Ohio State institute brings high school teachers to campus to guide students’ career paths

An error occurred while preparing your download

Ohio State institute brings high school teachers to campus to guide students' career paths

University hosts brainstorming sessions to promote STEAMM professions

More than 75 Columbus City Schools teachers visited The Ohio State University's campus last week to brainstorm solutions to problems that affect high school students.

The teachers' campus visit was part of Ohio State's STEAMM Rising initiative, a collaboration with the city of Columbus and the Columbus City Schools to establish pathways for youth to careers in science, technology, engineering, the arts, mathematics and medicine (STEAMM).

During this year's STEAMM Rising Summer Institute, teachers explored how to prepare students for careers in marketing and entrepreneurship, engineering and manufacturing, sustainability and logistics.

During the marketing and entrepreneurship session at Ohio State's Keenan Center for Entrepreneurship, teachers worked in groups with representatives from across central Ohio. The groups identified a single issue and brainstormed solutions that they can work toward with the support of parents, administrators and community members.

The purpose of the session was to help teachers train students to solve problems with an entrepreneurial mindset, said Bailey Hanley, senior education specialist with the Keenan Center.

"We're walking them through this workshop, giving them the assignment of identifying a problem that is meaningful to them that they are experiencing or society is experiencing," she said. "We spend about an hour and 15 minutes digging all the way into a problem: Who does it affect? What is it costing people? Where is it showing up? And then after getting really intimate with the problem, what are solutions for this and what might those look like?"

A major topic of conversation was how to teach students to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into problem-solving strategies while maintaining their own creativity.

One group discussed methods to teach students to "use AI, come up with a solution. … Then, as a class, poke holes in the solution that AI gives because AI doesn't have all the details for that solution," said Austin Owens, Columbus City Schools business and technology teacher. "It will require them to understand that AI can be used as a tool, but you have to use it ethically."

Shunda Wright, a career and community resource coordinator with the Columbus schools, said her group discussed the importance of partnering with the business community to train students to use AI to produce results while still using their own brainpower.

"By bringing in those business partners, [students] can actually see what's happening in the real world," she said. "Our big thing with businesses should be connecting our students in high school to the real world. By having those business partners come in, they can give them a realistic view and an ethical view."

Other teacher groups explored a range of topics, from providing support services for students experiencing food insecurity and homelessness to help them focus better in class, to soliciting student input for the redesign of one high school's athletic field and stadium.

Matching teachers from different schools resulted in a wide variety of ideas and strategies, Hanley said.

"It was really important to us to have people move around with people they didn't know or that they don't teach with, to have a more well-rounded [perspective], not be siloed into the same problems you have every day," she said. "It was, 'How can we make everybody's world just a little bit bigger today?'"

More Ohio State News