Leading Future-Focused Schools: Engaging and Preparing Students for Career Success

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Shira Wolf Cohen. Shira brings 25 years of experience in youth workforce development and education, and over a decade of her career was spent in school leadership at a Philadelphia charter school. As a teacher, program director, dean, vice principal, and principal, she championed student engagement, innovative instruction, and strong community partnerships to create impactful learning experiences. Shira is the co-founder of Innovagis, where she focuses on building partnerships, designing programs, and improving instruction in both school-based and out-of-school settings. And she is the author of the new book, Leading Future-Focused Schools, Engaging and Preparing Students for Career Success.

[00:54] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:56] SPEAKER_00:

Shira, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:58] SPEAKER_01:

Thank you so much, Justin, for having me. I'm very excited to be here.

[01:02] SPEAKER_00:

I'm excited to speak with you. Take us, if you would, into some of the origin story of leading future-focused schools. How did you come to write this book?

[01:10] SPEAKER_01:

Oh, that's a great question. So I actually, I think it comes with my why, which my high school experience was very different. I slept through classes. I barely scraped by. My counselor and my mother sat me down and said, you know, why don't we apply to community college and take a few classes? But that wasn't who I was.

[01:28]

Who I was was a different type of person in a world that was community based in my after school programs, in my youth group, at my camp. I was a leader. I had built relationships with adults. I became someone that was two different people in two different spaces. When I got into the work of being an educator, I realized that I had to find ways to engage young people. And I realized what was missing from my experience as a student was the relevance and the engagement with coming along with tapping into my passions and my strengths, building those relationships, you know, having a growth mindset, figuring out what's out there and who I wanted to be.

[02:05]

And very early on in my career, I realized I had to combine those two things in my own middle school classroom. As I became a leader, it became something that was important to me that schools had a future focused mindset that young people from kindergarten through 12th grade were able to really tap into their own strengths and know who they were and their passions and find out what they're good at and maybe what they do like to do and they don't like to do. And that becomes something that was really important to me. And so as I started Innovagist, I started a notes document and started really taking ideas to the paper and thinking about what this looked like from a leader perspective. There's a lot out there around how to build internship programs and how to really create after school programs that are career connected or CTE or career pathways. But as a school leader, how do we do it from top to bottom, you know, from left to right to make sure that all of our systems are future focused?

[03:00]

And my story was really the root to that and wanting every school and every educational institution in school and out of school to be a space where young people could thrive.

[03:13] SPEAKER_00:

So as a kid, the place that you had to be, school, was not relevant or engaging. And the places that you weren't required to be, those after school programs, those out of school time programs, filled that gap. They were able to connect with you in a different way.

[03:30] SPEAKER_01:

They were. And I don't think it was about that I got to choose those programs. I thought about that a lot. Well, most of the time, your after-school programs, your clubs are things that you have interest in, right? And when I dug deep to think and reflect on what it was that made those places special and made me stand out, it was the communities. It was the ability to make mistakes without judgment.

[03:53]

It was the relationships I built with adults. It wasn't about being in the community play or being in a youth group where you got to serve in a leadership role. It really was about those relationships, those cross-sector skills or life skills that I built there and the way that they were fostered in such a natural way. And It really felt as I moved into the education space that there was no reason that that couldn't be happening and shouldn't be happening in all of our classrooms alongside our core instruction of our contents.

[04:27] SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. And you brought that experience into the school world and ultimately became the principal of your school. Is that right?

[04:33] SPEAKER_01:

That is correct. I served as vice principal and principal at a school I was at for 19 years. While we were there, we were really intentional. We started as a K-8 school and the K-8 school then expanded to a high school. And we were really intentional in both identifying social issues that we wanted young people to explore in kindergarten all the way up to 12th. And we were also intentional about what students experience to get them to tap into their own passions and get to know what they liked and their interests and build their own identity and then move through getting to know what careers are out there and experiencing those careers and making some really informed decisions.

