Community Partners

Our partners include Aurora Medical Center Summit, Lake Country Fire & Rescue, the Medical College of Wisconsin, and ProHealth Care. They each play a unique role in providing place-based learning experiences, ranging from pre-designed shadowing experiences to student-driven projects, that benefit both students and partners. In some cases, partners provide instruction in the form of Nursing Assistant training, Emergency First Responder training, and Emergency Medical Technician training.

Partners need to have an interest in student learning and achievement on the academic and social-emotional level. Partners also need to fulfill a need or receive a benefit in order to maintain partnership interest and investment. Many forces, including economic reasons, do not favor partner participation. The partnership must define what success looks like and both partners and schools need to develop mechanisms that maintain a pulse on that state of the partnership.

The HS2 director oversees all partnerships in the High School of Health Sciences and helps the district develop policy changes that might increase place-based learning in the district. There are many people at the district level that are involved and it is a challenge to implement systematic place-based learning at the district level. School-wide implementation is easier. Sustainability is dependent on the following requirements:

• A student learning culture that recognizes the importance and value of place-based learning;
• A staff that can integrate PBL opportunities into crediting opportunities for the students;
• Parent recognition of the challenge of transportation and the required mechanisms for maintaining student responsibility;
• An integrated SEL program that assists students, teachers, parents, and partners in the learning process.

Curriculum

Real World Learning outside of the school setting dovetails with students’ academic coursework. This applies to science instruction, such as biology, chemistry, anatomy, and physiology, and math instruction, such as statistics. Social and emotional skills such as self-management and self-awareness (CASEL) are integrated and required for all place-based learning.

Measures

Each partner defines success in their unique way. Partners generally look at whether students successfully complete the programs they offer. Partners report seeing a positive impact on staff who work with our students, but it’s difficult to quantify. Despite management changes at our partner organizations, there has been a lot of continuity, which suggests that they are also benefiting from the program. We’ve used partner surveys in the past, but they have not yielded much useful information. We find much more value in engaging partners in ongoing discussion and collaboration. We frequently discuss whether the program is meeting the needs of our partners and what adjustments we can and should make to ensure that the partnerships continue and expand.

Some outcomes are defined in terms of subject area competencies. In all cases, the goal is to promote student awareness of college and career readiness demands and to help each student understand who they are as a person, from an SEL lens. The most concrete measures and outcomes we have are certifications in specific health care fields, such as Certified Nursing Assistant, Emergency First Responder, Emergency Medical Technician, and Wilderness First Responder. On the academic side, we focus on helping students develop their resumes and get recommendations from professionals. Students often receive very thorough recommendation letters from the Principal Investigators whose labs they work in, which outline what they have done and are capable of doing. These letters help them at the college level and beyond.

Professional Learning

We currently have 176 students and eight teachers, which means that every teacher works very hard. We allow teachers flexibility in how they instruct their classes and accommodate for significant schedule interruptions, as place-based learning most definitely redefines the student schedule. Teachers contribute to decisions about which students should be placed in different learning environments and how to support students who may be struggling. We have a flat leadership structure built on trust that allows teachers and administrators to talk openly about challenges and problem-solve together to design solutions.

Planning is designed by school administration and partners in a pure form of a PLC. We have governance council meetings that follow a typical school board meeting agenda, where people raise any issues that may be coming up, and we discuss how we can address them. We have open, trust-based discussions frequently to learn from what we’re doing and apply our learning to make improvements.