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Pathways to Success

As graduation swiftly approaches, I'm bombarded every day with what students are doing after high school. They come in and excitedly share that they were accepted to their dream school, their reach school, the local school, their parent's alma mater, the place where they will have a full ride, or a sweet scholarship. They are thrilled to go into the military, to land a coveted summer internship, to join the family business, to pursue their passions, or take a gap year. They ask for advice, they jump up and down, and they all smile about the possibilities of the future. But no two stories are the same. No two students want or need the same thing during high school, let alone after. I think about this constantly. If the needs are so varied, how do we help them all?

Consider the following examples, (all of which are true). In one graduating class, we had a student who was mature, and academically successful, but whose ACT score didn't reflect that. That student took advantage of the TN Promise and did very well taking online courses at Chattanooga State, while working full time in a potential career field and living independently at 18 years old. We also had a student who struggled to complete any math class but at 16 was operating a lawn care business (not just mowing the neighbor's lawns), who had a stock portfolio and enrolled in Volkswagen Academy after high school. In that same class was the valedictorian, who took multiple advanced math courses at UTC while dual enrolled, and went on to MIT.

These three students stand out in my mind because they were so different in terms of personalities, skills and abilities, interests and passions, and paths, but they were all prepared to tackle what they wanted in their lives, successfully! So I was left to question what we as a school had done to help, whether there were outside factors such as family influence (of course there were), or innate traits (again, yes), and how it came to be that they had the opportunity to do all of these things. At the convergence of all of those points was a trajectory that led each of them, and many others, where they wanted to go in life.

I think the short answer to how do we help all students is to yes, have as many pathway options as possible, but I also think the answer is to teach them the SKILLS they need to be successful wherever they choose to go. They need to be adaptable, they need to have analytical skills and be able to accept feedback. They need to be self reflective and accountable. They need to know when to apply what skill, in what setting or context. It may come as no surprise that whenever I ask educators to list all of the traits students need to be able to succeed, and then to group those into content related skills, or 21st century related skills - the list is far longer on the skill side.

We have to empower students (and each other) to do all of this by giving them the opportunity to try (college courses, PBL, business partnerships), fail or succeed (prototyping iterations, standards-based grading, remediation) and then to try it all again. Most students take roughly the same coursework over the 4 years of high school, but they don't exit with the same dreams. The best we can do is align all school practices and policies with the goal of ensuring they have roughly the same tools in order to pursue them. The pathways to success are paved with these skills, no matter what direction they go.








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