any school library, to be placed as a quick glance “coffee table book” to allow for open discussions of careers. Talking with the CCA Librarian recently, she emphasized the push into the 5th and 6th grade levels to become career aware. While I have seen many good websites for career reference, I think this book allows for more free thought discovery within the 16 Career Clusters.
Useful Career Studies Links:
U.S. Dept. of Labor - Bureau of Labor Statistics - https://www.bls.gov/ooh/
Career Onestop - https://www.careeronestop.org/
Mapping Your Future - http://mappingyourfuture.org/
Educational Planner - http://www.educationplanner.org/students/career-planning/index.shtm
National Career Development Association - https://www.ncda.org/aws/NCDA/pt/sp/resources
Useful Books:
What Color Is Your Parachute? for Teens - Carol Christen & Richard N. Bolles
What's Your Red Rubber Ball?! - Kevin Carroll
Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life - Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
ARTS:
A/V Studio (Mr. Cooper)
The flow of the A/V Studio is also change for the second half of the year as there are some changes to student schedules.
The key phrase being used is "WORKFLOW." We continued to impress upon students the necessity of following a workflow. This is in planning, research, execution and archiving. Mr. Cooper is working to adjust with consistent students. In all of this capacity building, we have put together weekly schedule for the Weekly Series that he and the students are developing. The Video Team has gone out and recorded sports events and special events around the school. The Studio Team has recorded special features such as Dr. Jackson’s Weekly Spoken Word episodes and other poets in the school. Dr. Jackson’s most recent episode included his recollection of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968. He remember that the next day after Dr. King’s death, they didn’t close schools. During the day in his 7th grade class, there was a decision made to walk out of the schools and he left following others. Looking back he said that he didn’t realize how important this was as a form of protest. He related this to the importance of spoken work in the community.
STEAM Making @ SciTech Campus High School
SCIENCE:
Trout in the Classroom (Sunada Roberts)
Going into the Holiday Break in December the 210 fish that were in the tank had dropped to just 3. When Sunada and the students returned from the break, the last 3 fish were dead. In the second week of January, Sunada reached out to the PA Fish & Boat Commission, to have some more shipped to SciTech. On January 10th, about 30 fish arrived and were acclimated to the tank. Students are now testing the tank and keeping an eye on levels. I hope that through the next two months students will learn more about the Trout Habitat and prepare for the April/May Trout Release Day.
In helping students collect data and learn the balance of harmful entities in a tank, we have been working with Active Learning Labs LLC to develop a TIC Simulation. The goal is to have a place to keep tank inspection records data as well as teach students the relationships of pH, Ammonia, Nitrites, Nitrates, feeding and fish mortality rates. We'll be working with teachers at CCA, MMSA and SciTech to test out the initial concepts that we hope will become a useful tool during next year's TIC project. It would also allow for a quick "dashboard" look at each schools to compare data across the Harrisburg School District.
TECHNOLOGY:
SciBOTS Robotics Team (Robert Steps)
The beginning of January was extremely tense for the SciBots Robotics Club because of the Saturday 1/6 Oxford PA Qualifying Tournament. The students only had two full days returning from the Holiday Break to finalize their designs and practice driving.
On 1/6 the Freshman Team 3282 pulled ahead with their ability to stack a total of 4 blocks during the match. This was attributed to their practice on the 4th floor at SciTech. The Senior Team 3305 continued to work on their strategy and pulled ahead. They attempted to get a score by picking up a relic and dropping it on the Relic Mat, but do to some miscommunication the robot arm crossed over the edge of the field before the 30 second end game time. The Referee called them and they had to just stop.
Ultimately the scores for the South Eastern Regional Qualifying Tournament (Oxford, PA):
3305 Scibots 2 (Senior Team) Rank 28
Qualification Points = 2
Ranking Points = 408
Highest = 168
Matches = 5
3283 Scibots 1 (Freshman Team) = Rank 33
Qualification Points = 2
Ranking Points = 229
Highest = 99
Matches = 5
To close out January, both teams participated in the South Central Qualifying Tournament at the York Penn State Campus on Saturday the 27th. This is a possible chance for both teams to participate in a third qualifier on Saturday, February 10th.
