#340 – Amplifying Excellence in Career Education and Development, with Ben Solomon

If you are listening to the podcast with your instructional team or would like to explore this topic more deeply, here are guiding questions to prompt your reflection:

• Which students may not always be included in “education for all”?
• Why is opportunity knowledge so important for students?
• How can you introduce more opportunity knowledge around college and careers to students in your school?
• What is the power of sharing stories?
• What story do you have to share?

• Amplifying Excellence in Career Education and Development (Marissa Wicklund via Getting Smart)
• Educating All Learners Alliance Awards Participatory Funding for Community of Action Projects (InnovateEDU via PR Newswire)
• Educating All Learners Alliance (official website)
• Getting Smart (official website)
• AVID (official website)

#340 – Amplifying Excellence in Career Education and Development, with Ben Solomon

AVID Open Access
31 min

Keywords
student skills, career education, amplifying excellence, teacher stories, student opportunities, disability inclusion, college readiness, career readiness, special education, equity in education, student passions, educational opportunities, teacher recognition, student potential, inclusive practices

Ben Solomon 0:00
How do we tap into students skills and students passions that they don’t even know they have? Well, the way we do it is we talk about it more, and we share stories of teachers that are doing this, and we figure out practices that are scalable. We come together as organizations and work together, and then we can start making some impact.

Winston Benjamin 0:20
The topic for today’s podcast is Amplifying Excellence in Career Education and Development, with Ben Solomon. Unpacking Education is brought to you by avid.org. AVID believes in seeing the potential of every student. To learn more about AVID, visit their website at avid.org.

Rena Clark 0:41
Welcome to Unpacking Education, the podcast where we explore current issues and best practices in education. I’m Rena Clark.

Paul Beckermann 0:53
I’m Paul Beckermann.

Winston Benjamin 0:54
And I’m Winston Benjamin. We are educators.

Paul Beckermann 0:58
And we’re here to share insights and actionable strategies.

Student 1:02
Education is our passport to the future.

Winston Benjamin 1:07
Our quote for today is from Linda Stewart, an educator for almost 40 years. She says, “All students need to have the opportunity to decide what they like and don’t like as well as to have multiple opportunities to develop skills they may not know they have.” What are y’all thinking about that? I’m gonna pass it to Rena.

Rena Clark 1:32
It just makes me think about our educational system, and how do we provide these opportunities for students? Because oftentimes students are put into tracks, or maybe they’re not exposed for specific reasons, or maybe we don’t think this or that. But how do we provide an opportunity? And I’ll use a personal story my best friend, I grew up in a more rural town, she was president of FFA, which is Future Farmers of America, for all of you that don’t know what that means. And I was a music kid, so because my electives were automatically filled with music, I didn’t get to really try out any other things, like CTE, any of those other courses. But somehow she convinced me to take this class, and I learned how to soil judge, and I learned how to weld, and I actually fell in love, like things I had no idea that I even might want to do. And it’s funny, those skills have actually come in handy in several different times in my life when I’m fixing things in my home. And that’s just like a tiny inclement, but I think about, in my own story, trying to get more female students, more students of color, to try on computer science, to try on different areas. And how do we even get students to try those classes out? So it interesting to talk more about this. Just how do we provide those opportunities? And it might be that, I always say it’s fine to say no, as long as you’ve you’ve tried it. But if you’ve never had the opportunity, how can you educated the say no, that’s not for me?

Paul Beckermann 2:06
I totally appreciate what you’re saying, Rena, about kids not having an opportunity to discover maybe what they love, because their opportunities are limited. I think of my own kids, you know, that’s the experiences that I saw close up. My son, he just knew he loved music, so he goes to a nine-month program at a community college for audio engineering. Well, he ends up as a stage manager and a pyro technician for an 80s rock band. Now, whoever thinks that that’s where they’re going to end up. But that’s where he is, and he’s doing great. And then my other son, he goes to school for education, because, well, his parents were teachers. That’s the experience that he knew. So that was the track that he went. But then he gets graduated, and he decides, I don’t think I really want to be a teacher, and now you’ve invested all that time. Fortunately, he ended up as a learning experience designer with a medical benefits company, so it kind of worked out, but he didn’t even know that was an opportunity until he got through working at the zoo, and then the YMCA, and then a friend happened to introduce him to that job. So all those opportunities that kids just don’t even know about. If we can open those doors, we are giving them a gift.

