Career Explorations: Connecting the Professional World With Classrooms

The past two weeks at Breakthrough Silicon Valley have been packed with career-relevant activities. Last week, we invited over 30 professionals to step into our students’ classrooms to talk about their jobs and educational journeys. Our Career Speakers represented various professions: from Adobe developers and San Jose City Hall lawyers, to banking experts at CEFCU, and marketing specialists at Google. 

Our students were exposed to a variety of careers and learned more about what engineers and lawyers all do on a daily basis.

On Friday of last week, we also invited over 20 female professionals to our 4^th Annual Women in STEM Brunch. They spent a morning with our 100+ female students and spoke about their educational journeys, and what it is like to be a female in a highly male-dominated sector of the professional world.

Last and most definitely not least, our students embarked on Career Explorations Day this past Tuesday. Our students visited over 25 different companies including San Jose Mercury News, Ubisoft, Bank of America, Microsoft, and Applied Materials.

That’s a whole lot of events to pack into an already packed 6-week academic summer program. So why is that we choose to spend so much time organizing these events for our students?

Simply put, as important as academics are in finding successful careers, being exposed to careers and professionals in the real world helps link all the classroom learning to the world outside of school. It adds relevance to our students’ efforts and helps them to be all the more motivated to learn when they know what the payoff may look like in their futures.

In order to motivate students, teachers may tell them, “If you study hard and complete all your homework, you will be better prepared for college and be more successful in life!” That’s a difficult claim to make and especially difficult for a young student to conceptualize, especially if they don’t know any professionals in their life. As has been mentioned, the vast majority of our students will be the first to attend college. Most of their family members know very little about college and perhaps even less about what it’s like to apply all the classroom learning to engineering or practicing law. All our students know immediately is that 2-hours of homework per night means less free time to play with friends or spend on the internet.

With events such as Career Speakers Day, Women of STEM Brunch, and Career Explorations Day, our students are able to not only conceptualize, but also experience what it means to be a college graduate and live life as a professional.

We aren’t the only ones to recognize the power of connecting the classroom to the real world. Other programs such as Linked Learning make it their goal to bring experiential learning into high school years. They work to ensure that students are working passionately for their career goals by learning and experiencing first-hand what those careers will look like through internships, shadowing, and other opportunities.

It is perhaps no secret that students feel more motivated to attend college when they know what’s at the end of the road. They are inspired to work harder and dream all the bigger after meeting professionals living out their career goals and learning about the hard work that goes into finding success.

At the closing of our Career Speakers Days, our Executive Director ensured our guest speakers that they have already made a long-lasting impact on our students. The 20 minutes they spent with each group has given them a brighter glimpse into the professional world and inspired our students to live within that world themselves one day. Through these events, our student get the opportunity to meet and see in person their career aspirations, making their dreams seem all the more possible.

Read More

"It's so much more than a summer camp!"

Last week, I met with one of my friends and was explaining to him what a day at Breakthrough Silicon Valley looks like.

“In the morning, we meet the students at the buses, give them high fives on the way down, and then play some games before classes start. We also have this thing called ASM which stands for All School Meeting where students prepare skits to share with their peers and teachers. Oh, and practically every week we have special events. For example, tomorrow I get to help out with Olympics at one of the sites!”

His response, even if unsurprising, caught me off guard:

“So is Breakthrough basically summer camp but with classes?”

I thought to defend the program by saying, “No, it’s an academic summer program! It’s so much more than a summer camp!” In fact, I think I might have said that before taking a step back and thinking about the similarities between Breakthrough Silicon Valley’s summer program and summer camps.

It’s true that the focus of Breakthrough is on academics. Our students arrive at 8:15 every morning and start their first class at 8:30am. They go through 6 classes every day and have Study Hall for 40-60 minutes at the end of each school day. Before 4:30pm, we might have packed students brains with high doses of literature discussion circles, to the quadratic formula and Newton’s Laws of Motion. The students then board their buses back home where they work on their 1-2 hours’ worth of nightly homework. But there are many aspects of traditional summer camps that contribute to our program’s success as well.

During All School Meeting, students are encouraged to step out of their comfort zones and try something new with full effort and a positive spirit. Many of our students feel uncomfortable leading cheers or acting silly on stage at the beginning, but eventually become excited and look forward to their time on stage. Similarly, during Olympics, having a positive team spirit and attitude is regarded highly, even above skill level. If a student fails to dodge a ball in dodgeball, their team cheers her on and praises her efforts. While teachers and students alike promote quality skits or victories in Olympics, nobody’s goal is to train our students to be good actors or star athletes. It is a place for them to act silly, feel a little uncomfortable, and in the process become more confident. It is less about showing off talent and more about improving and learning.

