MetWest Internships (Part 7)
The last post described student and teacher participation in twice-weekly internships in Oakland businesses, government agencies including schools, health facilities, and social services.
Advisor/Teachers work closely with students in their sites and are responsible for connecting what they learn with the academics they teach–English, history, math, science, foreign language.
Mike Cellemme is Learning Through Internship (LTI) coordinator. He finds a site and locates a mentor willing to take and supervise a MetWest student. He talks to students about what they are interested in and want to learn more about and then finds a match between site, mentor, and student. He supervises the overall program. The process looks like this:
*ImBlaze is a website that Big Picture schools use to identify possible internships for students
A former teacher at The Met in Providence (RI), he is experienced, savvy,and committed to making the program work for students, teachers, and work site mentors. What follows describes an afternoon I spent with Mike working with students and then going to an internship work site.
Like any high school program with many moving parts involving 160 students, a dozen or so teachers, and over a hundred mentors in their workplace, some things go smoothly, some less so.
On March 21, 2019, I went to room 136 in MetWest to see Mike and Mayra Acosta (a graduate of program and now Resource Program Specialist) work with various students searching for and working in varied internships. Students came in, asked questions about their mentors and sites and left; others stayed and sat with Mike and Mayra to talk about issues that came up in their classes, Senior Thesis Project, and internships.
Here is what I observed over the next hour. Alonzo who had worked as an intern on an Oakland political campaign during the fall semester is now searching for a new internship. On her laptop screen, Mayra pulls up some possibilities for him to consider. She asks questions about what he learned during the last internship, his current interests, and what he has heard from other students about their CONTINUE READING: MetWest Internships (Part 7) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
