Transcriber: Nawal Sharabati Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
My favorite class in college didn’t look anything like a class at all.
There were no chalkboards, no desks,
no lectures, no raised hands to ask questions.
It was just me and my two classmates
sitting at a table in our professor’s office
talking about engineering design and principles,
and building out prototypes based on these conversations.
Despite having taken three previous years of engineering coursework,
this was really the first time that I got what it meant to be an engineer.
I had never had the opportunity before to apply the equations and the theories
that we talked about in our engineering classes to a physical product
that someone could hold in their hand.
And in this class, my classmates and I designed
an air sterilizing travel pillow that cleaned the breathing air around you,
so if you were traveling in close quarters,
you won’t get sick from the people next to you.
And we designed the entire thing from start to finish.
From drawing this thing on paper to creating a digitally created design,
to then building a physical prototype that we made out of HVAC tubing,
self-designed electrical circuits, and homemade memory foam.
And we worked really hard on this process.
It was a ton of fun while we did it.
And we even learned things
outside of the scope of engineering that we probably would have never expected
to be an engineering class.
Like:
What’s the optimal density of memory foam for both comfort and for the structure?
How does the US patent system work?
And how much time do people spend traveling?
And how much time do you -
major league baseball umpires, specifically, spend on an airplane?
And oftentimes when we were working on this project, I often wondered,
“Why couldn’t more of my engineering classes be like this?”
I chalked it up to the fact that engineering is super challenging;
you need to know a lot of background before you can start to design products
or design systems in the field.
But all this time I often thought about, you know,
“Why don’t we do more learning by doing?”
And what I didn’t know at the time
is that learning by doing is also known as project-based learning
or work-based learning or active learning
depending on the context you’re looking at it.
And it’s actually a best practice in the learning sciences.
In learning by doing,
students will engage in real world and authentic projects.
Oftentimes in a classroom experience, but sometimes in a work experience,
like an internship.
And they’re scaffolded by,
but not totally dictated by learning objectives.
And research also shows
that these work-based learning and project-based learning experiences
lead to improved academic outcomes for students.
So improved GPA and improved school retention.
Students have a better sense of motivation
for why they want to pursue additional studies with this work-based learning.
And they also have a better sense of their skills
and how they might create more learning incentives for themselves.
They also gain a range of skills from hard skills like technical skills
to soft skills like professional and -
and leadership skills.
And so when we often think of classroom experiences,
we think of things like learning by listening
or going to lectures and readings.
And while this has a really powerful
and important role in the learning process,
it should be coupled with things
like sorting out challenges to unsolved problems.
And intuitively this makes a lot of sense, right?
If you’re trying to learn how to ride a bike,
you get on a bike, put your feet on the pedal, start biking,
you fall over and get back, and learn how to ride the bike - by doing.
You don’t spend a lot of time reading about
how people have ridden bicycles in the past.
And if you’re learning how to dance,
you move and you stretch, you jump and you turn to music.
You don’t listen to a bunch of lectures
about how people have danced in the past necessarily.
And so this was such a powerful learning tool.
Why couldn’t we apply this earlier on in someone’s education pathway
than as a senior capstone project in college?
What might it look like if we took work-based learning
and incorporated it into introductory course material
for students to really understand what they wanted to do
and how this was related to what they might want to do in the future?
So I tried this out when I started a community engagement STEM program
in Baltimore City
that was centered around computer programming
and applying that to the real world.
And rather than teaching computer programming to high school students
by memorizing a new computer coding language,
and figuring out what this new logic was all on a screen,
I wanted to incorporate some of what I did in this senior design class
that I had participated in and loved so much to a high school experience.
So we use this thing called a Raspberry Pi,
which is a computer that’s the size of your palm and $35,
that you can connect things like lights and LED screens and fans
to this computers and use computer code
to control how these objects operate in real life.
And so when students would learn how to code,
they could think in their own words about what they might want these lights
or what they might want these fans to do.
And then use that to translate into computer code
and see how that plays out in the real world.
And this was really cool to see how students would navigate this experience.
And we were able to work on a ton of projects,
including building these hydroponic indoor computer controlled gardens
inside of the classroom.
And similar to my senior design experience,
this didn’t look much like a typical classroom at all.
Yeah, student were sometimes at desks,
at their computers doing computer code,
but they were also using power tools to build these indoor farms that we had,
they were cooking with the vegetables that we grew in the classroom,
and they were also creating videos of themselves
talking to potential future students who might encounter the same challenges
and how they might overcome them.
And while I thought computer coding is a really awesome skill to have
and I was really proud of the stuff that my students were doing,
I was also curious how these students might direct their energy
if they given an opportunity to do more than what was outside
of the traditional curriculum and classroom experience.
And so I wanted to build in some of these work-based learning components
that I loved so much in the senior design course that I did,
and connect this classroom experience to the real world.
So in this class, we talked about things from improving education
and city infrastructure to starting businesses in the city,
and it was really awesome to see students light up
and really engage more and take ownership into these new types of projects
that wouldn’t have traditionally been in a classroom experience.
