Training for tomorrow’s careers starts in kindergarten

Beechwood Independent Schools is taking the training wheels off K-12 education and reimagining what it could look like to prepare its students better for the workforce. 

“What job exists where you sit down for two weeks, you listen to your boss, and at the end you write down everything your boss said, turn it in, and you get a paycheck?” said Beechwood Superintendent Justin Kaiser. 

This story is part of our latest super issue, which examines the future of work in Northern Kentucky. Click here to learn more.

The school’s EDGE program prepares students for the workforce in kindergarten through 12th grade alongside their regular courses like math, science, social studies and English. EDGE stands for education, design, geared toward experience. 

As generational changes and generative AI change the way we live and work, schools like Beechwood are already anticipating how to get ahead of changes to the way future workers are trained. 

At the high school level, students can choose a “minor,” a four-year course of study selected for ninth through 12th grade. EDGE minors are offered in biomed, informatics, entrepreneurship, culinary, engineering, media, performing arts, environmental and fine arts. During their senior year, students complete their minors through an internship, research, or early college or dual credit aligned to the minor. 

Beechwood senior Everett Pohlgeers is a biomed minor. Pohlgeers said he became interested in the medical field through his aunt, who is the team doctor for the Louisville men’s basketball team. “The EDGE program has helped me build that dream, build my motivation and show me what all I can do,” he said.

Pohlgeers has an internship with St. Elizabeth Hospital. He is in the hospital learning for two hours a day, Monday through Friday. He works in a different unit within the hospital every day, including sterile processing, outpatient physical therapy, skilled nursing and transitional care units. 

Merle Heckman, a lecturer at NKU’s Department of Management, is not only a university professor; he also has years of experience teaching trainers worldwide. 

“We have got to get away from just the information dump,” Heckman said. “I find that, when I have freshmen, sophomores, even juniors, who I’m teaching management to, and work situations, if they don’t have a point of reference, I can talk all day long, but they can’t connect it in their heads.”

In Pohlgeers’ biomed classroom, there is an anatomage table, which is essentially a human body-sized iPad. On it are five digitized cadavers that come from people who donated their bodies to science. Students can observe abnormalities and see how different diseases the people had affect multiple organs in their systems. 

“I pull it up in front of the class, and it’s huge,” said Beechwood biomedical science class teacher Kaylee Flynn. “I can show them this is what an elastic cartilage tissue looks like under the microscope. The kids really like that, because they’ve never experienced anything like that, and neither had I.”

Pohlgeers said all of the different equipment they are allowed to use is really cool. “Being able to use that and see more in-depth is more interesting than just it being on a whiteboard,” he said. 

The class also has two mannequins. One is more basic. Flynn said it is used for learning how to help patients get in and out of their hospital bed, feeding, grooming, etc. The other mannequin is AI-powered and can talk. Flynn said students use it when they are learning how to ask questions of patients and learn the bigger picture of what’s going on. Students can also learn how to take vital signs and blood pressure because it has active pulse points. 

“That’s cool,” Flynn said, “because, when I’ve taught similar classes in the past and we learn vital signs, I was never able to tell if they just made up a number or not. With this, I can control the mannequin’s vital signs, and, when they take the blood pressure and tell me what it is, I can assess it more easily.” 

Continuum of learning

This type of work is not going on only at the high school level. 

Beginning in kindergarten, every student experiences personalized, concept-based learning that continues through fourth grade. In fifth through eighth grade, students participate in “seminar,” a challenge-based curriculum that develops problem-solving skills through increasingly complex, real-world projects. Local businesses present many of these “challenges,” providing students with hands-on experience in creating solutions. 

By seventh and eighth grade, seminar expands to explore multiple postsecondary fields, mirroring the minors offered in high school and connecting students with business partners to tackle industry-specific problems.

Beechwood Assistant Superintendent Sarah Schobel said that students in seventh and eighth grade do challenges in each of the offered high school minor fields, so they get exposure to each topic before having to select one in ninth grade. 

“Workforce development preparation, the skill development doesn’t begin in high school,” said Schobel. “This starts down in kindergarten. There’s a continuum. They’re doing challenges with partners in kindergarten. Every year they’re adding more. So, by the time they get to high school, they’re used to feedback.” 

Beechwood works with 170 community partners in the EDGE program. Kaiser said kids being exposed to these partners so early builds the idea of workforce retention. He said a lot of their kids go away for college and don’t come back, but, if a business builds a relationship with students while they’re in school, they might be more likely to want to work there. 

Through his experience training people, Heckman said he has learned that people do not learn as well when they’re just talked at. Heckman said one method of learning he finds successful is when people learn something, go out and practice it, and then come back to share their experiences with others, helping them learn in the process. 

“How many times did you cram for a test and the day after you crammed, the test was over, a couple of days later, you had a hard time remembering?” Heckman said. “The more that we take education and make it practical, make it real, the better off we are.” 

Heckman said the idea of a four-year college degree is something he is no longer sold on, even as a university professor.

“In many ways, it’s been watered down, kind of just shuffle people through, and I think it’s going to come to where, with people having to pay so much and not knowing exactly what they’re getting into,” Heckman said. “We’re having people graduate with MBAs who are getting jobs at Starbucks.” 

Everything ‘keeps changing’

The number of students earning college degrees fell for the second year in a row, according to a new report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. According to the report, the total number of people earning any undergraduate credential (bachelor’s degrees, associate degrees and certificates) fell by 2.8%, or almost 100,000, in the 2023-24 academic year, the most recent year for which data was available. 

Heckman said that, when he considers the skills people have, no matter what training they’re going to go into, even with AI, there will always be a need for human interaction skills. He said there are essential skills a person needs to be successful in a career no matter what they go into. Those include the ability to communicate effectively with others, empathy, social skills, a basic understanding of data and its interpretation, and critical thinking.

“It’s a reality that we’ve got to help people understand the life skills that they need, that they have to learn to be adaptable,” Heckman said. “Adaptability is huge, because everything just keeps changing. Nothing’s the same, and it will continue to be that way.”

One of the skills Beechwood is instilling into its students is the ability to accept and handle feedback. 

Flynn said one of the challenges students do in her class involves a population health professor from Xavier University. She said kids typically are used to just checking the boxes and turning something in and being done with it, but Beechwood stresses feedback. Midway through the challenges, the professor will come back and students will present to him what they have so far and get his feedback. 

“It’s so interesting to me to see how they perceive feedback from someone that’s not their teacher,” Flynn said. “Going through school, you’re going to get feedback from your teachers, but when it’s someone that you’re not used to, they’ve never received a professional’s feedback, and this professor, he’s very blunt, not mean, but he’s very blunt and they have to learn that feedback is a gift. He’s not being mean to you. He’s helping you.”

Beechwood students are not required to stay in a minor if they don’t like it. 

“They can switch. You can be in performing arts and be in the band, and you can be in informatics,” Schobel said. “We did some things with schedules and providing that flexibility so kiddos can explore in high school, which can save time and money before they go to college.”

Pohlgeers said his internship with St. Elizabeth and his classroom experience have shown him the multiple possibilities in the medical field and have helped him decide that he wants to pursue a career in that field. Though he hasn’t made up his mind yet, Pohlgeers said he is thinking about majoring in premedicine. 

Schobel said about 75% of Beechwood’s seniors have an internship. 

“That hands-on aspect, that ability to see things you wouldn’t be able to see in a textbook or from a teacher, is really important for finding what you’re interested in and what you’re not interested in,” Pohlgeers said. “You can’t really do that if you’re just listening to a teacher or reading a textbook.”