Worth a Listen, Look or Read #13 — Aspire to Make a Difference
Jeff Ikler here for Kirsten Richert with our weekly “Getting Unstuck” mini feature: Here in about five minutes, we extend the idea of this week’s podcast with some related content that we feel is definitely “Worth a Listen, Look or Read.”
The idea
This week we talked with Mike Matsuda, Superintendent of the Anaheim Union High School District (AUHSD) , Anaheim, CA. Mike’s interview is part of our “Unstuck” series because he and his team are completely rewriting the traditional high-school playbook. Mike’s and his team’s focus for the last seven years has been on bringing greater alignment – coherence – between what happens in the classroom and the world that his students will face when they leave high school. https://bit.ly/3skd9Xm So they developed a “Career Preparedness Systems Framework” that consists of three elements, which form the bedrock of all student instruction and learning:
One is the development and integration of what we call soft skills, right? Emotional intelligence, those things that business and the world of work are looking for.
A second piece is the development of technical skills. These are developed through partnerships with community colleges and other types of certificate programs.
And then the third piece, which I think has been shunted aside for too long is development of authentic student voice and purpose, which seeks to help kids answer the question “What do you want to do with your life?”
— Superintendent Mike Matsuda
Taking the idea deeper
Let’s go deeper with that third element: the development of authentic student voice and purpose. This point reminded me of a video of an inspiring college graduation speech that Denzel Washington gave back in 2019. Washington’s remarks caught my attention for a couple of reasons.
> One, I never attended my college graduation. I skipped the whole cap and gown thing because after graduating a semester early, I was already knee-deep in my masters study to get my teaching certificate. My diploma came to me in the mail. So even though I’m in semi-retirement mode now, I imagined myself in that crowd of attentive graduates listening to words that were taking me from what I had been as a college student to what I could be as a working adult.
> Next, I was also thinking about how schools are starting to reopen now and how powerful Washington’s message would be as a positive kick-off to the year for both faculty and students. A lot of his speech details how he eventually found his way to acting after many unsuccessful attempts to do something else. I appreciated his point that failure isn’t an end, it’s simply a stepping stone to something else. “Fall down seven times, and get up an eighth.”
It was the last point Washington made in the video, however, that has really left me thinking. And it’s a point that totally underscores what Superintendent Matsuda and his faculty are really asking kids to consider in the third element of their framework. Curios? Ya gotta watch the video to its conclusion.
Putting the idea to work
> How does your district’s focus – its why – compare to the three elements of AUHSD’s “Career Preparedness Systems Framework”?
> What kind of alignment is your high school or district creating between what kids are doing in school and the skills and attitudes they’ll need outside of school?