At Teknor Apex, a high-tech firm in Pawtucket, Tom Holstein is working on the cutting edge of commercial technology as part of a research team creating products to supply the growing market for halogen-free, flame-retardant insulation compounds.
But Holstein isn’t a Teknor Apex employee; he isn’t even a consultant. He’s a 10th- and 11th-grade chemistry teacher at Portsmouth High School.
Holstein is one of five teachers participating this summer in the pilot edition of Leadership Initiatives for Teaching and Technology (LIFT2), a program created by Gov. Donald L. Carcieri’s PK-16 education council and run by the R.I. Economic Development Corporation (RIEDC).
During the school year, the five middle and high school educators teach science, technology, engineering and math, known collectively as “STEM.” This summer, LIFT2 has them exploring the business side of those subjects in six- to eight-week stints at four of the state’s top companies – Cox Communications, Raytheon, Rite-Solutions and Teknor Apex – where each teacher is assigned to work on a STEM-related project.
“It’s been a great experience so far,” said Holstein, who has been a teacher for 14 years. “I’ve learned a lot about industrial experimentation.”
That’s exactly what the program’s creators want to hear. Their goal is for the teachers to incorporate their newly acquired private-sector knowledge into their classroom lessons, and also use it to encourage more students to pursue careers in high-tech industries. They also can bring their students back to their work sites on field trips.
“We want to make sure that our education and work force development system is producing the types of skills and experiences that can fuel a 21st-century innovation economy,” said Saul Kaplan, executive director of the RIEDC. “So LIFT2 is a really exciting program that tries to make that connection, by putting teachers directly into companies that are good examples of the kind of 21st-century economy we’re trying to build.”
The program is the brainchild of David Cedrone, who is the STEM program manager for Carcieri’s PK-16 Council. Cedrone came to Rhode Island two years ago from Massachusetts, where he previously had spent four years running a federally funded LIFT2 program. Industry Initiatives for Science and Math Education, a similar program in the San Francisco Bay Area, also was used as a model.
“Students by and large don’t know what they will do with their math and their algebra curriculum,” Cedrone said. “They don’t have a clear perspective on how this gets applied or what it might look like as a career, or even simply as a passion or an interest that a student wants to pursue.”
He continued, “In my experience, we found that many teachers don’t have that experience either. Many teachers haven’t worked in industry, or if they did, it was a long time ago.”
At the West Warwick headquarters of Cox Communications, Jennifer Sawyer, who teaches math and computer networking at Charles E. Shea High School in Pawtucket, has spent the past six weeks conducting a staffing analysis of the telecom giant’s IT department. She found that IT encompasses a wider array of jobs than she had realized.
“When I came into this, I was thinking that I was just going to work with the networking portion of IT,” Sawyer said. “But I actually learned all about the different areas of IT, and I can take that back to my students to say IT isn’t just sitting in front of a computer.”
One way Rhode Island’s version of LIFT2 differs from its Massachusetts counterpart is its funding source; the companies that agree to host the teachers for externships pay their $800 weekly salaries. (In order to reduce the paperwork burden on the firms, the teachers are technically employees of the EDC, but their wages are paid by their hosts.)
LIFT2 and similar initiatives follow the decades-long trend of more partnerships between the business and education communities, according to Elena Silva, a senior policy analyst at Education Sector, a Washington, D.C., think tank.
“We see an increased emphasis on improving the quality of teachers,” she said, “and this is perceived as one way to do this, where you have a business that’s having a role in educating teachers, since the education-reform community pretty much across the board agrees that we are looking for ways to improve teacher growth.”
A study in 2002 by Columbia University found that students of teachers who participated in externship programs scored significantly higher on science exams after their teachers returned from their work experience.
Those findings matched the results of a survey conducted last year among teachers who participated in the San Francisco Bay Area program, nearly all of whom said their participation increased their enthusiasm for teaching and 96 percent of whom said they gained a greater appreciation for how STEM subjects get applied in the business world.
There is also the anecdotal evidence. Cedrone still hears from Massachusetts teachers who participated in LIFT2, including one who worked at the Mount Washington meteorological station and another who studied the Big Dig tunnel collapse with a top engineering firm.
Catherine Gurspan-Tobiassen, another one of this year’s LIFT2 interns, said her externship with Rite-Solutions has forever changed the ways she will teach her middle school students at St. Philomena School in Portsmouth.
Asked if she would recommend the program to colleagues, she replied, “Without a doubt,” adding: “I’m evangelical about it – I know that sounds over the top, but it’s true.”
Along with the community benefits, the companies involved in LIFT2 said they like the program’s leverage – one teacher will interact with 75 to 100 students a year – and they hope it will help to recruit the next generation of Rhode Island engineers, scientists and other high-tech workers.
“This fits in with our general feeling that it’s important that we have [local] young people who choose sciences and engineering majors, because that directly affects our work force,” said Dr. John Andraze, chief technology officer at Teknor Apex, where many employees come from the University of Rhode Island. “That’s who we hire.” •