The classroom approach is similar. Our students’ work is held to very high standards, but the goal is not to have them turning in perfect assignments every day. And if a student misses a homework assignment, the focus is on finding a solution to the issue: Was the assignment unclear? Did you feel unprepared to compete it? How can we work to ensure you complete all your assignments? Students’ success is a collaborative effort between the teachers, staff, and students at Breakthrough.

Stanford psychologist Paul O’Keefe conducted a study that tried to identify students’ “goal orientation” during summer camps and other summer enrichment programs. O’Keefe identified two kinds of orientations: 1) mastery orientation where students are interested in learning for learning’s sake and 2) performance orientation where students are interested in learning in order to show off their smarts. 

At Breakthrough Silicon Valley, strong emphasis is placed on what O’Keefe refers to as mastery orientation. We know and recognize that our students are smart and talented; our next step is to develop and celebrate their growing work ethic. Our goal is to have them think not in terms of how smart they are, but rather in terms of how their motivation and determination will help them continue to become even better students.

In thinking of how our Breakthrough Silicon Valley summer program promotes this kind of learning and environment which is similar to summer camps, I take back my knee-jerk reaction of insult and instead celebrate the similarities. Perhaps the way our Executive Director describes it as an “Academic summer school with a summer camp vibe”, is a good way to go about it. Like summer camps, Breakthrough emphasizes collaborative, team-building activities and fosters resilience in our students. If one assignment wasn’t great or you felt unprepared for a skit, that’s okay – you’ll get another chance to take a positive risk tomorrow.

Read More

Spirit Week 2014

Spirit Week is a celebration of our students’ creativity, positive risk taking, and passion for Breakthrough. Students dress up every day according to themes such as pajama day, wacky Wednesday, superhero, and decades day.  Within their crews, or small Breakthrough families outside the classroom, students create names and chants to show their crew pride.

For example, this summer at Hillbrook our theme is Breakthrough Cup, and students stretched their imagination by creating new countries to compete in Breakthrough Olympics. At the other two sites the themes are Cosmic Dancers and Holidays in Space. This experience allows the students to bond with both their teachers and other students that they wouldn’t otherwise connect with.

Spirit Week helps to foster a supportive peer group culture and allows the students to step out of their comfort zone. It encourages them to celebrate their academic goals in an environment that promotes fun just as much as it does learning.

Footage taken from Breakthrough Silicon Valley San Jose Unified School District (Hosted at the Hillbrook School) and Franklin McKinley School District (Host at Evergreen Valley High School) sites between June 30th - July 3rd.

Read More

What makes a good teacher?

Remember those teachers who made the greatest impact on you? It might be your first-grade teacher, high school calculus teacher, or a college professor. What was it about their teaching style that made them stand out from all the other teachers you had? Were they more engaging? Were they well-liked? What made them so memorable?

Let me ask you: What made this person a good teacher?

My guess is there are a lot of different answers. Some might say it was the way they made class material clear and interesting. Others might focus on the fact that they spent a lot of time trying to get to know each student. Still some may find all of these qualities in their “good” teacher. In the end, we can all point to something and say, “That’s it!”

So, if we are able to identify specific qualities that make a teacher “good”, why can’t we just have all teachers adopt those qualities? In thinking about the millions of teachers across the world, I’ve wondered: is anyone capable of becoming a good teacher so long as they know the tricks and techniques? Or is good teaching something innate, reserved for the select few people who have those special qualities from the start?

After a decade of No Child Left Behind testing, researchers found a mountain of data that measured which factors had the greatest impact on student performance. Everything from class size to curriculum was measured, but only one – just one – factor was found to have any significant impact: the teacher!

Interestingly enough, the research indicates that factors such as a graduate school degree, a high SAT score, an extroverted personality, and passing the teacher certification exam on the first try were not indicators or predictors of a good teacher. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation invested millions in programs to improve teacher quality. It is not surprising that, as someone who lives in a sea of data, Bill Gates made this careful comment: 

“Unfortunately, it seems the field doesn’t have a clear view of what characterizes good teaching. I’m personally very curious.”  

Having experienced teaching myself, I am more than curious as well. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the qualities of a good teacher are often immeasurable. The skills and preparation of one good teacher may be drastically different from another’s. Most agree being a good teacher takes great dedication and drive. Often professional teachers say that you can never truly master teaching – and as soon as you think you did, you should retire.