Winston Benjamin 3:13
That reminds me both of your statement reminds me of the phrase, don’t, DKDK, you didn’t know that you didn’t know that. You didn’t even have an idea that that was something. So I think a lot of people are in the DKDK spaces, and today we’ll have a hopefully we’ll have a chance to work through and talk about, how do we support students pushing beyond that? And I’m excited to have our guest today for our show, Ben Salomon, who’s the Manager of Learning Programs, Products and Services at avid Center. Welcome Ben to our podcast. We appreciate you. Woo.

Ben Solomon 5:00
Thanks so much for the opportunity to be here. Thanks, Winston.

Winston Benjamin 5:04
Ben, could you tell us a little bit about Amplifying Excellence Initiative that you have, and what is the purpose, and what’s it about?

Ben Solomon 5:14
Yeah, absolutely. So the Amplifying Excellence Initiative is actually a project that came about as a result of a community of action convening hosted last December. That was in Scottsdale, Arizona, hosted by the Educating All Learners Alliance, which is just a group of organizations focused on bringing together kind of thought leadership and different folks around advocacy, specifically around students with disability. And so under that community of action, we had the opportunity to there’s about 30 or so different organizations represented there, AVID being one of those 30. We got to come together in small groups and pitch concepts. It was very shark tank type experience, and I ended up partnering with the organization, Getting Smart, and AVID and Getting Smart’s pitch was the first one that was selected to be funded, and that was the Amplifying Excellence Initiative.

Paul Beckermann 6:16
That’s awesome.

Rena Clark 6:17
So I guess we want to just know a little bit more about that. So if you could just highlight or amplify a couple of stories from that initiative, we’d love to hear more.

Ben Solomon 6:26
Yeah, it’s fun. And Winston, I definitely caught what you sewed earlier, which was the story of Linda Stewart, who was one of the teachers that was featured. And so basically what our pitch was, and what was ended up being funded, was a contest to highlight teachers that are intentionally supporting college and career readiness, especially with students with disabilities. In AVID circles, we call that opportunity knowledge. It’s just helping students be exposed to college. And then in this, we really focus on a career under this specific grant that we were awarded. And so we did a national contest use the Getting Smart network, AVID network, the Educating All Learners Alliance network, and kind of pitched this contest where we had teachers nominate other teachers on their campus, or self nominate. And then from those applications that came in, we worked with Getting Smart to select five stories that we really felt exemplified what we’re looking for, that teachers that are going above and beyond and helping their students just have opportunities that might not have been available to them otherwise. So if one, dive in a couple of stories that I think that we’ll be able to [sic], fantastic. Let’s go. This is the exciting part, the teachers that are getting it done here. I’ve been out of the classroom for a while, and the further that I get away from the classroom and the teachers, the more I am in awe of what teachers are able to do and just under appreciated and underpaid. So it’s such a great opportunity to get to just celebrate some teachers that are doing this well that probably aren’t being recognized, just kind of being in the daily, daily grind of what they do. And so the five stories that we were able to share, and we’ll share the link to the to the blog where those are captured, but a couple of them that I want to highlight, because again, as I mentioned earlier, these aren’t weren’t all from AVID schools. They’re not AVID teachers. And so a couple of these are really cool stories that you can read about on the blog, the ones that are from AVID schools. The first one, it was actually an AVID Elective teacher, Claire, from Patapsco High School in Baltimore, and we just kind of got to hear her story and then share her story about how not only she’s an AVID Elective teacher, but she’s also a special ed teacher. I want to pause on that for a second, because I think that what we do as teachers is that we take what we teach, but we also take our passions and bring them into the classroom. I know when I was teaching, The Office was just, it was my obsession. I watched The Office all the time, and my kids would get sick of how much I brought The Office illustrations and videos and ideas into the classroom. I was a tennis coach, and so we even brought some of the coach language and stuff into the classroom. We just kind of meld these worlds together. And so for Claire, she taught the AVID Elective, she also taught special ed, and she wove those worlds together and said, man, I see what I’m doing with my AVID Elective students, helping them be ready for college and career. What if I was also doing that with my special ed students? And has just done some really amazing, tangible ways of bringing that message of college and career readiness that we have in AVID to her special ed students. Linda was the quote that you opened with, which I thought was a really cool story, because she’s at an AVID school in Tucson. Uh, but she’s not an AVID Elective teacher, and so she talked about how what she was doing with her special ed students. She just realized that, man, we say that we’re preparing them for college and career, but there’s gaps, there’s knowledge gaps, but there’s also just structural gaps. And so Linda and others at Cholla High School have done an amazing job of building these pipelines of opportunity; internships, field trips, things like that. And making sure that every student is included in those so that every student across the school gets these same opportunities to step foot on a college campus, to step foot in a workplace, to feel like they’re prepared and exposed to a lot of different options. And then the last one that I’ll just highlight quickly, Nicole’s story. I really like that. We grabbed this one from Stockton, California because it’s at Marshall Elementary, and it was just a reminder to me and us, as we were doing [this], you can’t wait until they’re in high school. You can’t even wait till middle school. Nicole with her kindergarten/first graders is helping set that early foundation of exposure to college and career opportunities with her little guys. Nicole talked about, she has some background experience with with autism, has brought in a really unique focus and experience and passion for that. And so she’s thinking, even as she’s like creating little classroom jobs and opportunities, what can I do to make sure that this explicitly connects to a career, a pathway, and just helping them have opportunities again, having their minds open to what they could become someday. So that’s just a little taste of the stories, that way you have to share via this contest and via those blogs.

