In the season finale of UEN Homerooom, Dani and Matt are joined by Tabitha Pacheco, Director of Utah Teacher Fellows and CEO of Hope Street Group, David Ma. First, they share how their mission to empower individuals through education and training is helping create better economic opportunities for all. Then, they provide valuable advice on how educators can navigate the world of advocacy and legislation to bring about meaningful change.
In the season finale of UEN Homerooom, Dani and Matt are joined by Tabitha Pacheco, Director of Utah Teacher Fellows and CEO of Hope Street Group, David Ma. First, they share how their mission to empower individuals through education and training is helping create better economic opportunities for all. Then, they provide valuable advice on how educators can navigate the complex world of advocacy and legislation to bring about meaningful change.
Learn more about Utah Teacher Fellows here.
Learn more about Hope Street Group here.
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[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hey Matt.
Hey Dani.
How's it going today?
It is going fantastic because we have some great guests today.
I mean, we always have great guests, but who do we have today?
So last year we had the EUA president and we spent some time talking about teacher retention.
Yes. I do remember that.
This year we have very similar subject matter with a national and a local guest. We have Tabitha Pacheco from the Utah Teacher Fellows and from their parent organization, Hope Street Group CEO David Ma.
All right, well, no time like the present to jump in, hey?
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All right. We're very happy to have a great pair of guests today from Hope Street Group slash Utah Teacher Fellows. Can you do us a favor and just introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about your background and what you do at either Hope Street Group or the Teacher Fellows?
Hi. Yeah, my name is Tabitha Pacheco. I'm the director of the Utah Teacher Fellows. But prior to that, I taught special education in Utah for 10 years. And so I'm very passionate about all things Utah public education, empowering educators, creating conditions that are the best for students to succeed, and I'm happy to be on the podcast today.
Hi, and my name is David Ma. I'm the new incoming CEO of Hope Street Group. I've been at Hope Street Group for six months now. Before Hope Street, I was the head of product for jobs on Facebook. It was a job search tool that focused on helping lower income workers get jobs. And so I've been working at the intersection of technology, business, and workforce for about a decade now. Excited to be here.
We're excited to have you here. And I think many Utah educators, they might be familiar with the work that Utah Teacher Fellows have done over the last few years going back I think about six or seven years here now in the state of Utah. But they might be less familiar with Hope Street Group, its national parent organization. Can you tell us a little about the Hope Street Group, what it does, and its work at the national level?
Sure. I can kick it off, and Tabitha, if you have anything to add, feel free to. We're actually going through an interesting and really exciting period of reinvention as an organization. As you may know, Hope Street Group has historically had two tracks. We've had one foot in education and another foot in workforce.
And for quite some time, our historical superpower has been this idea of being the great convener getting folks together who care about a similar problem to figure out what policies are going to support teachers and help kids, what's going to help talent get on to a better career path. And that approach has served us really well and served as the blueprint for a lot of other nonprofits and foundations who have sprung up and emulated that approach.
Looking forward, however, as an incoming CEO, it's also been my job to reconsider and reevaluate given where the world is today going forward what are some of the problems that we as Hope Street Group can uniquely make a meaningful dent on. What do we believe to be the highest leverage point to advancing economic opportunity and that maybe no other organization is working on?
And that line of questioning has led us to decide instead of working across both education and workforce broadly, we think the highest impact thing that we as an organization can do is at the intersection of those two areas. Thinking about what's going to help our youth towards economic opportunity, towards better and more satisfying occupation.
And that's something that I'm personally really excited about, because as I mentioned, I worked on a product that helped lower income workers find jobs in the past. And in that past life, I got to meet a lot of seekers. And the story that I hear over and over again is about how I could be a cashier or a customer service rep, but what I would much rather do is I would want to pursue this passion project or get into bookkeeping or go into a trade. And that theme of getting into a better career path was something that I saw over and over again and was very acute with the young adult population.
