NOTE: This post is Part Two (and a continuation) from ‘Grandpa’s Well Intended Faux Pas’ post on Jan 3rd.
_____________________
The Director asked the students, “how many of you would recommend the approach taken by Rob in the way he instructed your imaging course?” Every hand went up!
At the Southern California vocational school where Rob taught there was a gap in how prepared the students were to enter the working world. Rob knew it, employers did too. Technically, the students knew their stuff. In other words, their skill-sets were fine. The school had done a good job in training their students to be masters of an ever-increasing complicated technical universe.
Yet, increasingly employers realized the technical alone was insufficient. Purpose and values were important. So was taking responsibility. Like the employers, Rob believed that pouring in buckets of knowledge into student’s brain (as important as that was) was proving incomplete—after all, the school wasn’t preparing robots to enter the workforce. The school, in effect, was preparing technicians to enter the workforce. And traditionally that had been fine.
But today more was needed. Professionals were needed. Employers didn’t explicitly say so, but when you listened to their needs, professionals (the adjective, not the noun) is precisely what they were looking for.
Rob made the commitment to graduate professionals—not merely technicians. He did this on his own. He is to be commended. The implication? For students to meet the ‘professional’ standard they need both skill-sets and mind-sets. Thus, he married the mind-sets from The Power of Professionalism with the well-established technical curriculum. He upped the ante in a big way.
What did the students think? They whole-heartedly recommended it. Remember, every hand went up when the Director posed her question.
And if you’re wondering why the Director was asking that question, it was because the school’s owner was so impressed by the change in the students she asked the Director to look into expanding the approach to the rest of the school’s population of 1,000 students. It’s an exciting prospect.
We promise to keep you updated as the story unfolds….