Paul Beckermann 11:50
I love how you’re lifting the stories up through this project. You’re lifting the teachers up. You’re lifting the kids up, sharing those ideas with others. Really cool. So I’d like to back up just a little bit and kind of see some of the background of this thing, because I’d like you to share a little bit more about the partnership, maybe, of the Educating All Learners Alliance and Getting Smart that produce the telling of these stories. Who are those entities and how did that partnership come to be?

Ben Solomon 12:18
Yeah, so what’s really cool about the Educating All Learners Alliance and honestly, I didn’t know a lot about them going into this, but that whole organization kind of spun up out of COVID and out of some of the learning loss that was going in, and just the number of kids that were falling through the cracks at that time in our country. And so a lot of their work is underwritten by philanthropy. And so the Gates Foundation and the Oak Foundation underwrote a lot of our convening, as well as the grants that were ultimately awarded from this. And so it was just cool to see folks that have access to resources, turning those resources into opportunities for us, which then allowed it to turn those into opportunities for students, [for] teachers to highlight the opportunities that they’re providing for students. And so it’s just cool to kind of see the pathway among all of those. And Getting Smart is another one. I bumped into Getting Smart a couple different places in my work, but it wasn’t like an organization that I knew a lot about, but we happened to be sitting at the same table together, and as we started chatting about just the mission alignment that we had between them. So they’re an organization that’s really focused on, and they’re in the education space, focused on equity, but specifically innovation. And then their expertise is around storytelling. And so they have blogs and they have podcasts, and they do an amazing job of taking stories and turning them into just compelling pictures of the power that we have in education. And so as we were sitting next to each other and talking about this, I said, hey, I AVID knows college and career readiness, we’ve got an amazingly large network to tap into. And she was like, if you can give me some folks, I can I can tell their stories. And so it just felt like a really good partnership right from the beginning. And it felt like there was so much synergy that it wasn’t surprising that we were able to come together with a really good proposal, and rally a lot of support from the group. It’s just so I’m clear there’s 30 folks there, everybody pitch, and then those 30 folks voted on which ones to be funded, and we were the first ones that were nominated for that. So it was really exciting to have the idea come together, and now on the other side of it, have be able to see that idea come to reality, including this podcast we’re recording right now.

Winston Benjamin 14:39
You said something earlier that makes me think about this question. You said that teaching is a underpaid, underappreciated position in work. These people are, we’re doing stuff that, it’s a hard grind, and everybody’s just in it. I just have a question for you, because the one we never share how much we do. It’s the work. It’s the work. So how did you discover these stories, or these individual teachers, taking the idea that, hey, there’s something great going on here, how do you get someone to be able to share their story, where there’s a nomination, or whatever? And secondly, I think this is more importantly for me, why is it important to develop partnership like these, to share these types of stories?

