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How Learning Here is Different
Call it what you want, hands-on learning, contextual learning, project-based learning, career & technical education; learning at the Career Center looks different. Traditional school teaches most subjects in isolation. You enter different rooms and learn a subject apart from others in a concentrated fashion. In our setting, with a larger project to accomplish, we quite often need to use knowledge from many academic disciplines to accomplish the task at hand. For instance, it would be typical for us to first study a blueprint of a proposed project, where we need to interpret exactly what needs to be built. Next, we may need to reference a code book or the written specifications. We could very well need to calculate the materials needed, write out a material list, use our phone skills to order, plan where to store, physically unload, and finally be ready to build our project. As you can see from this simple example, we use skills mastered from several academic areas to accomplish a given project.
A Word About Relevancy
When we think about traditional schools, we typically see separate subjects being taught in separate classrooms. Our instruction is trade specific, which means that just as in the real world, we must draw from many academic areas to accomplish our tasks and projects. Please look at the link below to better illustrate that point.