(Vol. 1, No. 1 - Winter 1996/1997)

Connecting the future to the work of schools

By John Norton

Kevin Spencer is a sweet-natured fellow, but he's wearing his business face as he briefs prospective employees in an operations room at the UPS Aircraft Maintenance Distribution Center.

"We'll be visiting several areas of AMDC, and each of you will have an opportunity to do some of the same work we do every day," Spencer says. "You all have your agenda for today's session. Please take careful notes. Does anyone have a question?"

"I have a question about the agenda," says Holly Nall, a precise, no-nonsense blonde whose briefing papers and sharpened pencils are stacked neatly in front of her.

"Okay," Spencer replies, picking up his agenda from the conference table.

"This schedule says we're having lunch at 12:30. I always have lunch at 11:30. Is this a mistake or what?"

Welcome to Future Connections, the partnership program that brings together 13-year olds from Williams Middle School and middle managers from United Parcel Service's air service center for what is often a substantive, academically based exploration of jobs and careers -- and what is sometimes a reality check for adults who do not typically spend their days sharing workspace with adolescents.

The federally funded Future Connections program spans all three grades at Williams. The program for eighth graders is called "WINGS," short for "Workplace Integration Nurturing Good Students." The goal of WINGS is to blend careers awareness and academic skills as students probe the complex web of operations necessary to deliver on the UPS pledge -- next-day air delivery by 10:30 a.m.

Principal Jan Calvert says Future Connections and WINGS are not just projects but "an essential part of the academic design" of Williams -- a school where academics has not always taken a cockpit seat.

A few years ago, the Louisville Courier-Journal labeled Williams one of Kentucky's "10 worst" middle schools. Since the early 1980s, the south Louisville school has struggled with rapid principal and teacher turnover, a large bused-in population, a changing neighborhood, and attendant ills like poor parent participation. Teachers report that many parents' highest goal for their children "is to stay in school until they reach the legal age to drop out."

When Calvert came to Williams three years ago, she says her first impulse was to create a larger sense of the world and its possibilities for the school's many at-risk kids (nearly three-fourths qualify for free lunch).

"My vision came from a 'what if'," she says. "I wondered what would happen if we focused students on their future and connected them with the world that they're going to be asked to contribute to one day."

UPS executives were wondering much the same thing, says Cindy Read, a public relations manager who coordinates UPS's involvement at Williams. While UPS employees have a long history of volunteering in Jefferson County schools, Read says CEO Oz Nelson wanted to see the company involved in more substantive school reform work as well.

Read was brought in from the outside to help and soon found herself focusing more and more on "the critical turning point" of adolescence. She became a leader in Louisville's Middle School Coalition. When the Future Connections partnership opportunity came along, she urged UPS to make the significant commitment the program requires.

Although Read is quick to say that UPS became involved because it wants to support the community, UPS realizes the company has a big stake in school success. "We're the largest employer in Jefferson County, and we know some of the students who may be struggling in the middle schools now are kids we will need to hire in a few years."

As business grows and the Kentucky birthrate shrinks, Read says it's getting harder to find enough qualified workers. An entry-level package sorter at UPS must be able to read and write, to memorize zip codes for the entire U.S., to make quick decisions while accurately sorting at least 1,500 packages an hour, and to work on a team. UPS likes to "promote from within," but in a high-stress, "overnight" work environment, employees cannot rise up the ladder without more advanced skills like problem-solving and a sound background in math and writing.

So when it comes to school improvement, Read says, "It is definitely in our interest to do something other than sit on the sidelines."

WINGS takes flight

Grant in hand, Williams teachers and UPS staff members began brainstorming last spring about the best ways to give students not only an interesting off-campus adventure but a substantive academic experience. They planned WINGS activities for each eighth grade team. The "guinea pig" group would focus on the areas of UPS that help solve daily air-delivery emergencies.

Then came a dose of the "real world" of school. By late August, when it came time for the program's trial run, most of the Williams teachers involved in the planning had transferred, leaving science teacher Theresa Craycroft alone to manage a group of 39 eighth-graders through the process.

After a training session in the school library, Craycroft and her students visited UPS four times in October. Segments of the class rotated through the airport operations center's maintenance, distribution, contingency, and staffing centers. Students knew that at the end of the experience, they would have to apply what they'd learned during a "final exercise," but they didn't have many of the details.

The adults, in fact, were still hammering out the final problem themselves. They knew a plane would become disabled after it sucked a flock of seagulls through one of its jet engines, stranding a priority shipment of this year's hot Christmas toy -- the Nintendo 64. To create a sense of urgency (and reality) the students would be told that if UPS didn't get the toys to Louisville overnight, the company would lose $100,000 worth of business to arch-rival Federal Express.

Although all the details of the final exercise hadn't been worked out, it was Craycroft's job to prepare the students as best she could by including material in her daily teaching that would support the students' visits. She knew the students would need to know something about weather and U.S. geography, something about time zones and alternate time-keeping.

And the students would need other skills, not easily taught in a few weeks: Enough math to calculate fuel consumption, enough critical thinking to make the best choice from a number of options, enough cooperation to work in teams fulfilling a variety of responsibilities.