Ben Solomon 15:29
Yeah, I really appreciate that, Winston. That’s a thread that I was hoping we’re gonna get to pull on a little bit. So, we sent out this application to, I think 100,000 people via newsletter, and we have a really wide swath of folks via our network and like I said, a couple of other folks’ networks. We ended up with not a ton of nominations. And I think part of the challenge is that this is very niche work, career readiness for students with disabilities. But I even think that the bigger thing was that teachers don’t like this spotlight a lot of times. And the idea of self nominating, saying, hey, pat me on the back for my work is is not the the way that we roll. Like, hey, I know that the teacher on my left, to my right, deserve just as much of a pat on the back as I do. And so we did have some folks that nominated other folks, and had some folks that kind of begrudgingly, I think some folks encouraged them to self nominate. And so even within those stories, we had to dig a little bit, there’s a lot of humility that these folks came with. But the reason that I was really passionate about this, and so, like I said, I’ve been out of the classroom for a while, but I remember what it felt like, I remember the challenge of, Sunday afternoons, when all of a sudden the wheels start turning. Do I have my lesson plans ready? What about that kid that was in trouble on Friday? What about the bus that I got to reserve for the tennis tournament? All of those things that, again, I don’t I punch in a clock for that. That’s just part of the job. And nobody recognizes that, and nobody celebrates it. But that’s the calling, that’s what you signed up for. And so getting to shine a light on some teachers, give them some money. That was part of the grant, is that they received a financial award for participating in this and we love to be able to do that. Just to say, hey, we know that the five of you are doing amazing things, and we know that you represent 5000, 500,000 other teachers out there that are doing this work also. And so, hey, world, remember what’s happening in the classrooms, especially teachers at some some tougher districts, tough for schools and students coming with some challenges. And these are the teachers that say, hey, tough is good. Tough is what I signed up for. Let’s go. And so just getting to celebrate them a little bit, just that gives me excited that’s something that I love, the opportunity to get to do that every once in a while.

Rena Clark 18:07
I feel like your energy really comes through too. And especially the focus with with these teachers, in the past and we’ve had guests, we’ve talked a lot about preparing all students, preparing, we’ve dug in with like women in STEM, we’ve talked about how do we prepare our different students of color? But this, this particular opportunity, you really focused on students with disabilities and preparing them for more than academics, which I know we haven’t talked a lot about so I really appreciate that, and I just want you to speak to, why do you, in this group, think it’s so important that students with disabilities are prepared for more than just academics?

Ben Solomon 18:53
Yeah, thanks for posing that question, You say you guys haven’t talked about it. AVID probably hasn’t talked about it enough. I don’t know that our country has talked about this enough, despite the fact that this is a significant percentage of kids that have some type of neurodivergence or physical limitation. Our schools, our country, is full of these. And I’ll tell you one of the reasons that I’m passionate about this. I’ll share my story a little bit. In undergrad, you take classes on special education stuff, and you learn about this, and it’s very theoretical. And then you go into the classroom and you’ve got some students with IEPs and 504s and it becomes practical, like, oh yeah, I studied about this. Now these are, real kids in my classroom. And then you have kids. And I’ve got four kids. My oldest is in high school right now, and she has dyslexia, and it’s been part of our journey for the last five or six years, getting that diagnosed and figuring out how to get the treatment and figuring out how we’re going to pay for her summer school so she can stay on track and not get behind. In our neighborhood here, we’ve got multiple kids with different types of disabilities. We’ve got autism spectrum and just so much stuff. And so what was theoretical became practical and has now become personal. This is part of my lived reality of, looking at my kids and my kids’ friends, and, like you said, Rena, that there’s just not enough attention, not enough conversation, not enough funding to support this. And yet, like you started, Winston, you started like, how do we tap into students skills and students passions that they don’t even know they have? Well, the way we do it is we talk about it more, and we share stories of teachers that are doing this, and we figure out practices that are scalable, we come together as organizations and work together, and then we can start making some impact. And that’s what I think we’re scratching the surface of here, that the Educating All Learners Alliance has been doing for four or five years. And I think there’s a lot more meat on the bone there. I think there’s a lot more that all of us could be doing to really spotlight best practices that help these students fulfill their potential.

