Giving Compass' Take:

• Chicago Technology Academy (ChiTech) offers student internships as part of a wider effort to enhance project-based learning and expose students to more experiences outside of the traditional high school classroom. 

• How does incorporating internships into project-based learning advance student learning? What are the benefits? 

• Read about Drexel's cooperative education model that blends paid work and experiential learning. 

As an African American teenager from inner-city Chicago, Blanton didn’t look like most of the other people in the high-rise offices, and that was kind of the point. Most students at his school, Chicago Technology Academy (ChiTech for short), don’t come from places with a lot of college graduates and corporate connections—the sort of folks who can show young people, by example, that they can prosper in the professional world.

So, for the past two years, every ChiTech senior has spent a month out of school working full time at (largely) tech-oriented internships. With this “Real-World Learning” program, ChiTech joins a growing number of schools devoting big chunks of the year to internships, despite the perennial classroom time crunch.

The internships are also part of a larger turnaround effort at ChiTech centered on project-based learning. The school, where more than 90 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and 14 percent are counted as homeless, was founded in 2009 to teach skills valued by the booming tech sector. But it was nearly shuttered three years ago due to poor student performance, a reckoning that forced an ongoing re-evaluation of which “real world” skills really matter and how best to teach them.

Financial literacy is one of several side lessons of the full-time internships for his students, along with learning to navigate lobby security without state-issued identification and how to behave and dress at the office.

Then there are the larger lessons, such as building a network of professionals willing to help them succeed, gaining a vision of the world beyond high school, and taking initiative. Before Real-World Learning, Pavlov said, “our students were having a hard time making decisions about their plans after graduation, because they couldn’t envision it.”

Read the full article about student internships by Chris Berdik at The Atlantic