The Association of Illinois Rural and Small Schools recently co-hosted a webinar with CompTIA Spark to showcase their free platform of interactive career exploration units for middle school students. The full recording of the webinar can be accessed here.
AIRSS has spent the past year directing research through the Rural IL CTE Project to uncover the specific challenges rural and small districts across Illinois face in growing and sustaining their career and technical education programming. Rural districts shared unanimously that in addition to a variety of issues with CTE at the high school level, those challenges were even more severe for middle and elementary school efforts. While any career exploration and CTE experiences are beneficial, it is increasingly becoming clear that students need and want to start understanding their proficiencies and the working world sooner than the education system has traditionally allowed them to do so. This pressure to offer more at the middle grades and younger is compounded by increasing stress from Illinois state education agencies for districts to articulate how their middle and elementary grades are preparing students to make full use of high school college and career pathway opportunities.
In an attempt to help rural districts, AIRSS co-hosted this webinar with CompTIA Spark as a legitimate, cost-effective, and easy to implement way to provide every rural middle school student immediate access to high quality career exploration activities. CompTIA Spark is the charitable wing of CompTIA, the world’s largest IT trade association and based in Illinois. The platform they have created allows students to explore a number of STEM and technology-related career fields and real-world problems. Importantly, these units are not simply about coding or mathematics. CompTIA Spark offers whole-of-work lesson plans that require students to learn and express communications, organizational, and graphic design skills in order to complete projects.
For example, in one lesson students must create a rocket destined to carry passengers. Doing so not only requires them to understand the science and technology behind creating and running the rocket, but also the design and marketing of selling the product. Beyond rockets, CompTIA Spark also prepares middle grade students to explore some of the toughest and most relevant tech questions today like cybersecurity and AI. Through a mixture of games, videos, and hands-on activities, each unit provides a rigorous experience for every student to learn at their own pace, and even explore beyond the unit.
Because of its cost efficiency, ease to integrate into any existing course, and depth of content and engagement with students, CompTIA Spark has the potential to offer rural districts a method for starting ahead of the curve. Just as conversations about the necessity of middle grades career exploration and CTE is picking up steam, rural districts have available to them a ready-to-implement, proven suite of worthwhile middle school CTE activities. The Rural IL CTE Project encourages any and all rural and small Illinois districts to watch the above webinar, and reach out to Program Director John Glasgow or CompTIA Spark Senior Director David Mitchell to learn more.