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Union Public Schools
Our mission is to graduate 100 percent of our students, college and career ready.

8th Grade Center Gives Presentation On Careers-Focused Labs

A Supulpa Middle School principal watches to Union 8th graders as they work on a career's-focused lab, using Paxton/Patterson Labs curriculum.
Updated

The Union 8th Grade Center gave a presentation this morning for its Paxton/Patterson Labs offered in Future Ready Career classes at the school.

The 8th Grade Center has two classrooms, each with 12 labs. One classroom explores medical careers and the other explores a variety of other careers; both classes are for the entire year. The Union 7th Grade Center also offers different labs for one semester.

In the medical class, students can learn more about nursing, dental, mental health, veterinary, and emergency medical technicians, while the other classroom offers an assortment of other careers such as engineering, construction, hospitality, cosmetology and criminology.

Principal Michelle Cundy and the two teachers, who oversee the classes - Janet Teel for the medical careers labs and Meg Counterman for the generalized careers labs – talked about how the program has worked since it was implemented last August.

In the classes, students receive a lot of instruction on how the program works, how to upload documents and the logistics of the labs. Working, usually in pairs but no more than three, teams are assigned different modules, which last 10 days, before the students rotate to the next module. There are 12 teams of students working on a different module at any one time, which requires teachers to plan for management of time, such as changes to the calendar, and other logistics.

While there is a hands-on component to each lab, students are required to do reading and learning, teachers said,

Dr. Kenneth Moore, executive director of Secondary Education, allows the eighth graders an opportunity to explore their options before they enroll in later classes, and just as important, to determine if they do not like doing something.

Teel and Counterman said the nature of the labs means students will do a lot of ‘self-teaching’ with teachers serving as managers or assistant as kids work through the labs, a skill set which becomes more important in later grades and especially college.