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Business-Education Curriculum Collaboration
Why Do We Need to Learn This?
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A typical career path of a teacher includes graduating from high school, attending a four-year college to receive a bachelor’s degree and a teaching certificate, and returning to the elementary or secondary education classroom. Often, teachers have limited experience in industries outside of education beyond the part-time jobs they had in their formative years. This niche experience makes it difficult to answer a common student question, “Why do we need to learn this?”
Garden Spot High School, in the Eastern Lancaster County School District, offers many career experience programs including CTC, Internship, Co-Op, Access Success, Work-Based Learning, and Career Coaching. These programs allow students to explore careers in their interest areas and assist students with developing a clear and realistic career plan upon graduation. These experiences, while extremely valuable and important to student career development, are separate from everyday classroom curriculum.
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In the Fall of 2023, ELANCO School District was awarded a $25,000 grant from the Lancaster STEM Alliance for the Business-Education Curriculum Collaboration to be completed during the 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 school years. Through this grant, each teacher toured two businesses (26 total teachers touring 10 different businesses) to learn about a variety of industries. The teachers who participated in this experience work in a variety of disciplines including elementary and secondary education, with focus areas in Business, Math, Science, and STEM classrooms.
After the tours, teachers participated in project-based learning training and then created projects that will be implemented into the classroom curriculum. These new projects coming from local industry will begin to answer that age-old question, “Why do we have to learn this?”
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![](https://blog.elanco.org/pathways2success/files/2024/01/Teacher-Tours-Oct-26-2023-d6ceaa436b40db33-225x300.jpg)
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