Project Spotlight — Bluford Healthcare Leadership Institute

How do you bring about positive change for the future?
With a vision of what the future looks like, and a plan to get there.

Over the last six months, I’ve had the pleasure of creating a career exploration course aimed at increasing diversity in healthcare leadership by introducing high school juniors and seniors to a wide array of health careers.

This was such an exciting project for so many reasons! Here are a few that stood out:

• It was an incredible opportunity to learn about all the many ways those who work in healthcare make a difference every day, for individuals and in the community.
• It felt great to be working on an idea that could significantly benefit underserved communities and people of color in powerful ways by presenting pathways to make sure their voices are heard when important healthcare-related decisions are being made.
• It was rewarding to engage with high school students by better understanding the challenges and frustrations they are facing when making these huge decisions about their futures, and finding ways to support them with the information they needed most to decide with confidence.

The end goal was to do more than just introduce students to careers in healthcare. We set out to build a pipeline of young leaders by building confidence, sharing inspiration, and showing them the path to a career where they can truly make a difference.

Learning Outcomes

The course covers 12 healthcare-related career topics over 16 weeks, ranging from administration, law, behavioral health, and more. Each topic needed to be covered at a depth that helped students:

a.) understand the basics of the career

b.) understand why a specific career was important and the positive impacts one could make

c.) plan the next steps to pursue the career after graduation

Alongside these goals, it was imperative to allow students to both develop their leadership skills and to reflect on how each potential career path might align with their own skills and interests.

At a pace of approximately one career topic per week, this was a lot of information to fit in! How could we accomplish all this while keeping the content interesting, meaningful, and engaging for students?

Course Messaging and Design

Creating a course that engages and excites high school students can be a challenge. Through student interviews, we identified the messages which resonated most with this population. Students are both enthusiastic and apprehensive about their futures. They want careers where they feel like they could make a difference, and they need more clarity about what their next steps should be after high school.

Our Learning Experience Designers (LXD) also needed guidance to understand the career topics being covered, and do a deep dive into what each career entailed. We interviewed 12 subject matter experts to get a firsthand account of each career topic, including essential leadership traits and recommend path for students who interested in a specific career field. These conversations informed the learning outcomes for each activity throughout the course.

As a result, the course delivers learning using multiple approaches. Each activity was tested and iterated using student feedback. The types of activities included:

• Guest Speakers in each field offer students the opportunity to see what success could look like and the ability to ask the questions they care most about
• Role-plays and in-class games expose students to typical interactions they might expect within a given career while keeping learning fun
• Independent activities allow students to go more in-depth in learning about the positive impacts leadership in a health career can have on both communities and individuals.
• Journal activities offer self-reflection and mindful consideration of whether each career could be the right fit for them.
• Career infographics share data surrounding specific career fields — typical salary ranges, education requirements, job outlook, and more.

The course culminates in a Capstone Project, where students will flex their leadership and communication skills by choosing a career they are interested in, then presenting a persuasive speech on why they chose this field and their vision for how they could see themselves being a leader in this career.

Next Steps and Outcomes

The course will be piloted in two Kansas City charter schools starting in August 2021. Registration for the course is full! Once the course begins, student outcomes will be measured using surveys and journal entries. Our entire team is looking forward to updates on how the course is going, and to the feedback we will receive to help make future course designs even better!

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