Teaching Channel Talks Episode 106: Building “Future Ready” Students (w/Lindsey Dixon, NAF)

Dr. Wendy Amato: Welcome to Teaching Channel Talks. I’m your host, Wendy Amato. And as often as I can, I jump into conversations about topics that matter in education. And in this episode, we’re going to hear from the vice president of product and innovation for NAF. It’s my pleasure to welcome Lindsey Dixon. Hi, Lindsey.

Lindsey Dixon: Hi, Wendy. I’m so, so happy to join you today.

Dr. Wendy Amato: I’m excited to learn about your role with NAF. And in particular, I’d like to have an understanding of how you experience the mission of your organization.

Lindsey Dixon: Oh, great question in so many ways. So I’m the vice president of product and innovation at NAF. My job is to take a bit of what NAF has done for 45 years.

So we’re a national nonprofit. We are the leader in career readiness education in America with high schools all over the country, getting them future ready. My job is to take that And use technology, whether that’s software, artificial intelligence, like any of the emerging technologies that we’re exploring as a society.

And you use that to extend what NAF does into every high school in America. Not everyone yet is lucky enough to be a part of a NAF academy. And I’ll explain more about what NAF is later, but using technology, we can really bring that to every student. So that’s how I connect to NAF and its mission.

I’m really here because of our focus on equity and making All students have the access to opportunity. We know that Talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not. And that’s something that really resonates with my personal mission as an educator. And as a former high school teacher, I saw the disparities when my students in the Bronx would go off to certain opportunities or lack certain opportunities compared to other peers and even other boroughs, let alone other cities.

And that’s always really bothered me. So I’ve spent my career in education and my past several years with really trying to think about how can we Innovate the education model and use forces like technology for good to make sure that every student is given the tools that they need to succeed.

So that’s a bit of how I connect to the mission, but I’m sure there’s many more ways.

Dr. Wendy Amato: You have that classroom experience that helps make sense of what NAF is seeking to do and working to do. Is there a personal story as well that helps you think about career readiness or your own educational experience as a student?

Lindsey Dixon: Great question. I was a high school a ninth grade reading teacher primarily. Most of my students were coming in with second and third grade reading levels in the Bronx, but that’s common in a lot of other states. And one semester I got thrown an 11th grade essay writing class. And it was a test prep class, completely divorced from anything that students are going to do in their real lives or any amount of interest, right?

It had nothing to do with what are they passionate about? What are these students want to be writing about? It was get ready for this test in New York. It’s called the regents, but insert whatever test you want college prep or high school graduation test. And it was just all about drilling them on the strategies to beat this test.

And I just thought how. It kind of, loops us around to where we are today with the conversation about AI and our human skills, but like how almost inhuman of us as educators and whoever decided that this would be what education was, sit students down and just make them force march through boring essays.

And so I just, on my own decided one day I would raise some money and ask my family for some money and tell the kids that I wanted them to write persuasive essays and that they would. write these essays in order to get us to vote on whose was the best argument for describing a cause they cared about and that we would raise money to donate to the charity of their choice.

And I went and printed out some of those big checks. You know, I was a teacher. I didn’t have a lot of money, but I went to Staples and I printed out two checks. One was one of the winners was the Haitian Health Foundation. This is in the early 2000s, but I still remember it. And one was a Heifer International.

So, all about helping people have access to necessary like livestock and produce. And I just remember how excited the kids were to work on something real. They all stopped fighting me about having to write essays every day, and they were working hard on it because they got choice. I think choice is so important when you think about, you know, it’s one of the pillars of adult education, but we somehow act like teenagers are very much different from us, and that they want choice and autonomy and to be driven by passion and interest.

So it unlocks something for them, and I think it unlocks something for me. So most of my career since then I’ve had that narrative thread of passion based learning, project based learning, and that’s great. Very much a part of what I do at NAF with our product, KnoPro. But that’s a fun story.

I haven’t thought about actually in years. So I’m really glad you asked me that question.

Dr. Wendy Amato: It is exciting when we see our own teaching. skills evolve because we see the spark in our students. And I think you and I are both aligned in wanting to help accelerate this skill development for educators by providing them with tools and resources that will help them help their students.

I’d like to know a little bit more about KnoPro.

Lindsey Dixon: Yeah, absolutely. So, KnoPro, it’s K N O P R O dot org. For anyone that looks it up, it is a 100 percent free platform that helps students have real career opportunities. I like to say it solves the problem of the blank resume. So I don’t know if you or other former educators know what that’s like, but certainly teaching 11th and 12th graders, I know what that’s like to sit down and to work with young people to go off into the world college career.