And when you look at the high school, college to career funnel, 40% of high school graduates don't go to college. 40% of those graduates that are going to college don't graduate. If they do graduate, they end up being underemployed. And so when you do that math, college is a path that really only works for one in four people in America.
To be clear, I think college is still an incredibly valuable path that you should pursue if you have the opportunity. It will give you more time to think through your career choices and more time to explore and mature up before stepping into the scary world of work and total independence. But what I'm personally really interested in having a discussion around and building a solution for here at Hope Street is let's not forget and talk more about that other 75% of youth. What are they going to do after high school?
There are plenty of occupations and paths that are rewarding and pay really well that don't require a college degree. And what's heartening to see is that there's definitely a national trend and movement where our education system is recognizing that our students need not to be just college ready but also future ready.
So what you'll see more from Hope Street, the long winded answer, is that in the near term will be a greater focus on career readiness, a greater focus on work based learning. And we're asking ourselves the question, how can we help our education system scale and modernize their career readiness activities with better technology and tools, with the support of their local community, have better staffing in the school building to do career education, and what are maybe some of the education policies that are necessary to enable students to be better prepared for their future occupations.
I absolutely love that. And I've been doing my own research. I think a lot of us as educationalists, we want to know about that bridging of the gap between high school and college and college and career readiness and those sorts of things. Tabitha, maybe you can speak to-- because there's this interesting connection where job awareness and job skills at the national level with Hope Street Group and then we have the Utah Teacher Fellows who are focusing on teacher preparedness and teacher skills. How does the Teacher Fellows fit into this picture as well?
Yeah, great question. So like David was previously saying, instead of thinking about education as one separate field and workforce as the separate entity of we need to do better as a society of interweaving those instead of working in silos. So I think education and educators should always be included in conversations about workforce and the future for our students. Like they shouldn't be seen separately.
But in Utah, specifically the work we're doing with the Teacher Fellows, is more focused on teacher leadership and retaining our best teachers and empowering them. And one of the great ways that we do that is by bringing in a lot of those diverse perspectives. Within our fellowship, we don't just have elementary school teachers. We have high school teachers. We have counselors. We have librarians. We have district staff. We have a great variety of educators who can bring in these different perspectives, which helps us think a little differently about the students that we're serving.
When you're an elementary school teacher in Vernal and you get to talk to a high school teacher in Salt Lake City and then a librarian teaching on the Navajo Nation, you get to see this big picture of what our student population is and what our teaching population is. And it just expands your perspective a little bit and helps you really think about what you're doing to prepare students for the future and then how we're supporting teachers who are working in really different environments and cultures. So I think it all ties together. We all just want the best futures for our teachers, our adults. We want the best futures for our youth. And so we just all need to be thinking about these problems together and not in silos. So it all fits together.
Thanks so much, Tabitha. Let's back up just a little bit. How did the Utah Teacher Fellows even come to be an organization? And then David, maybe you can jump in and say are other states following the same model as the Teacher Fellows?
Sure. So the Utah Teacher Fellows came to be because of Hope Street Group. In 2015, I was selected as a National Teacher Fellow through Hope Street. They had a national program where they selected teachers from all across the country to convene together and work on education issues facing the nation. So I did that for two years. I was still teaching full time, but I got to go to Washington, DC and so many different states and meet with educators and just learn about what education looks like in different states. It was a truly incredible experience.
And through that, I got to do a lot of work with policymakers in Utah at the State Board of Education, legislators. And then she was our deputy superintendent at the time but our now state superintendent Syd Dixon was like, I love the work that you're doing. I love that you're getting to be a teacher voice and all these important conversations. We should do this in Utah, have a state level version of this. And I was like, yeah, absolutely.
And of course, because she's always such a champion of educators and our abilities to lead and she's like, and you should lead it. You can do this. You can make it happen. And so with the support of Superintendent Dixon and Hope Street Group, we were able to start a Utah chapter, which has been really successful. When we're able to bring people together and focus on very local issues, it has such a greater impact than working on a national level to have people like, we're just focused on Utah. We're bringing together Utah people. We're making this happen.