[05:11]

And that is not just saying, oh, great, we're going to have kids make budgets or we're going to have kids go and go to the firehouse, right? This is about being really intentional about what happens with our youngest students. and our middle grades and our high school students so that by the time they graduate, they have an idea of where they want to go. Because one of the most heartbreaking things I hear is young people graduating high school and not having any idea. You don't have to know exactly what you want to do. But what we can't keep doing is sending young people off to colleges or post-secondary experiences that they can't persevere through because they didn't have the experience to make the informed decision.

[05:53] SPEAKER_00:

I'm very interested to get into that question of thinking about careers, especially from an early age. And I think this is a topic that scares us a little bit in education because we don't want to do any kind of horse tracking, right? We don't want to say, well, in kindergarten, I can tell you're going to be a... You know, whatever that that doesn't feel like what we're going for.

[06:13]

And I'm noticing, you know, a pretty widespread trend of schools trying to offer more information about careers, more training that is relevant to careers to give students a taste of what it would be like. You know, if you're an eighth grader, you can probably say, hey, I want to be a phlebotomist in a lot of places and get some coursework and some experiences that are related to that. Talk to us about what that process is like for students to consider and maybe imagine themselves and learn some things and try some things without it being that tracking like, OK, now you're in the track and you're going to go work in the coal mine, basically kind of feel that perhaps we've been guilty of creating in the past.

[06:50] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

[06:50] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

[06:50] SPEAKER_01:

There's definitely a continuum, a continuum of types of activities that we should be engaging young people in, because it's not about, like you said, it's not about saying you are in a college track, you're in a doctor track, right? You're in a trades track. It's really the first phase. And this can be done as early as kindergarten. You know, there's younger elementary or if you are just in high school and you want to make sure every student goes through this continuum, you could do it in a shorter time period. Right.

[07:17]

But. We start with that self and career awareness. And so it actually doesn't start at all by saying what you want to be, right? It starts by thinking about what your skills are, your personality, what you value, right? What you like to do so that you can start to really think about who you are as a person and what your strengths are and what you're good at and start to foster that. Now in kindergarten, first and second grade, right?

[07:40]

Those are smaller things. They're just getting to know themselves. You can be a good friend, right? Right. Like I can I let people I share. Right.

[07:49]

I am willing to have a conversation. I can talk nicely to people. Right. And these are things that maybe I'm really good at. And my daughter, when she was young and as young as kindergarten, first grade, was really creative. And she knew that and people fostered that in her.

[08:04]

Right. And so we don't start by necessarily even talking. discussing what the careers are we start by discussing like how to tap into what you are good at what you'd like to do and teachers knowing what those things are allow for them to pull those things out right and so during instruction the student who is really great and at that public speaking maybe we're asking them to do the morning announcements right we're fostering some of that in them And that maybe we're even mentioning to them like, hey, have you ever watched the news? Like, did you know that like there are people that do this every day? And so it's not about having them, setting them on a path. It then moves into the space where we're exposing them and allowing them to explore just what's out there.

[08:45]

I also want to be clear that we don't know what's out there for these kids right now, right? And I think we'll put a pin in that and maybe come back to that space of we don't know what's coming. And so we can't even prepare them for everything. We can prepare them for what's coming, but we don't know what to share with them specifically. And so when young people have a chance to be exposed to what's possible and what's out there, And they have a chance to explore just to get to know not I want to do this, but like, hey, I want to maybe learn more. Or we've had lots of students go do those things.

[09:16]

And when they come back and say, like, hey, I want to go see the doctor. Right. Or I went to the dentist. And, you know, I hate tea. Well, you might not want to be. That might not be your choice.

[09:25]

And that's OK. It's a learning experience. From that, like, exposure and exploration, we really move in to that space where we're moving towards career preparedness. This is where students are starting to say, like what you said, right? I want to be a phlebotomist. What is out there in my school or an opportunity for dual enrollment or a community-based career opportunity?

[09:46]

program that I can be a part of that I can experience it more. Right. And that's where you see the job shadowing and internships and school based enterprises. And then the last phase is I kind of decided I want to go into this field. And that's where we see the CTE programs, right? We see specific certifications coming into the mix.