And you ask them for a mock interview or you help them prepare their resume and it’s blank. Mine said Chuck E. Cheese when I was a high school student that did not open very many doors for me. So at NAF, we really tried to think of what is the product that we could build aligned with our mission, aligned with our pillars, where we’re very focused on helping young people develop.

Their future ready skills the connections they need and social capital they need, as well as the awareness of what careers are out there. Drone operator was not a career very many years ago. And you know, beach body workout, the gym leader wasn’t a thing, you know? So like every five years or less, careers KnoPro, this free platform to offer students all over the country anywhere.

13 and up the opportunity to complete real world projects.

Dr. Wendy Amato: Lindsey, you’re describing KnoPro, and it sounds like an amazing way to help students demonstrate professional experience. How did that evolve and what is it like, how does it work?

Lindsey Dixon: So it evolved after a year of pilots. We worked with companies like Lenovo and other amazing partners on our board to come up with an idea that would let students do something real, like something that goes on their resume real.

And so we recruited high school teachers and high school students from all over the country, and we paid them to help co create a product that teachers would really use, that they would find easy and standards aligned and engaging for themselves, and that students would think was awesome. So it’s designed to look cool to Gen Z and Gen Alpha, and to be something that they could use on their phones or on any device in any classroom at home, at school.

And again, we worked with our amazing partners with Lenovo and Merck and the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation and Delta Dental Institute and many others to craft our content and curriculum in a way that gives students that spark. They see a real problem in the world, a real problem in this industry, and they’re able to tackle it in groups or by themselves and use their creativity.

In a way that really lets them stand out for these companies and, but really boosts their confidence and their skills as well. So after a year of pilots, we just launched this past September, 2023. So we’re just a few months in, but we’re already in all 50 States.

Dr. Wendy Amato: Congratulations. Thank you. Sounds like the newest opportunity through NAF.

Since NAF is decades old, I’d love to understand the evolution of the organization. Can you share some of the historic trajectory of what you’ve been providing as we get students future ready?

Lindsey Dixon: Absolutely. So NAF started almost 45 years ago, and it started with a single Academy of Finance in New York. So that would be where even 45 years ago, people were asking that question, how can we change the model of what school is?

How can we stop this just being a test prep factory or? Something based on seat time, right? How many minutes did a student sit here and pass this class? So even 45 years ago, leaders in this field and education and industry, we’re thinking, how can we bring education and industry together and what could sit in the middle to coordinate those relationships?

And that’s how NAF was birthed and started growing. And it is now in 34 states. We have over 600 academies with the career pathways ranging from healthcare to finance to technology. So slowly over time from that first academy of finance, people started to ask for more support. I want to know how to do this, but I may not be interested in finance.

What about hospitality, healthcare, engineering? So we’ve added these career pathways as we’ve gone along and we help schools figure out how to set up their curriculum. So they really are making. Students future ready and build an advisory board so that there are internships available for your students, but yes, even in rural communities or areas while where that might be a little bit harder.

That’s some of NAF’s special sauce.

Dr. Wendy Amato: If you all are providing career focused curriculum, is that something that plugs into an existing school model, or is it offered in parallel as an enrichment? What’s the experience like for a student?

Lindsey Dixon: It’s very flexible. So our curriculum that we work on building either ourselves or with partners is deployed probably different across every academy.

But definitely part of it is that during the day students would be working on these different courses this curriculum. It’s not just seen as an elective or an extra something they do after school so that part is true and absolutely would be embedded in what students day to day experiences like, but some of them may have their own home grown curriculum they’re using or a local partners curriculum.

Or they mail may avail themselves of mass curriculum on a national level or a mix of all of those different things. So we very intentionally knowing our teachers and knowing what it’s like to work in schools. We have made this a very flexible format that works really well in a variety of different types of schools.

Dr. Wendy Amato: Lindsey, help me paint the picture for our listeners and share a story about one of your learners who you’ve seen really benefit from NAF.

Lindsey Dixon: Awesome. One that comes to mind is a student His name is Aditya. He participated a few months back in a challenge on KnoPro that we ran with Lenovo. The Lenovo is so much more than just computers.

A lot of, you know, young people may just think, oh, that’s just about laptops. And Lenovo is a global juggernaut of all different types of technology. And they wanted to work with us at NAF and specifically on KnoPro to ask young people, how can technology be used to more equitably help young, other young people, your own peers get into college or pick the right career for you.