And so that's how it happened. And so we launched in 2017 and we ran two year cohorts. So we're just wrapping up our third cohort and launching in our fourth cohort. So we've had great success and just gotten more and more support from policymakers at all levels, teachers from every district, and really loving this idea of teachers having a voice, teachers getting to be invited to these important conversations, teachers having an opportunity to learn leadership skills of how to public speak, how to write about the profession, how to be solutions oriented and policy discussions. And so it's really been an impactful program in our state.
And there are other models happening in other states, some that are active, some that are taking a little bit of a hiatus. But there are other states trying to do this important work and make sure that teacher voices are included from the start of the discussions and not an afterthought after the policy's already been decided.
Yeah. I may not be the best person to talk about the Teacher Fellows history, so I think I'll look to Tabitha here. But the Teacher Fellows work and having visited Tabitha and the team in Utah, I was really inspired by what we're doing here, because we're really solving one of the most acute problems in the education system today where there's just a shortage of teachers and there's this big issue of teacher burnout.
And time and time again, when I'm on the ground, I've met with Teacher Fellows, they said, being a Teacher Fellow has changed my life. And I went from thinking about quitting to now I'm still here three years later. And we're still working on getting the data, but we believe that having a teacher fellow in school building increases teacher retention in those places. And at a time when there's a shortage of teachers, I think that's something that's really important.
Tabitha and I have also been discussing and talking about beyond Utah what are some of the other states that we could start to over time start to explore where states want to see this type of initiative happen. And how can we grow this not just within Utah but outside Utah on top of that as well? So it's definitely an exciting time and a really important problem that we're working on and hoping to make a dent on.
It's amazing. And we need all the support we can get, especially with teacher retention, just to make that happen and keep people in the profession and keep them excited to be in the profession. I love that. One of the things that I found really striking when I was doing some research on Hope Street Group was your mission statement. It says that Hope Street Group works to connect, extend, and guide a shared network of employers, educators, governments, and the public that will train, educate, and advance all Americans to economic opportunity.
It's just a really powerful, succinct statement. Could either of you explore the goals outlined in that mission statement? And what does economic opportunity mean to educators? I just found that phrasing of economic opportunity. What does that mean when you're a teacher in a classroom?
Well, for me, I'll speak to it. As a teacher, sometimes our careers can feel pretty limited. You get into the classroom and then you may be in that same classroom and the same building for your entire career. And as a millennial, the younger generation I guess, now there's Gen Z is teaching.
Gen Alpha is it now.
Yeah. That can seem pretty limiting for a career. We like change. We want opportunities. And so that's why I'm such a big believer in teacher leadership and having ways to have new opportunities in your career, these new experiences without leaving the classroom I think is really powerful. I think before it was like, you either stay in the classroom for 25 years or you leave to become an administrator, which is a great opportunity, but then we're pulling our best teachers out of the classrooms and we want them to stay in the classroom.
So by exploring other leadership opportunities, it's a great way for teachers to stay excited about the profession, but also grow themselves. So whether that's taking on some more traditional roles like being a mentor or an instructional coach, but also some new, innovative ways to lead from your school, like being a community outreach lead and starting programs like teen centers at your school or food banks at your school or organizing parent nights or other activities, like doing that community outreach.
But also having that as an official leadership role you're taking on and being paid to take on that role or taking on other leadership roles as an education ambassador where you're getting to present at conferences and travel across the state or the nation and share your expertise, becoming this professional learning facilitator. All these opportunities to grow yourself, share your expertise, but you're still a classroom teacher. I think that's a great way to expand opportunities for educators. And then David can definitely speak more broadly to our mission and what we're trying to accomplish.
Yeah, I think, Tabitha, you touched on something that was kind of interesting, which is how the teaching profession is changing. And I think when I think about economic opportunity broadly and thinking about workforce broadly, what we know is the world of workforce is changing. Gone are the days where you have a forever job and you work for four decades for the same company. And new jobs are getting created left and right. New job descriptions are emerging.
