Project Lead The Way

Welcome everyone and thanks so much for joining us today.

My name is Martha McCabe and I serve as Project Lead the Way's Senior Vice President of Community Partnerships.

Today I'm grateful to be joined by three experts who will share how districts and schools are creating future ready programs that make them stand out.

Thank you all for joining us today for this webinar.

And if you haven't already done so, please introduce yourselves in the chat and let us know where you're joining us from.

This webinar is a collaboration between Project Lead the Way and EdWeb.

For almost 30 years, Project Lead the Way has prepared pre-K through 12th grade students for careers, college, and life by equipping them with the STEM knowledge and career preparation and transferable skills and confidence to succeed.

As a national nonprofit, Project Lead the Way's strong professional development supports more than 116,000 trained teachers in 12,200 schools across all 50 states.

And remind me again, PT, PLTW.

Project Lead the Way.

Thank you.

Project Lead the Way biomedical science teacher Amy O'Teary and the curriculum director Carol Arkham.

They attended the Project Lead the Way fall conference on Monday.

There were 500 other educators there.

The session was focused on how students make the work that they're proud of in their classrooms where mistakes often help part of the learning journey.

They were talking about specific learning.

I think it was Kenise that talked about how she had grown in this way.

Like when I was... applying to become president of the PLTW program, I had to really tell myself, it doesn't matter who your competition is, you know yourself.

You know that you have the experience under your belt.

And if they choose you, that's great.

Thinking about how do we use these things, it's really important.

For our Algebra 1, we implemented a supplemental with Project Lead the Way last year where they're taking the Algebra 1 skills because you still, you get a lot of parents and adults.

And I think we've all said, oh, I don't think I ever used Algebra 2 in my life, right? But it does such a good job of giving our students this opportunity to actually utilize these Algebra 1 skills in a real way, right? And so they're doing labs and it's almost like a science lab, right? We need to make it practical and make it so they can experience it and feel it and actually know why they're doing what they're doing or what the use is.

We also have the problem that everybody has been educated in this 120-year-old model of classes.

The student doesn't have any other research, and so I put it in here 'cause I think it's a different, a novel category.

So we have the Project Lead the Way Engineering Capstone, and we're gonna remove that title, change it to whatever the specific project name is, like lithium alternative for blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

We'll get into like the, the concepts, and then put something like he's working with, uh, like a PhD, a doctor in Europe.

Put like the mentor affiliation in the, in the title, and get rid of Project Lead the Way, which sounds like some super...

Like who comes up with the titles of this stuff? Like seriously, Project Lead the Way? Yes, it is the name of like a very common elective, but i- it's very cliché sounding.

It just sounds like a class and an assignment.

Change it to a specific project name.

Put the university name or the lab or something like that with the doctor, Dr. Blah, blah, blah.