5 Reasons Why Career and Technical Education Should Start in Middle School
The purpose of career and technical education (CTE) is simple: to prepare students for their futures. Becca Gourges, CTE solution developer at McGraw Hill, puts it this way:
“Teachers of CTE courses have an important task — they must prepare their students to be successful in an ever-changing world by exposing them to a combination of academic knowledge and practical skills.”
It’s a myth that CTE relegates students to non-college-bound tracks and is only appropriate for students who don’t want to go to college. CTE courses are for all students, and they support learners on a variety of academic and vocational tracks. CTE prepares them both to make informed decisions about their futures and thrive in their chosen paths. It helps students understand themselves, the world around them, and their place in it.
With an accurate understanding of the broader purpose of CTE, it becomes clear that high school is too late to begin providing students with CTE instruction. Here’s why middle school is the ideal time to offer an introduction to CTE:
Middle school is all about self-discovery.
Middle school is a time of uncovering who you are, deciding who you want to be, and finding what you’re passionate about. That’s why being a pre-teen is so messy, confusing, and sometimes frustrating (ask a middle school teacher!) CTE meets students where they are on their path to self-discovery, helping them learn about themselves while illuminating the world around them. It provides structured learning time for students to ask and seek answers to questions about their futures.
Importantly, middle school CTE doesn’t ask students to decide what they want to be when they grow up. It gives them opportunities to explore how their skills and passions could someday help them thrive outside of the classroom and exposes them to career options.
For example, below is an excerpt from our middle school CTE program, Career Explorations. This STEM chapter invites students to consider if they enjoy working with “people, data, or things” and reviews STEM careers that fall into each category.
Early exposure to career clusters can also help negate harmful, limiting stereotypes that students may encounter later about who can do what jobs. For example, CTE instruction should feature case studies of women in STEM careers or BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) in leadership positions.
CTE boosts motivation and engagement.
Many teachers have increased concerns about students’ motivation to learn in a post-pandemic environment, noting a dip in engagement. In a recent poll from Education Week, 87% of educators reported that they believe the coronavirus pandemic has made students less motivated to do their best at school.
CTE can both engage and motivate middle school students. A strong career and technical curriculum engages students with collaborative group work, project-based learning, hands-on activities in a real-world context, diverse industry case studies, and rich multimedia resources.
Teenhood is notorious for its (albeit completely developmentally appropriate) tendency toward self-absorption. Middle School CTE invites this self-absorption, even embraces it, and channels it toward productive self-reflection, exploration, and learning. It motivates students by placing important skill development and knowledge acquisition in the context of what interests many teens the most: their own futures!
Practice applying academic knowledge to skills-based problem-solving can serve as a strong motivating factor for students, illuminating connections between what they’re learning in school and how they’re going to use it in their careers.
Our middle school CTE program, Career Explorations, has been carefully designed to motivate students through the ARCS instructional model. Read more here:
Middle school students are ready to develop valuable, career-relevant skills.
CTE should start in middle school because middle school students are developmentally ready for it. They’re prepared to practice important soft skills that will set them up for success in high school, college, and careers. A strong CTE program prioritizes practice opportunities for soft skills as well as critical academic skills and places them in the context of real-world careers.
The following excerpt is from a research summary from the Association for Career and Technical Education (ACTE):
“…middle schoolers’ brains are receptive to developing the competencies known as 21st-century skills, non-cognitive skills, soft skills or employability skills. These skills include critical thinking, adaptability, problem solving, oral and written communications, collaboration, creativity, responsibility, professionalism, ethics and technology use. Employers report that employability skills are critical to the workforce, and many are also positively associated with academic achievement and postsecondary success.” (ACTE 2018)
In this example from Career Explorations, students practice reading a gauge.
Middle school CTE prepares students to make informed decisions in high school.
Middle school CTE doesn’t require students to commit to a linear path. Instead, it prepares them to make informed decisions along a winding, ever-changing path to growth. It gives them the knowledge and critical thinking skills they need to decide what classes, clubs, internships, apprenticeships, summer jobs, and post-high school experiences are right for them.
We ask high school graduates to make enormous decisions that impact the course of their lives — we owe it to them to prepare them with more knowledge about the world, themselves, and their place in it. A strong middle school CTE program does just that.
CTE boosts student agency.
All these factors — time for self-discovery, career-relevant skills practice, and motivating and engaging lessons about real-world careers — contribute to an increased sense of ownership over learning. CTE empowers middle school students to continue developing a sense of self, carve out their own direction, and find confidence in their abilities.
Students can also benefit from personalized learning pathways in career education. The McGraw Hill Career Center, currently embedded in Achieve3000 Literacy, uses a research-based, student-friendly career assessment to help students match with potential careers based on their strengths and interests. In the Career Center, students can sort and explore hundreds of potential jobs in deep detail. Each career profile includes a required reading level compared to the student’s current reading ability based on their performance in the program, providing learners with a tangible example of the importance of literacy in the real world and a goalpost for improving their skills.
When students can see how the work they do in school every day propels them on along a long-term path to becoming who they want to be, they’re positioned to take ownership of their grades, their growth, and their futures.
For more on Middle School Career and Technical Education, see:
References
Association for Career and Technical Education. (2018). Career Exploration in Middle School: Setting Students on the Path to Success. ACTE. https://www.acteonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/ACTE_CC_Paper_FINAL.pdf
Research summary of the benefits of CTE and why CTE should be offered in MS: https://www.acteonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/ACTE_CC_Paper_FINAL.pdf
Motivation study: https://fs24.formsite.com/edweek/images/3-21-23_StudentMotivationSpotlight_Sponsored.pdf