[10:07]

We see young people walking away with college courses, right? Possibly being in some sort of like, you know, program that allows them to take a higher level exam. I've seen students take real estate exams, finance exams, right? This is the phase where we're really talking at this point, like those 11th, 12th beginning of college, they are getting into that career training, right? And so, as you can see, when we take students through this pathway, it's not about on day one, what do you want to be when you grow up, right? It's more about who are you and what are your skills and what are the things you like to do?

[10:42]

And then really fostering those things in the classroom. Yeah.

[10:48] SPEAKER_00:

And I think one big issue that you were circling around there was the fact that we don't really know what jobs are going to exist in the future. We don't know what work is going to look like exactly in the future. But I also wanted to ask your perspective on the change that can occur in a young person, because at the same time, kids change as well. I think about the skills that I used to do my job now, and I'm not sure anybody would have seen those skills in me as a kid or that I knew I might someday develop them. So how do we deal with that uncertainty, both in terms of what work is going to look like in the future when our current students are adults and what our current students themselves are going to be like as they grow and change and learn new things?

[11:30] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so it makes me think about two things. So number one is I always blow teachers away because I tell them, especially English teachers, I tell them, I ask them about what is the most common career that their young people are talking about. And the two top ones outside of I want to be the basketball player, which is common and we should foster all the different sports opportunity, right, is I want to be an entrepreneur or I want to be an influencer. And, you know, teachers, they just like influencer. Nobody does that. And so I blow people away because Alicia and my who is Alicia is one of my co-founders and my sister.

[12:06]

Our brother is an influencer, a male fashion influencer. He makes his money. He lives in New York City, right? Like this is how he does it. And so instead, I turn it into a conversation with English teachers around what are the skills that an influencer needs, right? Because 20 years ago, we might not have thought of that as a career, but now it's legit.

[12:30]

And let's go back because when ELA teachers start to really dig into what are those skills that influencers need, right? They need to be persuasive. They need to be communicative. They need to be creative. Right. There's so many things that they need to be.

[12:42]

All of those things are directly connected to the ERA skills that we want in our people. to learn. So I kind of work to switch their mindset of like, just because we don't think it's a real job or it is something that might be future focused that young people are like coming up with could be a job. We need to think about what are the skills that would, you know, ensure they can be successful and then foster those. Because I would have never thought that my brother was going to be an influencer 20 years ago when I was, you know, teaching. I would have definitely not, you know, fostered that idea.

[13:14]

But nowadays it's really important to do that. So it makes me think about that. It also makes me think about, you know, I asked someone really important to me to write the thought word. The person who wrote the thought word is the CEO of Valley Forge Fabrics, which is a hospitality fabric company. They basically, their kind of tagline phrase is that if you've been in a hotel, we've met, right? Because they do all of the fabrics in the hotel.

[13:38]

And when I asked Diana, who's the CEO, to write the intro and the thought word, she really focused in on the cross sector competencies. People call them 21st century skills, durable skills, whatever you want to call them. And she really honed in on that. And so I think for us as educator, if we can continue to hone in on those skills that are needed for any career today or in the future, adaptability, flexibility, communications, problem solving, right? All of these skills, and we continue to make connections to current careers, acknowledging that there are lots of careers out there we don't know about yet, then we can make sure our young people are successful because it's not about preparing them for a specific career. It's about preparing them to be successful in the career choice that they make because it's informed, it's aligned, right?

[14:29]

And it taps into something inside them that ignites a flame because if we don't do that, then we just have people going to jobs.

[14:37] SPEAKER_00:

Mark us a little, if you would, share about what students need to experience in order for that to happen. Because, you know, we could get some ideas, we could make a curriculum, we could explain all of this to kids. But it sounds like a lot of your approach is getting kids to actually experience some facets of careers and experience some things that teach them things about themselves that they may not have known. Take us into that experience side. What kids actually need to experience?

