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Teachers Share Lesson Plans from Plant Visits
CANFIELD, Ohio – Mahoning Valley teachers who took part in a job-shadowing program at area manufacturers this summer soon will take those experiences back to their classrooms.
The 21 educators who participated in the Educator in the Manufacturing Workplace program shared their experiences and the lesson plans they crafted based on their visits during a meeting Thursday at the Mahoning County Career & Technical Center. Funded through the Oh-Penn Pathways to Competitiveness Project, the program is part of a regional collaboration to promote manufacturing careers in the five-county region.
Each of the educators was assigned to a manufacturer for the 32-hour onsite initiative “to immerse themselves in that particular work area,” said Paula McMillin, coordinator for the Educator in the Manufacturing Workplace program. “The whole concept was they would learn what manufacturing in that particular business needs in terms of skills, both soft and hard,” then devise a lesson plan around the particular subject matter they teach to take back to the classroom and provide “real world examples” of why they need to learn the subjects.
“It really becomes a matter of sharing the knowledge that each of them acquired in the individual workplaces,” McMillin added. The lesson plans will be bound into a book and each educator will receive a copy. The lesson plans also will be available on the Industry Needs You website.
The 21 educators who participated in the job-shadowing experience represented disciplines with natural applications to manufacturing, such as mathematics and science, as well as those with less obvious connections, such as English and social studies.
Rachel Camuso, a middle-school special education teacher for Canfield Local Schools, visited VEC Inc., primarily its Evets Oil & Gas Construction Services division in Hubbard. “VEC is expanding like you would not believe and there are many, many opportunities out there for students whether they get a college degree or not,” Camusa said. Those include positions as welders and electricians, or for individuals who want to work in the office or public relations and marketing.
“A Welder’s Week,” the lesson plan Camuso crafted, “has students follow a formula and do calculations to figure out welding at inches and then also decide why it’s important to figure out how many weld inches that a welder would actually do in a week,” as well as why it’s important to assemble people that work well together as a team and other considerations, she said.
When visiting Specialty Fab Inc. in North Lima, Norene Kenyhercz, who teaches math for grades 7-12 at the Mahoning County Juvenile Justice Center in Youngstown, said the first thing she saw was a base plate diagram for a post. “Finally, trigonometry that’s meaningful,’ she remarked. Her students will be called upon to take a sheet of paper, calculate where the holes need to be and punch the holes. Their projects will then be judged against the master she prepared.
“If you’re off even 1/10th of an inch and you go around nine times, you’re off 9/10ths of an inch,” she said. “I actually had to do this five times,” she acknowledged.
Following his visit to Starr Manufacturing in Vienna Township, Andrew Herman, who teaches physical science to freshmen and physiology and anatomy at Howland High School, determined that employees who thrive there have to be problem solvers. “Answers aren’t always in the back of the book,” he remarked.
In the manufacturing lesson plan Herman prepared, students will pair off to make a blueprint for a model to be constructed using computer paper, tape and other miscellaneous items. Each diagram will then be handed off to another group to execute the blueprint and make the model described.
“It was one of the best experiences I ever had as a teacher,” remarked Jill Marconi, an 8th grade science teacher at Poland Middle School, who also visited Specialty Fab. One of several lesson plans she developed out of her site visit centered on safety. “There are safety concerns obviously when students work in a lab, and of course when you work in manufacturing there are safety concerns,” she said. “So I’m allowing my students to see that there is a connection to the real world when I'm talking about safety."
Steve Shurtleff, who teaches English at Boardman High School, spent what he describes as “three very long days” at Glunt Industries in Warren. “I had no idea what I was walking into, and it was just amazing how much work ethic those gentlemen have.”
Often, Glunt is presented with tasks that require reverse engineering. Shurtleff decided to take the reverse engineering concept for his lesson plan, calling on students to take an essay or paragraph and determine how it was put together or constructed, and how they can create their own.
Janis Pentz, a Youngstown City Schools teacher who visited City Machine Technologies Inc. in Youngstown, reconsidered her tour after recently being assigned to the Juvenile Justice Center. Her lesson plan will use Skype to connect to the Youngstown plant where executives there will not only emphasize skills that are required but the importance of being drug free, one of the key issues that was stressed during her visit.
“I’ve been really impressed. It’s been interesting and powerful to hear the teachers talk about these manufactures with fresh eyes,” remarked Jessica Borza, sector partnership coordinator for the Oh-Penn Manufacturing Collaborative.
“It was good to hear the variety of lesson plans that will make the subjects they teach more relevant to the real world,” she added. “They captured both hard skills -- math, science and writing -- as well as soft skills like problem solving and teamwork.” She also noted that several of the teachers acknowledged during their presentations they had “outdated ideas” about manufacturing and corrected those misperceptions.
Copyright 2013 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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