Path
PATH at Project Forward Leap (PFL) is a program designed to complement the academic content of the Summer Residential Institutes. These weekly, one-hour sessions, are held during the summer program. They provide PFL students in grades, 6, 7, 8 and 9 with a window into the infinite choices of careers available in a wide variety of fields. The goal of these sessions is to inspire students to consider a broader range of jobs and inform them of the educational steps they will need to take to pursue these opportunities. Students attend four years of summer institutes so we wish to cover new careers each year of the program. In addition the content has to be structured to meet the students at their grade learning level.
PFL students are lively and interested in learning but since the PATH sessions take place as lighter content at the end of a long academic day: our challenge is to keep them engaged with a highly interactive program. To that end we try to avoid the lecture-style of delivery and encourage our speakers to consider ways in which they can get students involved with their content. Successful strategies have included:
- A psychologist who challenged the students with a memory game and asked them to come up with a career that would not be able to employ a psychologist
- A chemical engineer from Hershey organized a taste test with a newly introduced chocolate line
- A group of engineers who specialized in water treatment plants were deluged with questions once students realized they could provide answers to questions about the water quality problem based learning (PBL) project that the 7th graders had to solve
- Groups or pairs of individuals presenting rather than one speaker presenting for the entire session. Encouraging the students to work in small groups to find answers to questions about careers and then present them to the entire audience
- Including visual aids and hands-on experiences, a mock trial, personality tests, etc.
- Sessions where students are encouraged to explore the wide variety of opportunities in a given field. Teachers can teach in schools, colleges, corporations or coach sports, life skills, train in continuing education, become specialized tour guides and teach abroad. In the health management field a student can be a nurse, doctor, paramedic, a lab technician, radiologist, physiotherapist, an administrator, a counselor, facilities manager, chef and financial specialist
