The Manufacturing, Transportation, Engineering and Construction Trades school is the pilot site for the program and the only one of the CTC’s three schools participating this year, said Amy Schakat, director of student services and academics.
Teachers spend an equivalent amount of time over the course of the year with the students and the Embedded English course earns students college credit through Sinclair Community College.
“They come here for the career tech programs, not the academics,” said Schakat. “(But English is) part of it and they know it’s important.”
The Embedded English program focuses on nonfiction reading and real-world application of writing and literacy skills, such as reading manuals related to their program, resume writing and creating quotes for jobs.
“We have seen great strides in the levels of reading,” said teacher Deana Harris.
The CTC students often need a high level of reading skills for the technical manuals and articles they read to learn their trades and keep up on practices and techniques in the field, said Christina Steffanni, an English teacher.
“Our students are required to even have greater reading skills than reading that fictional text (in a traditional course),” she said.
For example, an electrician’s manual would be a 1400 lexile level, a unit of measurement used to assess reading skills. Classics like “War and Peace” and “Price and Prejudice” have lexile levels of 1200 and 1100 respectively.
Steffanni and Harris reported that students also are more engaged in class.
Senior Michael Packer, an auto tech student from the Northeastern district, has earned better grades under the new embedded program and improved his reading levels.
“It’s easier than regular English … it’s stuff that has to do with our lab,” he said. “You’re not sitting in a regular class for 40 minutes.”
In welding, the students recently hosted a welding competition. For the English component, the students wrote a news release for the event, thank-you letters to sponsors and a newsletter.
“They’re not just sitting there going over nouns and verbs and writing,” said welding instructor Brian Massie. “They’re really doing stuff that applies to their field … It’ll make them better prepared for their next step in their careers.”
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