Changing Diplomas to Dollars By Improving Today's Workforce
One of the really cool things about travelling and going to summits are the really amazing people we meet and hearing about the positive impact they are having on the world. Dr. Aaron Smith is one of those people and I am proud to call him a friend. Today we talked about:
- What is the relationship between student engagement and outcome?
- How to fix our schools
- What’s working and what’s not in our existing schools
- How should current trends / breakthroughs impact teaching?
- Will robots take your job? Find out here
And I love this quote:
Kids don’t care what you know until they know that you care.
Two books came to mind while talking with Aaron: David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell and The Ingenuity Gap by Thomas Homer-Dixon (an oldy but goodie).
Dr. Aaron Smith, a 2008 graduate of Old Dominion University with a Doctorate in Educational Leadership, Dr. Aaron L. Smith has over two decades of experience in the classroom as a mathematics teacher and administrator. His dissertation focused on comparing alternative teaching certification routes to that of traditional teaching certification in conjunction to SOL results. You can find out more about Aaron on his website.
Aaron has developed a passion for workplace readiness and STEM where he has shared his knowledge as an adjunct professor at Old Dominion University and Christopher Newport University. He received the WHRO Technology Administrator Award, and the Crystal Star Award from the National Dropout Prevention Center.
Today Aaron is the proud program administrator at Denbigh High School’s Aviation Academy at the Newport News Williamsburg International Airport where they have received many honors from hosting a live downlink with the astronauts on board the International Space Station to becoming a PRIME (Partnership Response In Manufacturing Education) School by the Society of Manufactured Engineers Education Foundation.
His first book, Awakening Your STEM School enables people to take their current school and modernize it into an elite STEM Site. He is also working on a second book called Blank Check: Recreating America’s Public Schools where he writes about a principal on a quest to build the perfect public school in St. Thomas. This book should be coming out summer of 2019! It’s here where he discovered a systematic sequence to build and sustain a strong workforce.
My challenge to you this week...
Stop complaining about the school system and instead, start thinking about what a perfect school would look like and the ramifications of your new system.