Ultimately the scores for the South Central Regional Qualifying Tournament (York, PA):
3305 Scibots 2 (Senior Team) Rank 21
Qualification Points = 4
Ranking Points = 513
Highest = 293
Matches = 5
3283 Scibots 1 (Freshman Team) = Rank 24
Qualification Points = 4
Ranking Points = 482
Highest = 199
Matches = 5
“An organization that is healthy will inevitable get smarter over time. That’s because people in a healthy organization, beginning with the leaders, learn from one another, identify critical issues, and recover quickly from mistakes. Without politics and confusing getting in there way, they cycle through problems and rally around solutions much faster than their dysfunctional and political rivals do. Moreover, they create environments in which employees do the same.” (Peter Lencioni, The Advantage, p.9-10)
"In contrast, smart organizations don’t seem to have any greater chance of getting healthier by virtue of their intelligence. In fact, the reverse may actually be true because leaders who pride themselves on expertise and intelligence often struggle to acknowledge their flaws and learn from their peers. They aren’t as easily open and transparent with one another, which delays recovery from mistakes and exacerbates politics and confusion. That’s certainly not to say that being smart isn’t desirable, just that it provides no inherent advantages for becoming healthy.” (Peter Lencioni, The Advantage, p.9-10)
2018 is shaping up to be an incredible year because the alignment of a lot of items around Harrisburg. I see a deeper more meaningful community organizing happening, with a whole lot more of awareness. This is a good thing because caring residents of Harrisburg should be in the mission of community capacity building. This is a task that is not limited in any way to any human being.
Even better is that is when 2-3 are gathered and synergy happens.
Leadership should start to stir, and when that happens, that potential should be harnessed into a Collective Impact effort. I’ve been reading through Patrick Lencioni’s book, The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business. In my work within the community I see so many organizations. Many of them are unhealthy. I see organizations as living entity that is in constant change. We have the word organization, which is connected to living organisms.
It could be in good health (ease) or in bad health (dis-ease). This is why Lencioni’s book is so important.
In the last chapter he provides a checklist for organizational health. This is a tremendous resource that expands on the Four Disciplines Model seen above.
One last item that connects to community development and leadership is an idea from the book by Daniel Christian Wahl called Designing Regenerative Cultures.
Wahl digs into the idea of Three Horizons. This was developed by International Future Forum (IFF) of Hodgson & Sharpe in 2007.
“ ‘Three Horizon’s Thinking’ is an effective method for making sense of and facilitating cultural transformation and exploring innovation and wise action in the face of uncertainty and not-knowing. [...] The ‘Three Horizons’ framework is a foresight tool that can help us to structure our thinking about future in ways that spark innovation. It describes three patterns or ways of doing things and how their relative prevalence and interactions evolve over time.” (Harpe, 2013:2, Wahl, 53)
“The transition to a sustainable society will require the reconstitution and reinvention of households, villages, neighborhoods, towns, cities and regions everywhere on the planet as interdependent, nested, self-organized, participatory and diversified wholes. [...] The result will be a decentralized and diversified structure of everyday life which is in contrast to the centralized and increasingly homogenized structures that we have become accustomed to. [...] Reconstituting the Domains is an inherently transdisciplinary and grassroots process that represents an opportunity to reintegrate and contextualized knowledge, embedded it in both community and everyday life. It calls for the intentional, or designed, reintegration of all facets of everyday life in place, and suggests that a new kinds of designer is needed, a transition designer.” (Gideon Kossoff, 2011b: 22-23, Designing Regenerative Cultures, Daniel Christian Wahl, p.1260
Why do I bring this up as a close to a post on from the first month of 2018? Well this discussion is important in light of a new year and I see the community connection to making and Innovation Districts. Based on the image from p.58 of Wahl’s book, the Three Horizon’s are:
H1: Past “business as usual” / “old story”
H2: Present “choices”
H3: Future “regenerative” / “possible” / “imaginative”
The critical Horizon is #2. Wahl looks at two conditions:
H2- = Denotes the action of disruption is needed to dismantle the old Horizon H1 to arrive at H3.
H2+ = Denotes the action of bridging is needed to build the old Horizon H1 towards Horizon H3.
Over the next 11 months of this year, I hope to continue to dwell in the things of making within the community. I close with the images of a mug I painted at Color Me Mine in the Capital City Mall. Every year my family and my wife's relatives meet to paint a piece of pottery. This year, on 12/31/17, I created a one and only dual purpose coffee mug / beer stein for the time I spend at StartupHbg.
It will always remind me to GO MAKE!