Paul Beckermann 21:05
That’s really great stuff that you’re doing, Ben, and the whole initiative here that you helped facilitate. I’m wondering if our listeners, want to hear more about this, they actually want to dig into the stories from the partnership, how can they access those?

Ben Solomon 21:21
Yeah, so we have a link that we can share. I don’t know if there’s show notes or something like that we can share the link to those, but all five of those stories will be there, you can read there. And then it’ll also link back to a few of our websites, where you can learn more about the work that AVID is doing, the work that Getting Smart has been doing for a long time, specifically in this space of equity. And then also, again, all of this funded and put together by the amazing work that the Educating All Learners Alliance has been doing for the past few years.

Paul Beckermann 21:51
Cool. Yeah. And as far as the show notes for our listeners, if you go to AvidOpenaccess.org, click on podcasts up at the top, and then you will find the show and then if you click on that one, you will see the show notes, there’s a transcript, there’s all kinds of good stuff there for you, including the links back to the original stories. All right. Well, let’s hop into our toolkit.

Student 22:15
Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. What’s in the toolkit? What is in the toolkit, check it out.

Paul Beckermann 22:26
All right, time to ask the question, what is in the toolkit? Winston, what do you got?

Winston Benjamin 22:32
So I’m always not actually giving a tool, but thinking about a positionality. So for me, one of the best things about this was that all of this is just about somebody taking the first step. It was a teacher, seeing something, realizing something, making a plan, and putting work to that plan. So for me, I just think it’s like the idea of dreaming that you can do something for your kids, or seeing an opportunity to create something for your kids. And you know, just take an initiative to take the first step.

Paul Beckermann 23:05
Rena, how about you?

Rena Clark 23:07
I was thinking about other podcasts that we have done, and this took me all the way back when we had Adra Davey, the Leading for Inclusion podcast, 148 y’all, which is weird. To think we’ve been doing it this long. And I was just thinking about inclusive practices. And then I love this is like, going beyond those inclusive practices and what’s after that? How are we exposing students to those opportunities beyond we talk about that. But then I was thinking about even our few episodes we just did recently around college and career connections. And I believe Mr. Benjamin, you were actually in one of those episode 310, so, and then we had 308 and 302 and 298, which was a lot around some women in STEM and some different opportunities for college and career. So some other episodes that we have that I think connect well to this.

Paul Beckermann 23:55
Hey, if you’re throwing out episodes Rena, I’m gonna throw out episode 318 and that’s when we had Mike from Roadtrip Nation on. And believe it or not, there’s a Ben connection there too. Ben connected us with Mike from Roadtrip Nation. So thanks for that, Ben, fantastic episode and the work that they’re doing there to provide this opportunity knowledgefor kids, certainly a tool that you could bring into your classroom. All right, Ben, you get to play along here too. What’s something that you’d like to drop into our toolkit?

Ben Solomon 24:26
So I wrote this down earlier, and I was hoping to get to say so I’m gonna take this opportunity now. Rena said earlier, you can say no to college and career options, but try them first. Be open minded. And just made me laugh, because we just finished family dinner where that is one of the main things that we tell our kids. You can say no, but you got to take a bite or two first. And I think we can take that concept of just try it, it might not work, but try it. I think we can take that and apply it in so many different places in our life. Hey, teachers, if you’re listening to this and you’re thinking. And I don’t know what to do. I don’t even know where to start. Try something, do something, see what you can do to reach another student or two. Maybe it won’t work, but maybe it will, and maybe it gives you some ideas to keep excelling still more and what you’re already doing.

Rena Clark 25:15
I mean, in my house, we used to sing Daniel Tiger’s “If you try new things, it might taste good.”

Ben Solomon 25:21
There you go. There you go.

Rena Clark 25:26
Yeah, you don’t know Winston, you sing all kinds of things. You’ll do anything.

Winston Benjamin 25:30
Absolutely, I was that kid. I was like, nope.

Paul Beckermann 25:35
Does that mean if I like pepperoni pizza, I should try pepperoni pizza with mushrooms? Or is it more than that?

Ben Solomon 25:41
If that’s the zone of proximal development and your pizza, then there we go. We’ll take it some growth.

Paul Beckermann 25:49
That’s fair. That’s fair.

Rena Clark 25:50
Your circle widened a little bit, I don’t know.

Winston Benjamin 25:53
As a New York City kid, absolutely not.