[15:03] SPEAKER_01:

I mean, first and foremost, they need to experience an environment of community, right? In order for them to feel comfortable, to unleash those strengths, to make those mistakes, we have to create classroom environments that have empathy, right? And that are community focused. Those are two of our innovative school design principles. And so when we start doing that, we start to allow students to make mistakes. I think in a lot of our traditional educational systems, we are grading students on like every single piece of paperwork.

[15:38]

People are still doing this, every single piece of paper. And it doesn't matter if you got a 70 on the quiz and then you got a 95 on the test and it was on the same material, you still have that 70 sitting there, right? And so we also need to start demonstrating authentic growth without penalty. And so I think one of the things that our teachers can do is to start to identify like when things are actual practice activities and when things are actually those activities that can be ones that are assessed. And so creating that environment, first and foremost, where it like allows for students to start thinking about these things. I also think we have to make sure that our teachers are developing what we refer to as a future-focused mindset.

[16:22]

And this isn't necessarily about integrating a curriculum. It's not about having activities. It's about the things that the students are engaged in every day because it's part of the teacher's mindset, right? The idea that we are naming strengths, we're using as academic language. We're having our students, when we're teaching about it, we're literally saying like, hey, did you know about this? Like, has anyone here ever heard of an architect?

[16:48]

Right. Have you like who here has been to a place where you see training tracks or you see a bridge? And so I think us making those consistent opportunities and then young people hearing from real people, real career professionals. I think COVID changed a lot. Because back in the day, you wanted to do a career panel, and you would have to ask all these asks, right? And you'd have to bring people in.

[17:11]

After COVID, like, forget about it. It is way easier to ask a career professional, hey, can you zoom into my class for 20 minutes, right? And so don't be afraid to ask for folks to share more about their careers. I also think we need for our education sector, right, and our schools to work together to build those opportunities. So young people should be experiencing after-school programs, actional clubs that align to their interests. And so I think the combination of, you know, the community that we create is part of the experience and the adults we put in front of them.

[17:51]

Also, the space of what we're doing in our classroom, making those connections in small ways, having that mindset, making sure there are jobs. I always say to teachers like. When's the last time someone just gave you a job? Right. How do you get young people to say, I want to have a job in this classroom? We don't just raise our hand.

[18:06]

Maybe we have to say a speech or we have to fill out a little application. Right. But these smaller things that are happening in our classroom that are connected to our academics. And then the opportunity to expand their learning and have those offerings, whether that is joining an after school program or being a leader in like an extracurricular or running the school store so that they can take their own interests to the next level in the same space. Right. And that for me is important because maybe had I seen some of those connections in school, I would have been more likely to be engaged in my classrooms.

[18:39]

But for me, I literally had to leave my building and go somewhere else with a totally new group of people to feel that way.

[18:45] SPEAKER_00:

I love that you're so driven to take those experiences that you had outside of school and make sure that schools are actually building them into the school day so that it's not just by chance. Hopefully some kids will get them, but that everybody will get those opportunities as part of their school. Talk a little bit about what this can look like at the school level for a school to be intentional about giving students those experiences, giving students those opportunities. And I know you mentioned you do a lot of work with school design and helping schools envision, you know, how to be different, how to approach these questions in a more intentional way. Take us into some of what that looks like at the school level.

[19:24] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I think so. It looks like adults working together to create spaces where there is a shared vision, that they understand what their goal is for preparing young people for their future. And I think that a leader has a huge space in that. And so what it looks like is...

[19:48]

shared leadership. It looks like there is engagement in classrooms, right, because this is really about engagements and relevance. So it also looks like students being able to talk about what they've learned, right, in their classroom. It also shows them being able to ask questions and maybe questions that are out of the box and maybe even questions we don't know the answer to and feel comfortable about it. And so on the school level, it looks like two things. One is that there is intentional programming happening at each grade level.

[20:22]

And that is defined by that career development continuum. And that really is the role of a school leader, a committee, a team to build that out. Because one of the most frustrating things that can happen is the, I did a dream project, right? This is what I want to be when I grow up. And here's the budget. And here's where I need to go to college, right?

