This is one in a trio of articles that provide tried-and-tested, actionable advice for community partnerships in school. This article focuses on internship. You should also check out the other articles, on service learning and externship.
Bright sunlight shines across San Diego bay and through oversized studio windows, right onto Matthew’s office desk. Matthew is a junior at High Tech High International, but for almost one month, he is interning with a local communications and design firm, and he has just returned from an office team meeting. With a coffee mug in one hand and pad of paper in the other, Matthew looks he could be any one of the firm’s employees, all of whom are college graduates.
Bright sunlight shines across San Diego bay and through oversized studio windows, right onto Matthew’s office desk. Matthew is a junior at High Tech High International, but for almost one month, he is interning with a local communications and design firm, and he has just returned from an office team meeting. With a coffee mug in one hand and pad of paper in the other, Matthew looks he could be any one of the firm’s employees, all of whom are college graduates.
Matthew developed a love of graphic design during a sophomore year project, when a staff member of this communications firm formed a community partnership with the class and mentored students through their design process. That experience led Matthew to pursue graphic design for his internship—a graduation requirement for all HTH students—even though it was not directly related to marine science, his anticipated college major. During internship, Matthew worked alongside mentors who were trained in graphic design, creating actual content for clients in San Diego and Los Angeles.
While graphic design was not Matthew’s intended career path, the internship opened new opportunities and taught him a great deal about himself as both a student and an individual. He learned how he functions as a team member and realized how important it is to love one’s work. “That is something I want to bring with me throughout life,” Matthew reflects. “I don’t want to ever wake up and say, ‘ugh, work’. I want to find something that I’ll enjoy doing throughout however long I’ll have to work.”
Internship also provided Matthew insight into his own work habits, which will help him as he transitions to college. “Sometimes I’d be working on one task or multiple tasks and I really had to manage my time because due dates are due dates,” he says. “Not making the due date is very unprofessional and then it hurts the company’s reputation, which then ruins how people see me.” Matthew also learned how the post-high school world functions. “I learned how to connect with clients,” he says, “You have to be on the same page with them and really know what they want in order to create something creative and very professional. I had no idea that was part of the graphic design industry.”
Matthew’s experience illustrates the benefits of community partnerships like an academic internship. Such experiences are not simply about careers, but also about the pursuit of passion in the adult world of work. Moreover, for many students—particularly those from low-income families—the internship experience represents a powerful entry into adult networks and community partnerships.
Community partnerships are born when a school or classroom connects with a local organization to provide meaningful, engaging, and relevant experiences for students that also serve the needs of the organization. Community partnerships are not simply or necessarily about jobs and careers—rather, they are characterized by relationships and learning opportunities: students engage with community members to do real, meaningful work.
In a community partnership, the community becomes an extension of the classroom. The New Urban High School: A Practitioner’s Guide explains community partnerships as experiences that “change the context for teaching and learning…situat[ing] students in the adult world of work and learning, confronting them with unpredictable situations, new perspectives that cut across subject matters, and invaluable lessons in dealing with people in the world.”
Community partnerships offer both school and community stakeholders something valuable. Students gain real-life experience and develop opportunities for personal reflection that emphasize the relevance of academic learning while ensuring civic engagement that is focused on strengthening the community. Moreover, “research indicates that workplace learning enhances student achievement, preparation for college, attendance, and attitude, finding that students who participate in [community partnerships] are more likely to get better grades, stay in school, go directly to college, and approach life and work with a positive attitude” (National, 1999). Meanwhile, community partners gain an opportunity to introduce their work to students, increase student excitement about that work, observe student engagement and growth in the work, and mentor students who will potentially work in these professions upon their high school or college graduation.
The goal of any school-to-community program is for benefits to be reciprocal. Students gain experience, insight, confidence, and opportunities to reflect on their learning and work; the community partner, meanwhile, gains a valuable contributing member of their organization. One National Employer Leadership Council study shows that employer benefits include “reduced recruitment costs, reduced training and supervision, reduced turnover, increased retention rates, higher productivity of students and high productivity and promotion rates of school-to-work program graduates who eventually are hired compared with those of other newly hired workers” (National, 1999). Matthew’s junior internship experience offers an example of how this symbiotic relationship plays out. The student learned to transfer his skills from the classroom to the workplace, while the graphic design firm discovered an asset in someone who could produce real work for their clients.
