Students teach educators
Maples Met students speak of their experience at international conference
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This article was published 23/07/2018 (2660 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Two Maples Met School students went to the United States and switched places with educators and leaders.
Lauren Zielke and Jenny Vo, both students going into Grade 10, headed off to Big Picture Learning’s Big Bang Conference, an international gathering on student-centered learning, in Atlanta, Ga., to speak about their internships within STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) on July 24. They teamed up with another learner from Massachusetts and provided a session on women in STEM internships.
Vo and Zielke are the first Winnipeg students to attend the Big Bang conference representing Canada.
“This is something that you wouldn’t do in traditional high schools, so it’s a great opportunity for us,” Vo said.
Through the Big Picture Learning model, Met schools around the world dedicate their teaching to students individually, rather than to a class. The model proposes an education system that provides students with broader learning opportunities that have improved engagement with children.
Each student in a small advisory of 15 kids is led by a teacher who works closely with the group and personalizes their learning according to their interests. In high school, students have internships where they work with a mentor, exploring career options and learning in a real-world setting.
Zielke and Vo experienced this model for the first time in Grade 9 during the 2017-18 school year. Both of them are interested in the sciences and health field and embarked in internships that opened up their eyes to the various opportunities out there. They just finished an internship with the Winnipeg Prosthetics and Orthotics and Red River College’s pharmaceutical manufacturing lab, respectively.
“There’s a real value in these students teaching the adults about what a powerful internship experience is,” Matt Henderson, principal at Maples Met, said. “If the audience members are new advisors, new educators, who come and have (the students) speak ‘These are the internships, these are the experiences, these are the outcomes, these are the projects that we did,’ you can now have advisors who are relatively new now go ‘Oh, OK, that sounds really cool, I want to do that with my students.’”
The internships not only prepare students for their future careers, but it also gives them extra knowledge for university and puts them ahead of the curve. Vo said she already has experience writing a lab report in professional standards and working with biological materials, while Zielke, who wears orthotics for her left foot, created her own orthotic.
“You build a lot of life skills when you do these kinds of things. You are learning how to reach out and connect with adults, maintain a conversation, become more professional and gain those experiences,” Zielke said.