Teachers Visit Plant Floors, Write Class Lesson Plans
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- At the beginning of each school year, Jill Marconi, an eighth-grade science teacher at Poland Middle School in Poland, talks with her students about safety. Last fall, she tied that to how important safety is taken in the workplace.
She drew on her own experiences at an area manufacturer.
Safety was the topic of one of two lesson plans Marconi developed based on her visit to Specialty Fab in North Lima. She was one of 24 educators in the Mahoning and Shenango valleys who took part in the Educator in the Manufacturing Workplace program offered last summer through the Oh-Penn Manufacturing Collaborative.
The initiative expands on the Educator in the Workplace program the Lawrence County (Pa.) School to Work program has offered several years, says Paula McMillin, executive director of Lawrence County School to Work.
“It’s evolved over the years but it really was based upon the idea of getting the educator out into the workplace,” McMillan remarks.
The Oh-Penn Manufacturing Collaborative last year underwrote the program that was geared toward getting teachers into manufacturing worksites to introduce students to an alternative career path to address the upcoming shortage of candidates to fill manufacturing positions.
Also, where instructors once were matched to workplaces that corresponded to the core subject matter they taught, teachers of disciplines that range from math, the sciences and technology to history and English visited manufacturers in the five-county region.
Marconi, following the safety lesson plan she drafted following her visit to Specialty Fab, used her trip to illustrate a “real-world lesson for students” in the lab. “Wherever you work, there are safety concerns,” she says.
The experience also gave her the chance to share with her students what she did that summer. “At the beginning of the year you’re trying to make connections with students and tell them a little bit about yourself,” she says. She also prepared a plan that focuses on potential energy.
Terri Fleming, who teaches pre-engineering to high school juniors and seniors at Trumbull Career and Technical Center, Champion Township, prepared a lesson plan based on fluid flow in valves based on her visit to BOC Water Hydraulics Inc., Salem. “This is a topic that I have covered for five years and have never [before] felt that the lesson was incredibly effective,” she says.
Fleming spent five days overall at the plant, most of that time with machinists, CNC operators, engineers, draftsmen and expediters. “My time with the workers at BOC gave me time to view hydraulics from a whole new perspective,” she says. “Using a PowerPoint, a movie and some hands-on activities, I am able to bring a very high-level concept to a level that my students can understand.”
She will use her plan in the coming weeks, she reports.
“I gained a lot of insight into what it takes to do manufacturing. Also, I gained an appreciation for the skilled trades as a career choice,” says Andrew Herman, a ninth-grade physical sciences teacher at Howland High School. He visited Starr Manufacturing Inc., Vienna Township, which principals Dale and Andreas Foerster run like an extended family, he reports.
“The overall zeitgeist of Starr was unlike what most Americans would imagine from how manufacturing is portrayed in Hollywood movies where miserable workers are treated as externalities. Everyone at Starr works as a team and they work hard,” he says.
Herman’s plan presents students with a challenge: “Be creative and think of something they would want to manufacture out of a few sheets of computer paper, a foot of string and a foot of tape,” then produce a detailed drawing of what they made and provide step-by-step instructions and an estimate of the time needed to make the item.
The students were then instructed to swap directions with another group and attempt to manufacture the item, then estimate the cost per item to manufacture it.
Many of his students “got the message loud and clear,” he reports. “Manufacturing requires many diverse skills such as teamwork and communication, writing instructions, making drawings with measurements, interpreting drawings and instructions, and estimating and evaluating workmanship and quality of work. Many were frustrated by the difficulty of the whole process,” he says.
In addition to issues specific to the companies, the educators learned a lot about the importance of soft skills in the workplace, McMillin reports. “When you talk to any employer, they stress the importance of attendance, whether it’s absence or tardiness, the ability to work well with people, those sorts of things, along with being able to read and comprehend instructions,” she says.
The importance of math skills “came through loud and clear on everyone’s visit,” she adds.
The lesson plans, presented during a program last August at the Mahoning County Career and Technical Center, are printed and bound and the collected plans were given to each participant as well as their principals and school superintendents. The lesson plans are available electronically through the IndustryNeedsYou website.
Additionally, Fleming, who is a master teacher with Project Lead the Way, an organization that focuses on curricula in the STEM – science, technology, engineering and mathematics – disciplines, presented the lesson plans and showed the video produced as part of the project at the state Lead the Way conference, McMillin says. “Terri definitely took it to the next level,” she remarks.
“Any time I can talk about the opportunities that we have to further manufacturing in the Mahoning Valley, I jump at the chance,” Fleming says. “It was a great opportunity to network with people that will hopefully employ some of my students someday.”
Fleming was also impressed, she says, by many of the other lesson plans and intends to use some of the economics lessons later this semester.
Plans call for the program to be repeated this summer, with information going out to school superintendents in April.
“The hope obviously is that our previous participants act as business cards for the program,” McMillan says.
“Initially some of them were apprehensive because they weren’t sure what they were getting into [by] going into a manufacturing facility,“ McMillin relates, but they responded positively on surveys following the program.
“They rated the program extremely high because of the fact that it raised their awareness of the tremendous opportunities for students in the manufacturing world at every different level of education,” she reports. “It was extremely eye-opening for the teachers.”
TCTC’s Fleming, who will use her plan in class in the coming weeks, most enjoyed having the opportunity to spend the time concentrating on the topic. “As educators,“ she says, “we are torn in many different directions. This allowed me to concentrate on this topic and how I can better teach my students about careers in manufacturing.”
EDITOR'S NOTE: This story first appeared in March edition of The Business Journal.
Copyright 2014 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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