In a community partnership, the community becomes an extension of the classroom. The New Urban High School: A Practitioner’s Guide explains community partnerships as experiences that “change the context for teaching and learning…situat[ing] students in the adult world of work and learning, confronting them with unpredictable situations, new perspectives that cut across subject matters, and invaluable lessons in dealing with people in the world.”
While community partnerships can take several forms, this article focuses on one in particular: internship.
Internship
Internships offer a formalized, facilitated learning program that provides practical but exploratory experiences to students under the guidance of an expert in the field. Internships are based on student interests, though specific career alignment is not a requirement.
“Internship is an experience in which a student becomes more than he or she was before.”
—Rob Riordan, Co-founder of High Tech High
All High Tech High students complete an immersive academic internship. Although that experience occurs in the eleventh grade, preparation for it and reflection on it are ongoing throughout all four years of a student’s high school experience. Some schools make internship opportunities available in twelfth grade, but the internship experience is more strategically placed in eleventh grade; this maximizes the potential for its post-high school impact. After all, eleventh grade is when students make critical decisions about their next steps in life—when or if to apply to college, whether to take tests like the SAT, and what life beyond school might consist of.
Above all, internship is not about tracking; nor is it about career placement. Rather, it is an eye-opening, informative experience that prepares an individual to make critical choices for the next phase of life—whatever that may be. “The purpose of an internship is not career preparation,” says Rob Riordan, co-founder of High Tech High and President Emeritus of the High Tech High Graduate School of Education.“It is preparation for life after school. Internship is an experience in which a student becomes more than he or she was before.” Riordan and others at HTH view internships as no less than “an expansion of identity.” While internships take place in businesses and offices, and feature skills that pertain to all types of work environments, their goal is not solely to introduce students to a career. As Riordan puts it, “An internship’s real purpose is to enter the world beyond school, understand how it works, and become bigger as a result of that” (Riordan, 2017).
Internships can take many different forms, but all extend from the concept of service learning. In addition, all feature the student at the center of the work. Work takes place alongside a mentor and sees the student and mentor working collaboratively to benefit the partner organization.
Academic internships feature a fluid process. Some details must take place in a linear progression; others will be ongoing. Learning begins even before a student sets foot on the internship site. For example, identifying potential internship institutions requires a student to practice public speaking, research, and collaborative learning. Securing their internship placement requires them to learn soft skills like confidence, communication, and etiquette, and more practical skills like resume and cover letter preparation, writing and revision, and strategies for articulating goals and skills, interviewing, and time management.
In Knowing and Doing: Connecting Learning and Work, Lili Allen, Christopher Hogan, and Adria Steinberg situate internships around six key components and expectations:
When an internship program commits to these six principles, students accomplish relevant and engaging work. They also have opportunities to reflect on their own learning and the importance of their work in the community.
A student’s internship experience benefits from the involvement of as many of his or her teachers as possible. School administration also plays a role, in terms of identifying the time of year during which internships will take place and the program’s parameters (how many days per week internships are done, for how many hours, etc.). There are two general variations on internships: episodic semester-long experiences, in which students go to community partners up to three days per week for full or half days; and short-term immersions, in which students visit community partners for full days every day for two to four weeks.
Regardless of structure, the internship program begins with a series of strategically- timed events and supports designed to help students find, prepare for, and enter into an internship placement.
To create an integrated, academic internship, students engage in the following work primarily with their core classroom teachers. That said, this work does not have to fall solely on a teacher of any specific discipline. As a school identifies its internship program’s goals, all academic teachers can find a space in which to work with cohorts of students preparing for internship. Every teacher is capable of supporting the work of preparing for, and seeing through, students’ experiences with academic internships.
There is no “best” approach to resolving every logistical challenge in having students outside of the school building and at a worksite. What works in one school or district may not work in another, due to a host of factors such as changing regulations, policies and procedures, or the fluctuating roles or personnel at community organizations. If there is a “best” approach, it is surely one that features flexibility and diversity.