The other day I just learned that a high school student wanted to become a Salesforce admin. So after high school, you can go get a certificate with Salesforce and earn $75,000 a year working at for a company to manage their Salesforce software. And even in industries where you think that jobs should be relatively constant are changing as well. So builders today are increasingly doing a larger chunk of their fabrication building and assembly offsite before towing on giant trucks over to where they need to hook things up.
And so when I think about economic opportunity, I think there's been a lot of the historical model of workforce development around let's prioritize five high growth, high potential pathways, build credentials, internships, apprenticeships around those.
But what I'm more excited about thinking about is how do we also think about how we can prepare our youth for a much more dynamic and changing workforce. A person who's graduating high school today might need to have multiple careers throughout their lifetime. And I think what we need to prepare learners and students for is just cultivating that growth and learning mindset, knowing and expecting that your work is going to change and that you'll have to learn how to constantly build new skills, adapt, and learn to be resilient from that.
Thank you so much, David. Maybe a job that educators weren't prepared to take on is that of a politician or a lobbyist. But both of your groups, Hope Street Group and the Utah Teacher Fellows, help educators to get their footing in the world of advocacy and legislation. What does the process look like for an educator with little experience in the legislative process? Maybe they haven't even paid attention to it before. And how have you seen educator voices change during the legislative process in Utah and beyond?
Yeah, this is, of course, a topic I'm very passionate about. I think back to my early years as a teacher. And I had 0 idea about education policy. It wasn't something that was discussed during my teacher prep program in college. So I didn't understand how there were things happening at legislation that trickled down into my classroom.
And so then when I got frustrated with things or didn't understand policy, I didn't know where to take those. And I think that's true for a lot of educators is we think, oh, my principal is making us do this. But what they don't understand is that, well actually, five years ago this decision was made during the legislative session, which then went to the State Board of Education, and they created a rule around it, which then they created technical assistance around it and policies for your district, and then your district made their own policy for it and then it got to your classroom.
And so I think it's really important for teachers to truly understand their own profession and start taking some ownership of that. And so understanding who is representing them at the various levels of policymaking. That there's someone above their principal and then there's someone above their district staff, above their superintendent. There's all these levels. And so where they can weigh in and have influence on policy.
I have several tips for getting started. First is you don't do everything all at once. There is too much. I consider myself a very active and very involved educator and follow education policy, and I cannot keep up with all of it. Every day there's something new happening. Changes happen overnight. There's new people in different positions. So you can't track all of it.
So I would recommend for educators to pick one or two topics that they're most passionate about. What are the things that they feel really deeply about? So for me, special education, since that's what I taught, is something that's a very high interest to me. And so those are the type of policies that I follow and track because they are something that I feel impacts the population of students that I work with.
So I try to stick just to special education. Or now some more broad teacher leadership type issues, things that would affect teacher pay and teacher job satisfaction. Those are policies that are really important to me. And so it's not that school lunches aren't important to me or bullying aren't important to me. I just don't have the bandwidth or the capacity to follow all of it. So pick one or two things that you're the most passionate about.
The second thing is I would say get really good at telling your story. And then you don't have to feel like you have to be an expert. If you can talk about how something affects your students, your classroom, your job, that is so powerful. And then you are the expert. You can say I might not have all the research on this thing or the expertise in this, but I can tell you my story about my students in my classroom.
And people can't argue that. That is truth and that's what changes people's hearts. That's what changes policy is when you can put a real person of if you make this policy, this is how it will actually affect a human being. So get really good at telling your story. And don't be afraid to talk about what's happening in your classroom and at your schools. Own that.
And then my third tip is just start showing up. You would be surprised at how few people are the ones who are actually making the decisions because they are the people who show up at the town halls. They show up at the board meetings. They show up at the committee meetings. And if teachers aren't there, we don't get to have a say. And so I know that can sometimes be challenging, because we are in schools all day long. We have jobs.
But whenever you can show up, show up at night to the board meetings. If you can't show up live, watch the recordings so that you can be involved and then you can talk about the issues with people because you're current on them. So tell your story and then just start showing up. And start small. Pick your one or two things that you care the most about.
