Saratoga News

Photograph by Robert Scheer

Mission College English instructor Greg Tiernan (right) joins other teachers as paid summer interns at Intel.

Applied Learning

Participants swear by the cozy new relationship between schools and industry

By Sandy Sims

Traditionally English teachers spend their summer months attending workshops on Romantic period poetry or traveling to places like Ashland, Ore., to renew their literary spirits. But something new's afoot in education, and Greg Tiernan, a longtime English instructor at Mission College, is just one of a growing number of converts who's doing something different.

Instead of studying the Bard's plays or participating in workshops on Shelley and Byron, he spent two summers as a paid intern at Intel, getting to work at 5:15 a.m. for calisthenics, going to morning team meetings and climbing into a "space suit," so he could go into the "clean room" and learn about microchips.

Tiernan is part of a program that brings high school and community college instructors to workplaces such as Intel and Hewlett-Packard as well-paid interns. What they're learning during their internships is just what industry wants them to learn--that the world of work is very different these days.

The vision for this progam began in1994, when the Santa Clara County Manufacturing Group--the powerful trade organization representing 115 of the largest employers in the Santa Clara Valley-- created Workforce Silicon Valley (WSV), an independent nonprofit organization formed under guidelines defined by the 1992 federal School-to-Work Opportunities Act.

The board of WSV is made up of representatives from many businesses and organizations including Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba, the California Teachers' Association, the Santa Clara County Office of Education, the South Bay Labor Council and students. Former Manufacturing Group executive Gary Burke, now with the NASDAQ Stock Exchange, and Rose Tseng, chancellor of the West Valley Mission Community College District, co-chair Workforce Silicon Valley.

The goal of WSV is to develop a schools-to-career program that hones all the skills workers need to succeed on the job. WSV administers the teacher internship program and has already worked with 130 teachers from 20 high schools and seven community colleges in Santa Clara County.

Teacher-interns who participate in this program immerse themselves in the work and the culture of the high-tech industry and come away amazed at the skills a worker needs to cope with the Information Age. What many find surprising is that most of those skills are not what they imagined they would be.

Laurie Collins, counselor and student adviser at Mission College, experienced quite a wake-up call when she sat in on employment interviews for technician jobs at Intel. "The interviewers asked only one technical question," Collins recalls. "They were more interested in the applicant's ability to think logically than to get the right answer." All the rest of the questions dealt with what industry calls "soft skills," such people skills as how the applicant gets along with difficult personalities, whether or not they've worked in teams and how they think and make decisions.

Collins was also surprised to learn that even low-level technicians today need an associate of arts degree, not only for the technical expertise but because they also need to write reports and give presentations.

The teacher-interns are finding out that workers today face an enormous and growing body of information, a technology that becomes obsolete every 10 months or less and a new management style that uses "teams."

Raul Garcia, a machinist and 30-year employee of United Airlines, can speak firsthand about the changes in the workforce. Just a few years ago United joined with the rest of industry in implementing the team concept of work. This new way of working brought about a shift in responsibility from management to workers.

Garcia recalls that United did away with foremen and set up team leaders. The company gave floor workers the authority to make decisions and implement them. As a result of this change, Garcia and a co-worker, on their own authority, created a tool one day that would give the correct finish to the edge of the large fan blades for jet engines.

This new tool enabled mechanics to go from painstakingly hand-filing one blade a day to easily finishing 15 a day. "Prior to teams," Garcia says, "we would have given our idea to the foreman, who would have passed it on to his boss and then to the engineers for design and approval. That might have taken two months or more."

The School-to-Work program aims to instill in teachers the realization that in today's fast-changing work world, there just isn't the kind of time there used to be to get things done on the job; the old days of "I just do what I'm told" are gone forever. Workers must be problem-solvers, creative thinkers, flexible and ready to learn new skills and new technology and must work well with other people. Industrial leaders maintain that this new work culture requires a different kind of education; already, industry has spent some $30 billion training and retraining its workers. They complain that the education system is turning out graduates unprepared for today's work world.

The culprit, they say, is the traditional method of teaching: instructors standing in front of a class, pumping information into students, and students memorizing blocks of material is no longer relevant to what they will be required to do when they get a job.