The trick to teaching may not be known – no secret method to ensuring a student’s success and interest in the classroom. And yet, every summer at Breakthrough Silicon Valley, we find our students more than engaged with our teachers. After just a few days, even the quietest students are dancing in their seats with their hands raised, eagerly hoping to be called on.

Last summer, I had the pleasure of being a teaching fellow for Breakthrough Silicon Valley. During our training days, we had workshops that ranged from effective lesson planning to classroom management. Our training lasted a little over a week and we must have spent well over 90 hours participating in workshops, developing engaging lesson plans, preparing our classrooms, and building relationships with each other as we prepared for our Breakthrough students’ arrival at the beginning of next week.

By the time my students arrived for the start of the 6-week program, I was incredibly tired from training week.  And yet, I remember at the end of that first day of teaching feeling a funny combination of weariness from work, and an immense energy in anticipation for the next day. The teaching day lasted from 7:30am to 6pm and did not end there – as soon as I got home, I had more lessons and activities to prepare for my students.

I never felt like I wanted to take a day off either. I may have needed it physically, but my yearn to see my students again, interact and learn together with them and the rest of my fellow teachers made me more than willing to wake up at 5 in the morning to prepare for another school day.  Each and every day I looked forward to trying new ways of presenting material and seeing my students engage with The Giver, the book we read in my 7^th grade Literature classes. I also could not wait to see my students join in my passion for music in my Music Theory elective.

Outside of the teaching theory workshops and classroom management technique practice, what I really appreciated from our training week was the opportunity to talk and discuss education inequity and the stories of our own educational journeys. All of us teaching fellows came from a variety of backgrounds. Several of us were first-generation college students, much like our Breakthrough students, who are on their path to college. We came from schools as far away as the University of Pennsylvania and Duke to neighborhood schools like Stanford, Santa Clara University, and Bellarmine College Preparatory. We were teaching self-created electives that ranged from Creative Writing and Intro to Film to Basketball and Computer Science. What brought us together was our interest and drive to learn and make an impact in education. What brought us together was not only our interest to learn how to make an impact in education, but our drive to make an impact ourselves.  Our schooling is something of great value to all of us and we celebrated the opportunity to provide students from underserved communities a highly engaging and rigorous academic summer program.

This summer, I have taken a behind-the-scenes role as the Public Relations Intern. I remember walking through the halls on the first day of the summer program, seeing teachers nervous yet excited to find their space in the classroom. Again, at the end of the first day, the teacher interns were filled with a great energy that contradicted their tiredness from long hours of work. One 7^th grade Writing teachers closed saying, “I’m so happy today happened!” as he was walking out to find his ride.  In a charmingly simple and sincere manner, he summarized the way I felt at the end of each school day.

I definitely do not claim to have unlocked the secrets of “good” teaching. But I do believe Breakthrough has cracked the code in many ways. The program brings together high school and college students with a variety of career goals and upbringings to spend a summer with students from underrepresented backgrounds and underserved communities. The connections we built with them in the classroom: the field trips and extracurricular activities we experienced together…they all allowed us to bond and find so many fulfilling moments in our Breakthrough summer.

Breakthrough is finding success with teachers and students, and I, for one, am so much better because of it. I feel I grew so much as a person and learner, and became all the more driven to help create quality educational opportunities for all students. I sincerely hope that one day I too can become one of those memorable teachers to my students.

-Joel Ponce

P.S. If you ever come across this, Bill Gates, I invite you to come see our Breakthrough Silicon Valley teachers in action…since you’re curious.

Read More

About This Blog

The Breakthrough Blog was started in Summer of 2014 by Public Relations Intern, Joel Ponce:

I experienced Breakthrough for the first time during my 7th grade summer, when I was just eleven years old. Seven years later, I spent my first summer out of college working as a teacher intern for Breakthrough Silicon Valley. I was now the 7th grade teacher rather than the 7th grade student. Breakthrough's dual mission of preparing motivated students for a four-year college and inspiring high school and college-age students to pursue careers in education is one I truly connected with. This summer, I was happy to return as the Public Relations and Special Projects Intern and continue to learn and experience how Breakthrough impacts the lives of so many students every summer.

It is my hope that many other Breakthrough teachers, instructional coaches, supporters, and staff alike will use this blog to share their passion for Breakthrough Silicon Valley.

To find out more about Breakthrough Silicon Valley, please visit our website: http://breakthroughsv.org/

Read More