Since a segment of our target audience includes disadvantaged youth, we intentionally leverage the hardships these young people have faced by helping them realize the personal strengths they possess. In fact, we utilize the students’ social capital to e teach STEM. From there, we introduce exciting areas of discovery that reveal possibilities—careers they could pursue—that they never knew existed. Along the way, hands-on experiences enable boys and girls to recognize their talents and pinpoint their interests while transforming the way they think about the world and themselves.

The process is life-changing.  Students who never imagined earning more than an hourly wage soon have a new vision. Setting their sights on professional and entrepreneurial careers, they proceed with determination to attain their dreams.

We currently offer several ILC Enrichment Programs, click here for more information.

WHEN Tony Wagner, the Harvard education specialist, describes his job today, he says he’s “a translator between two hostile tribes” — the education world and the business world, the people who teach our kids and the people who give them jobs. Wagner’s argument in his book “Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World” is that our K-12 and college tracks are not consistently “adding the value and teaching the skills that matter most in the marketplace.”

This is dangerous at a time when there is increasingly no such thing as a high-wage, middle-skilled job — the thing that sustained the middle class in the last generation. Now there is only a high-wage, high-skilled job. Every middle-class job today is being pulled up, out or down faster than ever. That is, it either requires more skill or can be done by more people around the world or is being buried — made obsolete — faster than ever. Which is why the goal of education today, argues Wagner, should not be to make every child “college ready” but “innovation ready” — ready to add value to whatever they do.

That is a tall task. I tracked Wagner down and asked him to elaborate. “Today,” he said via e-mail, “because knowledge is available on every Internet-connected device, what you know matters far less than what you can do with what you know. The capacity to innovate — the ability to solve problems creatively or bring new possibilities to life — and skills like critical thinking, communication and collaboration are far more important than academic knowledge. As one executive told me, ‘We can teach new hires the content, and we will have to because it continues to change, but we can’t teach them how to think — to ask the right questions — and to take initiative.’ ”

 My generation had it easy. We got to “find” a job. But, more than ever, our kids will have to “invent” a job. (Fortunately, in today’s world, that’s easier and cheaper than ever before.) Sure, the lucky ones will find their first job, but, given the pace of change today, even they will have to reinvent, re-engineer and reimagine that job much more often than their parents if they want to advance in it. If that’s true, I asked Wagner, what do young people need to know today?

“Every young person will continue to need basic knowledge, of course,” he said. “But they will need skills and motivation even more. Of these three education goals, motivation is the most critical. Young people who are intrinsically motivated — curious, persistent, and willing to take risks — will learn new knowledge and skills continuously. They will be able to find new opportunities or create their own — a disposition that will be increasingly important as many traditional careers disappear.”

So what should be the focus of education reform today?

“We teach and test things most students have no interest in and will never need, and facts that they can Google and will forget as soon as the test is over,” said Wagner. “Because of this, the longer kids are in school, the less motivated they become. Gallup’s recent survey showed student engagement going from 80 percent in fifth grade to 40 percent in high school. More than a century ago, we ‘reinvented’ the one-room schoolhouse and created factory schools for the industrial economy. Reimagining schools for the 21st-century must be our highest priority. We need to focus more on teaching the skill and will to learn and to make a difference and bring the three most powerful ingredients of intrinsic motivation into the classroom: play, passion and purpose.”

What does that mean for teachers and principals?

“Teachers,” he said, “need to coach students to performance excellence, and principals must be instructional leaders who create the culture of collaboration required to innovate. But what gets tested is what gets taught, and so we need ‘Accountability 2.0.’ All students should have digital portfolios to show evidence of mastery of skills like critical thinking and communication, which they build up right through K-12 and postsecondary. Selective use of high-quality tests, like the College and Work Readiness Assessment, is important. Finally, teachers should be judged on evidence of improvement in students’ work through the year — instead of a score on a bubble test in May. We need lab schools where students earn a high school diploma by completing a series of skill-based ‘merit badges’ in things like entrepreneurship. And schools of education where all new teachers have ‘residencies’ with master teachers and performance standards — not content standards — must become the new normal throughout the system.”

Who is doing it right?

“Finland is one of the most innovative economies in the world,” he said, “and it is the only country where students leave high school ‘innovation-ready.’  They learn concepts and creativity more than facts, and have a choice of many electives — all with a shorter school day, little homework, and almost no testing. In the U.S., 500 K-12 schools affiliated with Hewlett Foundation’s Deeper Learning Initiative and a consortium of 100 school districts called EdLeader21 are developing new approaches to teaching 21st-century skills. There are also a growing number of ‘reinvented’ colleges like the Olin College of Engineering, the M.I.T. Media Lab and the ‘D-school’ at Stanford where students learn to innovate.”

Reblogged article by  THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/college_bound/2011/11/just_over_half_of_community.html?cmp=ENL-EU-NEWS2

POWER-IT

(Promoting Our Worth as Entrepreneurs and Researchers in Innovative Technologies)

• Engages over 2,000 students in interactive design classes or full videogame programs;
• Offers more than a dozen colleges & universities with comprehensive interactive design career paths.

STEM Entrepreneurship can catapult students’ interest in STEM after years of marginal engagement especially from students of color. ILC will soon be writing articles on this. In the meantime, check out this great article written by Daniel Margolis for Chief Learning Officer.

He quotes Cathy Ashmore, executive director of the Consortium for Entrepreneurship Education: “There are only two kinds of people you can work for, someone else and for yourself, and we forget to teach people how they can create their own business and work for themselves.”

ILC agrees that we can apply this concept to STEM entrepreneurship as well. We will soon discuss more on this topic. Join us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for regular discussions and updates.

We are excited to announce that the Morehouse School of Medicine recently received an award from the National Science Foundation to launch the POWER-IT project (Promoting Our Worth as Researchers and Entrepreneurs in Innovative Technologies). Dr. Blackmon is the Co-Principal Investigator and author of POWER-IT. She will join the Morehouse School of Medicine faculty to implement the project.

There is only one similar project in the nation–where urban youth will engage in neuroscience research, learn about and use Web 2.0 technologies and be exposed to using their science and IT backgrounds to set up their own STEM based companies–through the STEM entrepreneurship development component of POWER-IT.

POWER-IT at Morehouse School of Medicine is specifically designed to provide Georgia High School students with year round access to STEM based activities (neuroscience and information and communication technologies) and to teach them about launching their own STEM based companies.

ILC just signed a letter of agreement with the City of Atlanta Department of Parks, Recreation and Cultural Affairs to launch a robotics program for urban high school youth. The project title is: Young Urban Roboticists: Robotics for Elementary, Teen, and Middle School Students (YOUR Robo-TEAM).YOUR Robo-TEAM is the intellectual property of ILC. All rights reserved.