That's great advice, Tabitha. Thank you.
And now it's time for our teacher question.
Hi, I'm John Arthur from Meadowlark Elementary. For educators who are trying to find their footing in advocacy, who can they turn to for good examples? Who do you turn to for inspiration in your advocacy?
In Utah, I think we have a lot of really talented, intelligent, passionate people doing this work. And some of them are Utah Teacher Fellows, but a lot of them are your neighbors, your friends, your colleagues who are doing this work. So our teachers of the year, former and current, a lot of them are using their elevated platform and voice to speak about current issues
I would also say if you wanted to get involved, look for the people who are actually showing up. Sometimes it's easy to share your opinions or voice your complaints. But you might not be willing to put in the work. And so I would look for people who are doing the work. Who is participating in the committee meetings? Who is running for office? Who is willing to put themselves out there? Those are the people I would follow.
We can name names, but I'm a big advocate for our local community on Twitter. If teachers aren't on Utah ed Twitter, it is a very robust community of people who are sharing information, sharing data, sharing opinions, letting people know when meetings are happening. That's a great place to be involved. So Twitter is a good resource if used correctly. So follow #uted or Utah ed chat, Utah pol, which is for Utah politics, Utah policy. Those are great places to find the people who are actively involved in this work.
Yeah, I think in terms of on the local workforce side, I would say I agree with what Tabitha said. Look out for who in your community is active or the right set of people that are thinking about workforce related things for youth. So this could be your-- if you have a CTE director or CTE teacher around you or someone who's coordinating internships at the school level, your local Chamber of Commerce, local nonprofits that are nearby. I think it's best to think about what are the things that I can do locally to learn more about how you can maybe contribute to helping our students think about the future.
Love that. And that segues really nicely into our next question here of one of the main missions that we've-- we've been focusing a lot on the educator role, which is incredibly important and a big part of Hope Street Group and Utah Teacher Fellows' mission. But there's also this huge side, David, that you mentioned earlier about job training for learners starting in K-12 and then also bridging into adult ed.
How does Hope Street Group maintain local and national perspectives for on the job training and future ready skills? And as I was perusing your website and kind of digging in, there's a lot of national partners and industry that you're working with. How do those industry partners fit into the larger picture of job training and economic opportunity?
Yeah. So as I mentioned a little bit in the past, there's a lot of national partners that are actively working on specific sectors and pathways to think about how a specific industry or sector, whether it's in health care or manufacturing, how do we provide the credentials and apprenticeship opportunities so that students have access to these things. That's a model that we've seen sprung up and replicated since we've started this work in the last couple of years nationally, locally, in different areas over time and time again.
I think going forward and looking forward, what we're excited to think more about is not just concentrating on those sort of high priority pathways but think about it from the perspective of the individual, the perspective of the student or the adult that's navigating the world of work. I think the macroeconomic bird eye view lens of this is itself not enough, because as I said before, it's really hard to-- because the world of work is changing so fast, it's really hard to at a macroeconomic level keep comprehensive job related data maintained and up to date.
And when you talk about how new job titles are constantly emerging, today there's a COVID compliance officer that didn't exist five years ago. You can be an online fitness instructor. That didn't exist five years ago. You can be a cryptocurrency asset advisor. That didn't exist five years ago. And so all those jobs and opportunities and pathways are emerging don't get caught in this sort of larger system.
And with recognizing that there are a lot of national nonprofits and local nonprofits that are actively building those pathways, what we're excited to think about is how do we think about pairing up the education system with industry partners. Because the folks in industry and business are most familiar with what's the latest up to date trends and jobs and wages and job description. They're best equipped to help students understand these are the credentials and degrees necessary for you to pursue.
And I think the framework of selecting a few high priority industries is really good. But on top of that, what we think is an opportunity in sort of the world of building networks and building connections between students and the working world is thinking about how can we bring a broader set of professionals and volunteers and people who just want to help students understand how crazy the world of work is and how fast it's changing.