"There is simply too much information in any field today for a student to learn it all," Saratogan Paul Lavoy, CEO of INTA, contends. "Students don't need to memorize the names of planets or the table of elements." He maintains that students need to understand what elements and planets are and how they function, where to get the information and how to apply it. He says students also must have computer skills and be able to work in teams because this is what prepares them for work. What's more, he says, students need applied-learning experiences where they are actually given real projects to complete, projects that require them to use various disciplines and problem-solving techniques

Not everyone agrees with the idea that the primary goal of education should be to prepare students for work. Scott Rice, English professor at San Jose State University, is an outspoken critic of this type of education. "Education should stay away from industry because industry is largely about profit, not about the greater concerns of society; education should concern itself with social and ethical issues," he says.

Applied learning projects, however, are already used by many teachers. Ron Cassel, head of industrial arts at Los Gatos High School, uses projects geared to the real work world in his classes. "When I give my students a real problem to solve, most of them can't do it, even the straight-A students," Cassel says. He teaches computer- assisted design using a sophisticated computer program that actually tells a machine what tool to use to cut a particular design into a particular substance--wood, plastic, etc. Definitely high-tech.

In one assignment, he gives his students the task of creating a top--the toy kind that spins. To create a top that spins for a long time, the students have to correctly calculate the mass size and weight distribution. "I make them create a process plan, do a simulation on the computer, map out their procedure documents and then make the top," Cassel explains.

For this project, students must integrate physics, math, technology and English, "just like they would have to in industry," Cassel says. The student who makes the longest-spinning top is rewarded with a banana split.

This is exactly the style of education industry is promoting. And it's to win teachers over to this model that industry is spending so much time and money enticing teachers into their world.

WSV links high schools, community colleges and industry together in collaboration. So far WSV has set up six collaboratives in the fields of apparel technology, multimedia, information systems, advanced manufacturing, health/biological sciences and financial services.

The educators and industry representatives in these collaboratives swap ideas and brainstorm new ones. They do internships in industry and take day trips to industry or to the schools to see just what is needed for students to be ready for the workplace. They plan a specific curriculum that brings together learning with real work experiences, and the lesson plans are rife with team projects.

While the focus of WSV is to help students and industry, it is having an invigorating effect on teachers. There is excitement in the voices of participating teachers.

"It's wonderful to look at what you teach in a different way... in a real context," says Jim Wilczak, a math teacher at WVC who participates in the apparel technology collaborative. "We usually learn and teach our subject in a vacuum," he says. Wilczak has "job-shadowed" workers in the Koret and Levi apparel industries and is surprised at the math required to construct a pattern for a dress. "I was amazed at the fraction problems involved in planning the placement of buttons on a dress or in resizing a garment."

In fact, Wilczak says he is surprised at how much numbers are a part of the apparel world. "I'm learning so much about the apparel industry. It's wonderful," he says.

As part of his work for the apparel collaborative, Wilczak has created a special Math 102 class that focuses on problems specific to the real world of apparel design. For example, he concentrates his math on such problems as the square footage of material needed for draperies or for resizing a garment.

Sally Aitken, chairwoman of West Valley's fashion design and apparel technology department, through this collaborative is also creating a link between her program and Los Gatos, Live Oak and Independence High schools. Students at these schools interested in a career path in apparel design will be able to take particular homemaking classes designed to meet requirements for some college credit. These students could job-shadow in various apparel industries and get early experience in their field as well as begin the process of building a portfolio, something that is becoming more and more important to the application process for work.

Through the apparel collaborative, Aitken also has established a strong working partnership with Gerber Garment Technology. As a result, West Valley now boasts the largest apparel technology center in North America. Recently Gerber installed a sophisticated computer that can actually bypass pattern-making and send a design right to the computerized fabric-cutter. Aitken's students will leave this program with all the skills industry is looking for and a portfolio to boot.

The excitement of these teachers is infectious. Greg Tiernan is enthusiastic about his English class that includes literature relevant to nursing and technology students and is creating team projects for his classes.

The WSV program has a vocational patina because the focus of collaboration to this point has been on jobs that do not require a bachelor's degree. However, WSV's long-range plan includes all levels of education.

What might we lose if education cuddles too close to industry? Of course, the "bottom line" could take over and eliminate fine, thoughtful art and literature, or even courses like anthropology and sociology.

But those involved in this movement say, "It's the jobs, stupid." English instructor Greg Tiernan says, "All the nonbelievers have to do is go to one of these internships, and they will be sold."

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