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Teachers are paired with business professionals whom they’ll shadow for the week. Scott Van Beck is the Executive Director of Houston A+ Challenge who along with the Greater Houston Partnership runs the event.
“We have a challenge as adults in our society to teach our kids what we do; that thing called work.”
Twenty of the teachers will spend the week at Shell Oil. Monte King with Shell USA, says what teachers experience this week, their students will see through out the school year.
“The teacher then creates lesson plans, is able to incorporate what the jobs for today and tomorrow require. They’re also able to bring hands on experiences and they can really relate to the student how the class relates to what they’ll in the world of work.”
Ligia Allison teaches at Claughton Middle School in Spring ISD. This year she’ll be at Shell, but last year she shadowed at the University of Phoenix and learned a lot about online learning.
“I challenged myself to have the kids do a PowerPoint presentation: get up in front of the class and present it, practice their word processing skills, their researching skills with the internet. So, I didn’t do a lot of that before and it really changed my perspective.”
Shell’s Monte King says everybody wins when class work is relevant to the real world of work.
“So that each person has an idea of…shoot for the stars if you will.”