Imagine if a student in high school can go on 20 job shadows and get credit for that. That's a really powerful way to help students not just understand, OK, my school has three CTE paths and I learned about two or three of those. It helps open, I think, expand that mindset of here are all the possibilities that are potentially out there.
And so long story short, I think to answer your question, I think we're starting to rethink this model as opposed to we're the expert that knows these five or six industries really well to how do we mobilize the community to connect with students so that the community can support the students in understanding and navigating this really, really complex world of work.
I absolutely love that, David. I love that you brought up this idea of awareness. I think back to when I was 17 and I was a bagger in a grocery store. And I didn't understand that produce distribution was someone's job. Running fruits and vegetables to the store was someone's job. And now that has just gotten more and more complex.
Point being, AI has changed how some people do their technology, like writing and things like that, across the internet just in the last few months. And so I guess there's a question here that kind of I'm interested in of what are some ways that teachers can create more awareness and connections for these changes and jobs and for job skills training that are practical for them to slip into a course? And maybe Tabitha you can speak to this as well.
It's a bit of a loaded question because as teachers I know all of us are like, we're already doing so much. We're teaching our content, but we're also doing all of these other things and these new expectations that are put on it. So sometimes it can seem overwhelming of like, oh, and now I also have to be a job coach and do this too. And so I get that it's a lot for educators.
That's why I really liked David's previous comments about bringing in the community and really starting to rely on them and not have schools so siloed or educators so siloed and really getting communities to be like, this is our future. This is our future employees, our future neighbors, our community. And so we all need to be invested in helping our youth succeed and sharing opportunities with them and giving them experiences and talking about what we do.
So I think that's one way is we can rely on our communities instead of saying, let's just give teachers one more thing to do. Teachers are amazing and they could do it, but that's probably not the best model. We need to find other ways to help support our students.
Yeah. I can't agree more. If you're a scrappy teacher and you want to go and find guest speakers for your classroom and want to find internships for your students, go for it. If you have the energy, go for it. But it's a tall ask. I've seen examples where really passionate teachers-- there's a school in Palm Springs here in California.
Palm Springs has a very big tourism sector. And so there's a lot of hotels and the hospitality industry is very strong there. And so that school has about I think 60 students. And basically this really passionate teacher decided to take upon themselves, along with some other folks within their school system, to create an internship program with local hotels that enrolls all 60 students across different chains and different hotels.
So every student that goes through that high school gets an internship experience in their, I forget, junior or senior year to work at a hotel at different functions. Some of them in reception, some of them in food and in various aspects of the hotel's operation. And so that does happen. I'm very heartened when that happens. But it's, as Tabitha said, that's a big ask to say, hey, on top of everything that teachers have to do, they have to shoulder the responsibilities due to this.
I think what a teacher can do on top of some of the things we discussed is try to advocate also for workplace learning opportunities. Make it a priority. So for example, I think in Utah, it's my understanding that workplace learning is not for credit. And that's something that is potentially a barrier for some students to get access to job shadows and internships.
If you're from a family that's well connected, that has more resources, you might be able to place yourself into an internship or job shadow just from your family's connections. But if you don't come from that background and the school isn't offering that set of things for credit, it's really hard to incentivize a student who might be holding multiple part time jobs to do that kind of work.
And so there's things that we can talk more about work based learning. We can talk more about career exploration, career readiness activities. Some schools I've seen have developed curriculum specifically designed for career exploration. So a student who's going through that class might not just learn about several careers but in the process also build resume building skills or interview skills and job readiness skills. And there's a specific teacher whose job is to teach those courses and those classes.
So there are examples and models where this can really work. But if you're a full time teacher in math or history, I think asking yourself, you really should just check in with yourself and make sure that you have the appetite and the bandwidth and the energy to take on some more if you want to make some of this happen.
I appreciate that thought. And I also appreciate the idea of leaning on your community to support where they can. So when we're talking about job preparedness or job readiness, how does that idea support the Utah portrait of a graduate specifically for our state but other state wide portrait of a graduate? What does it look like to graduate from high school? What should we be prepared with?