So that future ready piece that NAF does so well, how can students themselves use technology to do that? And Aditya. Built his own artificial intelligence chat bot and did all the prompt engineering and like went so above and beyond in the project itself that it really only asked him to give us the concept.

Tell us what you would do with technology and do a three to five minute pitch video. That’s all you have to do for KnoPro is learn about the issue, decide whether you want to solve it with a product, a marketing campaign, or a business pitch and then pitch it. But you certainly aren’t expected to go out and build it.

You don’t have to run a real marketing campaign and you certainly don’t have to build a real chat bot, but Aditya did. And he won first place, I think, I believe it was either first or second, but you know, not only does that young person now get thousands of dollars in cash that they can spend, however they like to benefit their future or their family and he’s got Lenovo on his resume.

He also has a real checkbox out there in the world that he can tell his next employer that he built by hand custom. So that’s pretty transformative to me and so much different than the traditional Schooling experience. I just wish everybody had a nose about KnoPros and say they could have a KnoPro.

It’s free any device, please use it. But I’m so glad that Aditya found out about it and it was able to do that. Cause that’s such a step above what you would ever think you might see for high school students. So impressive.

Dr. Wendy Amato: I’m impressed. I’m impressed. Me too. I’d like to have that credential on my resume.

Lindsey, I’m going to switch the subject a little bit. I’d like to see what kind of myths are out there about future ready or career ready And maybe clear up some of the misconceptions that people may have about this type of education or program.

Lindsey Dixon: Great question. There’s two that spring to mind. So, the first is, I like to say rather avuncularly this ain’t your granddaddy’s CTE. Like this is not the CTE of the sixties and the seventies and the eighties. I think rightly so back then some parents and other educators had the hesitations about what does career and technical education mean?

What is career readiness? Are you siphoning off particularly black and brown students? into lesser than career trajectories and are they not going to college? And in some ways that was true decades ago, but certainly within the last 20 years the model of CTE and career readiness career readiness has shifted and it is absolutely a both and pathway.

Absolutely you can prepare and we do prepare students to go to higher education, but we also make sure that they do so with a knowledge of. What are their skills? What do they want to work on? So they pick the right training program so that they pick the right major. So that’s one of the things I really want to dispel because I think that still lingers out there.

And sometimes people worry, Oh, you know, I don’t want my student to, or my young person to just be a plumber. They’re going to college. Well, first of all, plumbers make excellent money and we all need them. And many of them do go to college as well. But second of all that’s just not what CTE is.

Not anymore. So that’s the that’s the first one. And the model itself is about Separate paths, and then I think related but separate. There is a notion that it’s one size fits all, the only way to be successful in the United States or the world is you must go to college and you must obtain a four year degree.

Not only is that not true, it’s never been true and it’s It’s not ever supposed to have been, I don’t think personally, the sole focus point and focal point of the education system. When that has happened in recent decades, that is where you get the oversaturation of time spent on testing and worrying about, you know, this is the only pathway that we So while we’re really proud of the fact that 99 percent of students graduate, if they go through our NAF academies, 99 percent of them graduate high school and the vast majority of them in the 80 percent and higher signal that they are going to go onto college, we know that’s not a one and done, it’s not the only pathway.

There are many other opportunities for young people in civil service and service to their country training programs and apprenticeship programs. And college. So it’s a yes. And so both of those things are big misconceptions. I still hear the old model of CTE and the one size fits all marching straight into college and for some reason they don’t go or don’t graduate.

They’re a failure. And neither of those is true.

Dr. Wendy Amato: I hear sometimes people with very narrow understandings of what kinds of careers we are preparing students for their programs where your options were cosmetology or mechanics, auto mechanics, and that’s just not the case now. Absolutely, actually, with all that you bring to the table when we talk about emerging technologies and different ways of delivering and accessing instruction.

The world is open and we can prepare students for careers all around the globe and in, in all industries.

Lindsey Dixon: That’s so true.

Dr. Wendy Amato: That’s a big deal. This is different. If people are looking at career readiness through an old lens, it’s time to break it.

Lindsey Dixon: It is time to break that narrative. Absolutely.

It’s important.

Dr. Wendy Amato: I love that. Tell me more. Are there other things that people should know about NAF or about career readiness? What am I forgetting to ask about? What would we like people to know?

Lindsey Dixon: I think one of the things that NAF gets right is that it’s a holistic picture. So we’re not just focused on one piece of the puzzle, like internships.

Now that’s important, but only 2 percent of high school students get internships in America. 2%. So we like to say we built KnoPro for the other 98%. Every kid deserves to have something amazing on their resume. They deserve, before they pay upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to college, potentially, they deserve to know whether or not they’re even going to like that major.