Paul Beckermann 25:59
Are you saying there’s more to life than pepperoni pizza?

Winston Benjamin 26:02
No. That’s it.

Ben Solomon 26:05
Maybe there’s more to [sic] life in than New York style pepperoni pizza.

Paul Beckermann 26:08
Well, there you go, right there.

Rena Clark 26:13
All right. Well, that takes us into our next session.

Paul, Rena, and Winston singing 26:15
It’s time for that one thing. Time for that one thing. It’s that one thing.

Paul Beckermann 26:28
We’ve had a lot to talk about, but I’m really curious. What is that one thing that we’re either still thinking about or we want to leave our listeners with? So let’s go ahead. Winston, what’s your one thing this episode?

Winston Benjamin 26:40
With this one, I think it’s for all of us, including teachers in the classroom, to open their eyes to see all students’ abilities and capabilities. I think to see where they can go and not limit what options you want to show them or give them. I think is an important part of this conversation as well.

Paul Beckermann 26:59
And I’m thinking, Winston, you and Ben were talking about how teachers are kind of reluctant to share their stories. And I guess what struck me is, we need to have people share their stories. We’re already isolated enough in our classrooms. We need to share the brilliant work that’s being done. And Don’t sell yourself short. You are doing great things, let’s share those things, we can glean so much from each other, even the small little relationship tips we have with our students. Let’s share.

Rena Clark 27:30
And along those lines, I think every person has brilliance inside of them. And I was thinking how opportunity knowledge is really for everyone, and we want to hear from all different kinds of different people in different jobs. So that’s another thing is, how do we provide access for them to share their stories, so that our students can see themselves in those opportunities? And we talked about, I feel like with technology and everything else, there’s so many ways that we can do that now. So how can we uplift other people’s stories as well in our community, so that students can see themselves?

Paul Beckermann 28:08
I really like that. Rena, I think we’ve talked about this on the show before. If you can share somebody else’s story or brag about them a little bit in front of somebody else, like especially a supervisor, while you’re lifting them up and giving them extra encouragement to share the stories. I love that idea.

Rena Clark 28:26
All right. Ben, do you have one last thing?

Ben Solomon 28:30
I’ll build on that one, because that’s similar to what I wanted to share. You know, the mission of that AVID is to prepare all students for college and career readiness and success in a global society. We talk about that word all a lot, and a lot of times, I’ve so many, countless hours of conversations around kids from poverty and first generation college going kids, and kids of color, making sure that they’re included in our all. And we haven’t talked enough about students with disabilities, and what is all means all for these kids? My neighbor next door, my daughter with dyslexia. What does it mean that we are having inclusive practices that really help tap into the potentials and the passions of all of our kids? I’ve used a quote, I think it was George W. Bush that talked about the soft bigotry of low expectations, and we’ve moved away from a lot of that in our society, but maybe there are some groups within the walls of our schools that our expectations might still be a little bit too low. And so I think it’s just a challenge to me and to us of, how can we really raise our expectations for all of our kids?

Winston Benjamin 29:43
I appreciate that about that conversation of all, and I, like you, I’m really interested in the idea of equity. And Kimberle Crenshaw talks about intersectionality. The thing that’s really powerful, and what you just discussed is that we’ve isolated parts of students. We’ve said we care about the poor. We care about these, but again, all students, the poor students, are disabled as well. They are disabled, the students who access learning needs, who are learning diverse between African Americans and all these other things. So if you’re interested in supporting one of these groups, also, you’re going to try to include students who are having neurodivergence or other opportunities. So please make sure that you try to see all your students in all their ways, in all their positivities. Thank you so much, Ben, for bringing this and check out the Amplifying Excellence Initiative. Please check out the stories of these teachers doing great work.

Rena Clark 30:48
Thanks for listening to Unpacking Education.

Winston Benjamin 30:51
We invite you to visit us at avidopenaccess.org where you can discover resources to support student agency, equity, and academic tenacity to create a classroom for future-ready learners.

Paul Beckermann 31:06
We’ll be back here next Wednesday for a fresh episode of Unpacking Education.

Rena Clark 31:10
And remember, go forth and be awesome.

Winston Benjamin 31:14
Thank you for all you do.

Paul Beckermann 31:15
You make a difference.