You'll have these-- like [INAUDIBLE] every graduate, I got to help be part of the creation of that over several years. And I love that there was lots of teachers across the state involved in creating this. So it really felt like it was the people doing the work and teaching it who got to come up with what we want to see from our students.
I think one of the interesting things about it is that academic mastery is just one portion of what we want our students to graduate with. When I think historically, that's what we thought graduating from high school was, was that you graduated high school, you have academic mastery. Where now we are recognizing that that's just one portion, one small part of what you gain from graduating 13 years, 12, 13 years of school. There's so much more that you gain in school experience.
Wellness is such an important-- part of school is learning how to maintain your own wellness physically, mentally. Learning how to communicate, learning how to think critically and solve problems, being creative, collaborating with a team. Those are all such important skills that we gain in school, even if it's not class. You're not taking a collaboration and creativity class.
It's just embedded in what we're doing. And so I love that that's now being recognized of these are important skills we want our students graduating with that will help them in the future. Like academic mastery is so important, but that's just one small part of what it takes to be a successful adult and to be part of a workforce and part of a community.
So I think the portrait of a graduate, the Utah one, but also nationally is really bringing attention to that school is more than just a place where kids go to learn academic content. School is multifaceted. There's so much happening and going on there. And so that's why we need to support our schools, because it's such a great place of growth on so many levels for our youth.
Yeah. And I think job preparedness and maybe let's say if you do an internship, that's an opportunity for you to learn how to communicate professionally. If you get a real task, you're thinking about how to solve problems in a work environment. You have an opportunity to stretch and grow your creativity if you're working on a website or a social media campaign for your company or small business. And obviously when you're working with a team and working in a work environment, you're collaborating with others. So I think work based learning activities I think are a really good complement to a lot of the graduate of a portrait ideas, whether it's with Utah and other states.
But I think the thing that I think might be surprising is that I think career development activities actually have an impact on wellness as well. So there's a study that they did in Europe where I think Europe and maybe Canada where they looked at different types of career development activity and how that impacted students' perception of school, how useful they thought it was. Did it prepare them better for their future and their lives and their careers afterwards and how engaged they were in school.
And I think the study showed that a lot of the career development activities, but especially talking to a guidance counselor about careers and going to career fairs, those were the things that really stood out as impacting students' perception of is school helping me get me to where I need to go. And I think when you see a lot of this feeling of disconnectedness with school is just not doing this for me, I think that's actually a thing that might be surprising is that actually helps with wellness and your attitude towards and optimism towards school and your own future.
I love that answer. I love that we can tie job preparedness to wellness. Circling all the way back to the beginning of our conversation, though, we talked a little bit about retaining teachers. I want to ask a question about how do we get teachers to or how do we get students to want to be teachers? So how can we prepare the next generation of educators and keep them excited about education? And where does advocacy and skills training fit into that retaining or adding teachers to the workforce?
This is something that we are constantly working on and it's so exciting to talk about. And I think one thing is that if teachers, if our current teachers love their jobs and are excited about work, that's one of the best things we can do to recruit more teachers to the profession and recruit high school students and college age students is if the current teachers are like, this is the best profession that you can be in. There we go. There's advertising word of mouth right there.
And so we have to take care of our current teachers so that they want to be in their jobs and they want other people to come to their jobs. And so of course, that's where that sort of advocacy works comes in is where teachers feel like they have a say in their own profession, in the future of their profession, and that there is good policy being passed around. Not only what's happening with our curriculum and with students, but policy around like how our teachers are taken care of in schools. So that's important.
I also know that there is a lot of great work and it's continuing to grow and be more robust with implementing TAP programs as a path students can take. And TAP stands for Teaching As a Profession. And so it's so exciting that we are having our high school students have the opportunity to learn what it means to be a teacher.