The adults wanted to inject the students into "live action" situations at UPS, letting them observe, and even take part in, the daily problem-solving associated with a rapid service company. No one was sure how middle schoolers would react (or behave) in such situations. As it turned out, they did pretty well.

"It was something different for us," says Spencer, an aircraft materials specialist with no particular background in education. "Most of us have kids of our own, but we're not usually in an educational situation like this. I was surprised about the different attention span. You have to keep them doing something! We've tried to do a lot of hands-on activities everywhere we could."

A very tough test

When final exam time arrived in early November, Craycroft's students and the UPS staff gathered in the school library to discuss what would be expected. The kids would have several days to work in small groups on the problem. On Friday, each group would make a 10-minute presentation to an audience of UPS folk who'd been involved in the on-site experiences.

It was a challenging test that set high (but not unreasonable) expectations for kids in the eighth grade. Students were given the downed-plane problem and asked to analyze a set of possible solutions -- ultimately choosing the best one. They were expected to use skills and information they'd acquired at school and during their UPS visits to complete specific calculations and tasks.

Here's an example:

. . . In checking the computer, you have determined that the AMDC has the parts in stock. Now you must find a way to get the parts to Boston. Consult with the mechanic and Contingency to determine what time the parts need to arrive in BOS in order to get the aircraft out in time to arrive SDF at 0800Z.

The UPS staff designed the final activity so that students would not succeed unless they cooperated. They were divided into 10 four-member problem-solving teams. Each student had a specific job -- contingency, procurement, etc. -- and the answers they came up with had to be fed into the ultimate solution.

"The kids had a hard time working together," Future Connections director Shawn Ackroyd admits. "In one group we had a student who had her whole part worked out, but she couldn't complete the assignment because the student in the maintenance role said her part of the problem was too hard and just shut down. The first child was extremely frustrated."

Some of the student teams simply found the final activity too challenging and gave up. "Some of the kids were downright angry. They felt like they were being asked to do things they really hadn't been completely prepared to do, and that's probably true," says Cindy Read. Only three of the 10 teams were able to get all the way through the activity and present the correct answer.

Some lessons learned

It's fair to say that the inability of most students to complete the final exercise was less about failure and more about the learning curve involved in any project as ambitious as WINGS.

"We learned a lot," says Read. "We've tried to be tough on ourselves in assessing what went right and wrong, just like we want to challenge the kids with an assessment at the end of each project we do. I'm determined that this will be more than a field trip. If we're going to have substance, we've got to expect to make some mistakes and refinements along the way."

Read's middle school colleagues feel the same way. "This grant is all about setting higher expectations," says Williams principal Jan Calvert. "It's tough on us at times, but if our kids can't meet them the first time, it's our job to teach them how to get there."

Read, Calvert, Ackroyd and other team members agree that two changes could greatly strengthen the activity next year. First, teachers need to make sure that weekly visits to UPS are reinforced when the kids return to the classroom through what Ackroyd calls "mini-lessons" -- reviews of what was observed and learned.

Even more important, they say, teachers and students need to know the requirements of the final exercise in the beginning. This year, heavy teacher turnover and some uncertainty about who should do what resulted in a last-minute rush to nail down exactly what the culminating activity would look like.

This meant that no one could say well in advance of the student visits what skills and knowledge students would need to be successful. As it turned out, it wasn't just shortcomings in math and science that caused trouble, it was the students' ability to break down problems and work together to solve them.

"Teamwork is a big issue for UPS," Ackroyd says. "They attribute a lot of their success to that. So they want the children to see that if you're going to succeed in today's world, you have to work well in teams."

The lesson for Williams, Ackroyd says, is that while students are regularly involved in "cooperative learning groups" in the school, "we may need to work harder to make sure that those groups involve authentic teamwork where every student is doing his or her share."

Making the standards connection

The next wave of 8th graders have now completed their UPS experience. They worked more closely with computers, learned to use graphing and presentation software, and sharpened their math and English skills.

The students' learning experiences went more smoothly, Cindy Read reports, thanks to the trials and errors of Teresa Craycroft's "guinea pigs."

As a more complete curriculum for the eighth-grade Future Connections activities emerges, Williams educators want to make sure it is closely linked with the academic standards that
middle schools are expected to build into their teaching and learning over the next several years.

"We've got to tie Future Connections to KIRIS and the core content standards, because teachers are very focused on that now," says Ackroyd. "We're sharing the standards with UPS so we all know what's most important for students to learn."

Calvert believes Williams can justify the investment of time and resources in the Future Connections work, even in the hothouse atmosphere of "KERA prep."

"Part of KERA and high standards is that kids should be able to do complex tasks by the time they leave us," she says. "That's what this is all about. We have to have the courage to challenge these kids."

The Future Connections leaders can take some comfort in the words of Patrick Hume, a quiet eighth grader who likes to play the clarinet and wants to be a pilot. He's learned a lot from his UPS experience, he says.

"You have to know your science to work at UPS. And you have to do math. I saw them using equations all the time, figuring out how much parts would cost and how much time they could save. I think I'm learning what it means to work, and why we have to go to school and learn stuff. It's really interesting."
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Read more about Jan Calvert's changes at Williams Middle School

Going to UPS

Read more student comments about the Future Connections program