Curriculum: Academic Content Standards - Jake Kitten

The speaker discusses the CTE content standards and their preparedness to teach them. They feel ready to teach career planning, technology, and problem-solving. They mention using project-based learning and current technologies. They also mention bringing in guest speakers and visiting a university for senior design day. They find ethics and legal responsibilities more challenging due to student behavior issues and difficulty understanding consequences. They suggest using AI to help teach these concepts and provide real-world applications. This week we were asked to look at our CTE content standards and talk about which ones we feel prepared to teach and which will require a little bit more preparation or require some special consideration. Some of the ones I feel really ready to go ahead and teach and that I feel really prepared for is our career planning and management, technology, and then our problem-solving and critical thinking. I think our Project Lead the Way curriculum for engineering does a really good job setting up project-based learning for students so the problem-solving and critical thinking kind of comes naturally through our projects. The technology that we use, using different CAD programs, 3D printers, and editing softwares I think really gives students the opportunity to look at current technologies, not using things that are outdated. We're using kind of top-of-the-line stuff. And then our career planning and management, we do a really good job at bringing in guest speakers from the discipline. So last year we had a couple mechanical engineers, civil engineers, materials engineers from a variety of platforms come in and speak to students. We even went to San Diego State University and we observed their senior design day where their senior engineering students showcased their capstone projects across all the different types of engineering. So again, those ones I feel really ready to go about and really prepared for. Some of the ones that are a little bit tougher for me is probably going to be the ethics and legal responsibilities. Again, I think it's just really hard. The demographic of kids that we have tend to have some behavior issues and they tend to have a tough time understanding consequences and things like that. So getting across the ethics and the legal responsibilities in the discipline of engineering sometimes can be really hard for them to understand. Like when we write in our engineering notebook the importance of signing off at the end and the legality of copyright infringements and things like that. Because again, these kids tend to have a really tough time with that. I also teach math and so when kids are working on their homework, I see them on their phones and they're using photomath and they think that that's a calculator and they don't quite understand the difference between some of these things. So it can be the same thing, especially in this current generation with a lot of AI stuff, it's easy to go ahead and pull stuff from AI or to research and pull stuff off the internet without looking at the copyright or the legality behind different things like that. So I know that those would tend to be a little bit tougher. So to kind of address these challenges, I think AI is going to be something that's here to stay, something that they see a lot in their English classes, seeing if there's a way that we can use AI to help us understand it and to give these kids a good real world application learning about ethics and legal responsibilities, especially in the discipline of engineering, I think would be really beneficial for these guys.