[20:40]

Like Very traditional project. Guess what? I did that in sixth grade and ninth grade and in 11th grade. Right. Instead of mapping out what are the core experiences and projects that our young people are going to have related to the career development continuum. So that's the first.

[20:55]

The second is the embedded, embedded actions that are happening. the interactions between the adults and the young people where their voices are valued, the communication and collaboration between teachers to share ideas and to share community partners, the coordination, right? And so let's be clear, this does need some coordination, right? The coordination that allows for teachers to not have to do everything themselves, right? Whether that's the coordination of making sure that they have the resource, the coordination of making connections with community partners, right? And that it is all really cohesive so that it doesn't belong to one teacher or one grade or this principal, but it belongs to the school, right?

[21:40]

And the school has built this continuum for our young people and that they have trained teachers and provided resources to do those embedded actions that can happen on a day-to-day basis.

[21:52] SPEAKER_00:

than just by chance, some amazing teacher individually making this happen, that there is a school-wide intentionality and plan.

[22:00] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Yeah. And we've seen that for the past few years, have been working with cohorts of educators across Philadelphia and working with them through our workforce investment board here in Philadelphia. And for two years, we worked with teachers to build a future focused mindset to work in their school. And what we found was that they were doing great work in their space. But it wasn't intentional across the school or across the grade.

[22:26]

And they felt almost like they were hitting a ceiling. And so this year, we're working with 17 school principals and school leaders here from Philadelphia. And what they have been able to do to take some of this work to the next step, even in the past six months, has been more than those teachers were able to do because they are those leaders. And my own experience knows that as leaders, we said we are, you know, We are setting the tone for what's happening in the school. We're working collaboratively to set that vision. And so if the leader is not on board, the teacher is only going to be able to do what they're able to do within their classroom.

[23:00]

The school leader approach really makes it so that this is part of the school and fabric of the culture.

[23:06] SPEAKER_00:

Sure. One of the things you say in the book is that every teacher is a career teacher. What do you mean by that? And what does that look like?

[23:14] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it's so interesting. So, you know, I started as a middle school math teacher. And I remember in my math training, even as a math teacher, we were always told that everyone's an ELA teacher, right? Like every math teacher learned how to also, got professional development on how to do reading and writing. And I always wondered for myself, like, what do you think everyone's a math teacher? Right.

[23:37]

We have this we have standards for math that also are not just about math. Right. We have these standards for mathematical practice that actually should be taught across every classroom. And so I like to think about that with every teacher as a career teacher, because. Every teacher out there, we don't leave it up to the school counselors or the CTE teachers or the set career seminar teacher to be the only ones that work to develop our young people. This is every teacher's responsibility.

[24:04]

And so I always say the same way that, you know, we kind of told people back in the day that everyone was an ELA teacher. We now need to start saying that every teacher is a career teacher. And we need to not just say it. We need to get behind it, right? We need to provide the professional development. We need to provide ideas and inspiration.

[24:21]

We need to tell the stories. And we need to make sure that we're giving them the expectations and the support so that they can be a career teacher, because that is not just one person's responsibility. It is everyone's.

[24:36] SPEAKER_00:

Everything we're teaching, we're teaching because it will be valuable to students at some point in their lives. So everybody has a role to play in preparing kids, you know, to step into whatever career they end up in, whether it exists now or not. Wonderful. So the book is Leading Future-Focused Schools, Engaging and Preparing Students for Career Success. Shira, if people want to get in touch with you and learn more about the work that you do, where's the best place for them to go online?

[25:03] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, the best place is you can go to our website, which is innovagis.com, and you can set up a meeting on there. You can drop us an email. But if you want to reach me directly, you can reach me at shira.innovagis.com.

[25:17]

You can also check out the innovagis.com slash books for updates on the book, how to order them, some testimonials. There'll be resources because it's going to be a great resource and it will be something hopefully that school leaders will really be able to tap into and utilize to both for themselves and for the educators in their school.

[25:33] SPEAKER_00:

You're a Wolf Cohen. Thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. What a pleasure.

[25:38] SPEAKER_01:

Thank you so much for having me. Take care.

[25:40] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.