Seeing Yourself in the Future Fellow: Lisa Ingram, West Virginia University
Fellow Report: The ISBE provided an organized approach and excellent planning materials to keep our team on track: We have confidently identified the community issue, our motivation, the purpose statement, as well as developed a one minute pitch designed to recruit new facilitators to utilize our program. We have thought about targeting a second persona which are the Future Trained Trainers, as well as possible implementation into our state's existing Energy Express programming. Our Unique Value Proposition: Seeing Yourself in the Future, a workforce development curriculum, for middle school youth that leads youth to imagine their future through career exploration, soft skill development, and hands-on practice and application enabling informed decision-making and long-term individual/community prosperity, unlike trial and error on their own that often leads to frustration and disappointment or focuses on high school students or in some cases does not exist at all within local school systems. The team has also developed strategies for possible implementation: training formats, potential partners for packaging the curriculum with an eye-catching graphic package, updated evaluation tools for use with the "trainers" and additional marketing pieces to tie the program directly to content standards. We have also worked through stakeholders and the roles of various entities within that realm. I believe the ISBE sessions helped us focus and expand outside of our initial thoughts on the program's direction--the brainstorming between our team, as well as mentoring by Cheryl has already moved the program significantly forward. Significant Results: The team has a logic model developed for the curriculum (working copy at this time--uploaded below). We have completed a literature review focusing on middle school career readiness during this first quarter (included below), which has given us additional insight on other programming--additionally the national and state data was released from the Common Measures: College and Career Readiness project that WV was a contributor--this provided additional insight for the team on focus areas, which align with our curriculum. Fall 2022 Impacts of Pilot Offering: As a result of the dissemination of the program and its initial impacts, program usage has substantially increased. Programs are currently being held in West Virginia in Wood, Marshall, and Logan Counties, as well as in the state of Ohio. There are currently 297 youth participating in the nine-week series. The evaluation results for these youth will be analyzed during the spring of 2023.
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