Did you know that the majority of students in America choose and pick and switch their major up to three times or more? Credits that don’t transfer money that is sunk into something that you’re not going to use. So one thing I think NAF gets right and lost time. One thing I think that NAF gets right is the ability to explore all of those things and learn what you like and don’t like while you’re in high school.

But again, it’s not just that one piece. So it’s not just the internship. Well, that’s super important. And it does help you with the social capital and that social connection piece. That’s massive. Most of us, nine out of 10 of us still get jobs through who we know. So we need social capital and NAF does focus on that.

But NAF also focused is on skill development through our academies and through our KnoPro product. We measure quantitatively skill gains in the future future ready skill areas like problem solving, communication, collaboration. Those are the ones that. all employers ask for. It doesn’t matter how the software changes or how AI changes the game, you’re going to need those transferable human future ready skills.

And so NASA focuses on the skills. And then the other piece of that kind of holistic puzzle is the aspiration. You have to take time. It’s not enough to get to meet your guidance counselor or college counselor twice a year, which is because of the high student to counselor ratios, how much time kids get.

That’s not enough. So you need to embed all throughout their four years of high school and beyond the opportunity to learn more about what’s out there. What are careers in AI and engineering and emerging different aspects of hospitality and ecotourism, for instance, if you don’t know that it exists. How could you ever follow that career path?

And so that’s something that I’m really proud about, and I think NAF does really well, is that holistic piece. We call that our outcomes driven work based learning framework. So it’s really focused on not just checking a box that a career fair attended, which is some of that old school CTE I was talking about.

Yes, every student sat through a career fair. But what was the outcome? What did they learn? But did they learn about themselves? What skills did they develop? So that’s something where I think NAF is really leading, and I hope more programs and schools will jump on board with us and make this much more of a equitable experience for all high school students.

Dr. Wendy Amato: The best schools don’t operate in isolation, and I wonder if there are insights you can share with us about NAF coordinates.

Lindsey Dixon: Yes. So while we have a national board that has like I said, all kinds of amazing companies that we work with, we also work with their employees and other organizations locally.

That is so important for schools and principals and to be able to work with their local partners on things like internship opportunities, but not just that aligning curriculum, making sure that their curriculum is updated and aligned to. Industry recognized certifications and standards that are going to be really meaningful far longer than any offense.

But any curriculum standard that is solely based on K 12 and access to college isn’t going to hold as much weight as saying, Oh, well, this is, you know, aligned to the the Cisco networking framework. Well, that’s going to carry some real cachet. On students resumes, and it’s gonna make the teachers so much more knowledgeable if they’re able to work with these advisory board members to go over their scope and schedule and understand the sequence of their curriculum and bring in new donations hardware software and yes those guest speaking opportunities and internship opportunities so math has lots of different ways that we can work with schools to help them build out their advisory boards and tools that have been built over the last four decades to help them do that themselves.

So that they have that sense of ownership of, you know, this is my advisory board and they work for my local community and I think that’s a really powerful approach to do it locally.

Dr. Wendy Amato: Let me finish by asking you how an educator, whether a classroom teacher or a school leader, how would an educator access NAF and launch a program to help their students?

Lindsey Dixon: Great question. So there’s a few ways. You can just go to NAF. org, N A F. novemberalfafoxtrot. org if you can’t understand how I was saying it. So through there, you can find a way to find academies near you. If there’s others that you want to talk to and learn more about the program, there’s information that you can reach out to specific point people that will be able to help you in your journey.

Into becoming an AF academy and learning what that means and finding all about the amazing ways that you can get support. A lot of our curriculum and other materials is also available on our website. And then certainly, as I said earlier, you can go to KnoPro. org and take advantage of all of our content and curriculum and scree.

And across all industries now. So those are two kind of core sites that we offer, but certainly to start an academy, just go to NAF. org and reach out to us. And we will get back to you really quickly because we love to work with schools.

Dr. Wendy Amato: No barrier there. Thank you for that. Oh, not at

Lindsey Dixon: all.

Dr. Wendy Amato: And Lindsey, thank you for sharing this conversation.

Lindsey Dixon: Thanks, Wendy.

Dr. Wendy Amato: To our fellow educators, thank you for joining us. If you’d like to explore topics that Lindsey and I discussed today, please check out the show notes at teachingchannel. com slash podcast, and be sure to subscribe on whatever listening app you use that will help others to find us. I’ll see you again soon for another episode.

Thanks for listening.