Internship programs benefit from a few basic practices and protocols, many of which pertain to identifying and cultivating community partners. Keep the following in mind as the school’s internship program is developed:
Be on the lookout for community partners. Teachers and students request contacts for community partners at back-to-school night, open house, and school conference events. While students should not intern with their parent or guardian, personal networks can provide valuable access to potential community partnerships; parents and guardians can mentor interns who do not live in their own household.
Use the school’s networks to find partners. Educators across the school community can cull from their own professional networks, specifically considering adults who likely have the professional values and contextual understanding to be strong mentors or create positive internship experiences.
Maintain a living database of key contacts and internship site possibilities. Once contacts are identified, keep them in a central database that can be edited by teachers but accessed and viewed by students. Add to it often and populate it with useful information, such as multiple ways to contact a person, their associated institution, their role, and how they came to the school’s attention as a potential community partner. Once this database of contacts has been established, it should be updated after every internship experience and at the beginning of each school year.
Give students a script to follow when reaching out. As students begin to contact community partners, situate them as if in a call center. Such a script might address the following questions:
Mentoring Students As A Long-term Return On Investment“Our engineering mentors say, ‘wow, these kids can do something and we can be involved in helping them improve their skills.” —Brandee Brewer, Capital Region Academies for the Next Economy (CRANE) Students in Sacramento county are engaged in regular conversations about clean air and other environmental concerns via in-class mentorships, out- of-class pathway experiences, and internships. For example, one program brings students to a college campus where they work alongside college students, professors, and industry professionals to participate in hands-on diesel and clean air initiatives and experiments. According to Brandee Brewer, CRANE Career Specialist, many of these students walk away with a new understanding of and appreciation for higher education, sharing, “You know maybe I do want to go to college,” or “Maybe this is the place for me.” “Keep in mind [that] these are students who started this program not knowing what they want to do, not belonging in any way, not having found their niche,” says Brewer. “Through this process … we get them enrolled in community college classes right there.” Equally exciting for the students and the CRANE career specialists is that students work on engineering projects with professional engineers and mentors who continue to engage with students throughout the year. Mentors know that participating in such relationships does not necessarily mean a student will come work for them immediately after graduating from high school; rather, they are building relationships for long-term returns on their investment. By participating in these events, mentors “see just what the students are capable of and how they can best mentor them” in the hopes that through and even after college students may return to work with them as colleagues. |
Setting up a strong internship program requires more than just finding locations and partners. Schools must also take seriously student safety, insurance, parent permission, and student transportation.
For most of these issues, working closely with school administration and the school business office can yield the necessary documentation, but each school’s needs and expectations will be unique. Schools can treat the internship like a recurring field trip and use the appropriate permission forms. Or, a local school or district may offer a process to resolve logistical concerns and internship placements—if that is available, a school may choose to use that process.
Reflection is an essential part of the internship experience. Regular opportunities for reflection—via blogs, photo essays and vlogs (video blogs)—help students capture their daily learning experiences and provide content for longer reflections that feed into a culminating presentation of learning (POL). Daily blog prompts might consist of written responses, videos, and/or photos (or ideally, all three). These prompts can be crafted by teachers or students before internship even begins, and then rolled out daily or weekly for student response.
After internship, students present about the experience to their mentors, teachers, peers, and even families. This POL serves as a reflective capstone of the entire internship experience, and includes the work students did leading up to the internship. High Tech High students deliver these presentations at the internship site, in front of student peers, the school advisor, the site place mentor and colleagues, and often family. Students discuss their work, how they grew as a student, how they changed as a person, what skills they gained, how they will implement these, and more.
Allen, L., Hogan, C. J., & Steinberg, A. (2000). Knowing and doing: Connecting learning and work. Providence, RI: Northeast and Islands Regional Educational Laboratory at Brown University.
Corporation for National & Community Service. February 2, 2017. What is service learning? AmeriCorps. https://www.nationalservice.gov/.
National Employer Leadership Council. 1999. Intuitions confirmed: the bottom-line return on school-to-work investment for students and employers. http://fles.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED430083.pdf.
Riordan, R. (2017). Personal interview.
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