And what was really cool to see
was students who might have come to late class -
come to class late previously,
or not been as excited to do certain things
that we were doing as class activities,
really take initiative and leadership
in some of these other things that we had talked about.
For example, coming to school at 6am before classes started
to run a sandwich business that stemmed out of conversation
that we had in our classes.
So this was super awesome.
But one of the challenges of this
is that it was hard to maintain momentum of work-based learning
once students left my class.
So for the juniors in my class,
there wasn’t any guarantee that they’d have flexibility
to continue this type of work-based learning after college.
And for the seniors in my class,
there wasn’t any guarantee that they would have the supports
and flexibility and freedom to continue this type of work in their next endeavor.
And we often think of learning for young people as whatever they do in school.
But we also know that learning happens outside of school all the time.
So how might we rethink what this classroom experience means
and what learning means
for different people involved in the learning process?
I mentioned earlier that work-based learning boasts a ton of benefits
for the learners involved,
but what I also didn’t mention
is that it also benefits the employers involved
who are hiring these students
from work-based learning experiences.
Because students who participate in work-based learning experiences
have a better sense of why they’re at work, what’s expected at work
and what they want to do while they’re there.
And so it’s easier and faster for employers to onboard these people
and do stuff right away in the company
that’s meaningful for both them and for the students involved.
So considering this,
I built on some of the stuff that I had done in this Baltimore school program,
and led a similar initiative in Baltimore City government,
where students work on data analytics projects,
but this time outside of the school entirely.
At the time, I was a data analyst in Baltimore City government.
We wanted to grow our technology and data team
by helping train our own talent.
So we partnered with this nonprofit called Code in the Schools,
and we paired their free after-school computer coding classes
with mentorship and projects that we wanted to figure out
from Baltimore City government.
And this was a really powerful tool.
We kind of created this apprenticeship-like approach
where students were learning and working at the same time
to kind of see how both things were benefiting each other.
And we did this for two reasons:
One is because
we didn’t really care what kind of credentials the students had.
We just wanted people to start doing stuff and be excited to work.
It didn’t matter whether they had a college
or even a high school credential.
And we also wanted students to start working right away.
We wanted to hire these students as paid interns.
And we wanted them to be able to engage with topics immediately as they came in,
so they could feel involved in the workplace
and they could be connected with the different colleagues
in city government.
So we worked with Code in the Schools
to create this new type of classroom experience
that again looked nothing like a traditional classroom.
Students kind of dove into our data and tried to figure out new things
that we were excited about and things that they were excited about.
And they even created this Twitter bot
that would automatically tweet out really interesting findings from the data
that could be interesting for the public as well.
And I think one of the coolest things that came out of this program
was at the end of the program, students gave a presentation to a panel
of Baltimore City leaders in government and technology.
And they were super impressed with the work that they had done.
And you could see this mindset shift between looking at these kids and students
as sophomores and kids in high school to colleagues in city government,
especially as they asked them questions and started to understand
a little bit more about how this stuff could also benefit them,
it wasn’t just a project for school.
And both of these examples were kind of rethinking
what it means to be a learner,
what it means to be an educator, what it means to be an employer.
And although both of these things were new initiatives,
they weren’t really doing anything new;
they were kind of just aligning a bunch of stuff that was already happening,
but also benefiting more people in the process.
And as I mentioned earlier,
sometimes we think about life and learning as like two separate categories.
But we know that both of those things happen simultaneously and all the time.
So how might we rethink what it means to be in a classroom
or to be a learning experience
and create these learning experiences that are more like building blocks
to figure out what we want in our career?
Versus just a checkbox in someone’s educational pathway.
And how might we think about using these things to help people understand
what these academic experiences are for in the first place?
I think this is something that's super interesting to think about.
And (Laughs) -
And -
And I think it’s something that there’s such a huge opportunity
for more people to get engaged with it.
And this is one of the things that I love so much
about Baltimore in general.
I think there’s so many different people involved in - a bunch of communities
that are overlapping with similar missions and aligned missions.
And people are already doing this type of work anyway.
So for example, I mentioned Code in the Schools
who’s working with both employers and students
to work on computer science education for young people.
There’s organizations like B-360 who’s combining engineering and dirt bike riding
for students to understand how these academic components
might be applicable to their real-world interests.
And there’s organizations like Baltimore Corps
who’s providing communities and entrepreneurship lessons
and financial support
so that folks in Baltimore can think about how they want to pilot new initiatives
and actually pilot new initiatives that strengthen Baltimore communities.
There’s a ton more examples that I don’t have time to talk about.
But in these and many other examples,
people are learning in a working environment
and working in a learning environment.
And all the people involved are benefiting from both this work and learning component
at the same time.
So as we continue to build more programs and see how all these things fit together,
it’s really important to think of learning experiences
as more than just as what happens in the classroom,
and work across sectors to incorporate more things like work-based learning,
so that together we can rethink the classroom experience.
Thank you.
(Applause)