Week One - Education

   This week I was able to start at The Principal for my summer externship.  My externship includes having an opportunity to experience several different areas of the business, each in a different week of the six week experience.  My first week was spent with the Information Services unit, and mostly with the technical learning group.  The members of this department kindly gave me a chance to pick their brains and show me the tools and the pro/cons of those tools that are at their disposal.  This was a great chance to see how training is created and shared on a business level.

   It wasn't surprising to see that they deal with many of the same challenges that I deal with in my classroom, whether it's finding ways to reach a reluctant student or trying to find an efficient tool to measure the effectiveness of the training.  I was able discuss the philosophies they used to try to make sure the end result of training is an employee who has a new or improved skill set and can then effectively use these skills to improve productivity.  This is a significant objective, if not the objective, in my area of education as well and I'm surprised how easy it is to get distracted from this goal.  It is a struggle for me to implement methods of instruction that not only provide knowledge to my students, but also helps them build a general mechanism to make it more likely to apply that knowledge.  I know from past experience and the trends in education that this is most likely to happen when the knowledge is learned in the context of problem solving and critical thinking.  I don't have much experience with project based learning units, but this does seem like a great way to give students these opportunities and I look forward to developing a strong start to a new project based unit that I can use this year.  I can already see that much of what I'm picking up on here at The Principal will help me build a business relevant structure to a project. This might include a leadership hierarchy and specific roles, cost/benefit analysis, globalized perspective, collaborative technologies, legal considerations, etc.  I probably need to temper myself a bit when developing the unit so it doesn't get bigger than I can handle, but the value of this experience, even to this point, shouldn't be understated.