A couple months ago, I had the opportunity to judge at an Educator Rising event, our statewide Utah Educator Rising event, which was high school students. And oh my goodness, I was blown away with these high school students and how passionate they were about education. And the area I was judging is they had to debate an ethical dilemma in teaching. And I was just blown away by what these-- it was junior high to high school students.
So 13 to 18 year olds, how they were viewing issues of should teachers be able to have their students' cell phone numbers. And if a student posts something on social media outside of school, is that bullying? And to hear them debate about it and to think about some of these larger issues of being a teacher was really impactful. And then to see their other things they had prepared, lesson plans they'd prepared.
And seeing them in action, I left that day feeling like, oh, if this is the future of teachers, this is incredible. These teenagers are going to change the world. They're going to be the best educators we have. So I think it is really great that we are starting to give that as a pathway for students while they're in high school of saying, if you want to be a teacher, let's start now. Let's get you ready.
So that way they are willing to major in that in college. And if anything else, at least think about the teaching profession in a different light and see how complex it is to be a teacher. So I see great hope for attracting new teachers into the field and then continuing to do our work on a policy level and through convening great teachers to retain the amazing teachers that we already have.
Yeah. I'll just have a short answer to this to add on to what Tabitha is saying. Education as a profession has an unfair advantage, actually, of recruiting students to become teachers. Every student knows what a teacher does. A student might not know what a different profession is, but every student knows what a teacher does. And so I think Tabitha is spot on. Good teachers inspire students to become teachers. And that's what we have to focus on.
That's wonderful. And I could not agree more with that, David and Tabitha. If teachers listening to the podcast are wanting to learn a little bit more about Hope Street Group or the Utah Teacher Fellows or perhaps become a Teacher Fellow themselves, where can we find you on the internet and to explore a little bit more about your content?
They can visit us at our website, hopestreetgroup.org and learn about our national program. You can also navigate there too like our Utah Teacher Fellows page. And then locally in Utah, we are on all the social media platforms. You can find us on Twitter. You can find us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn. And we post regularly about the work that we're doing and ways that educators can engage.
We're always looking for more teachers to be involved. We do have a limited number of people who can participate in our cohort. But we find other ways for teachers who aren't officially part of the program to still come to our events and engage with us. And so anyone has questions, find us on one of our social media platforms and we are more than happy to connect you.
Tabitha, David, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us and our educators today. We really appreciate it. It's been awesome.
Thank you for having us.
Thank you.
So what's your takeaways, Dani?
You know, I loved hearing about how skills training and job training is all becoming part of this thing that we think about before our kiddos graduate high school. I think for such a long time, we were so college focused. It's like high school and then college and then you figure out how to adult. And I think a lot of us got thrown into the world kind of underprepared for adulthood.
And like David said, college is awesome, but it's not for everyone. And I love this idea that kids start thinking about careers and the future and what that can look like for them while they're still in high school, while they still have some scaffolds to kind of help them get there. Because there's so many different ways to get there and it may not look like college right exactly after high school.
Exactly. I love the idea of simple awareness about jobs and how we can help students be more aware of the careers that are available to them. Because we could say platitudes about how things have changed and how there's new jobs and jobs don't exist and things like that. But the reality is even 30 years ago, jobs didn't exist that the students will have when they graduate.
And so I think the simple awareness and what they're talking about of relying on the community and having some more on the job training inside schools could be really helpful. So I absolutely loved this conversation, especially from the perspective of how do we support our educators, how do we support our students in a way that keeps everyone engaged.
All right. It reminds me of the quote. It's Marian Wright Edelman. And it's if you can't see it, you can't be it. Or you can't be what you can't see. And so I love this idea of getting kiddos in jobs. Because like you said, you didn't know that someone's job was picking out produce. That's such a cool job. And if you don't know what the jobs are out there, you might feel really limited in what your life looks like after high school. And really there's so much.
And it's not only the teacher's responsibility but the whole community's to prepare students for the world of work.
Absolutely.
Well, thanks, everyone, for listening. We'll see you next season.
Oh my gosh. Yep, see you next season, everyone.
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