This document discusses assessing academic and technical skills in career academies. It explains that academic and technical skills should be integrated and taught together to prepare students for both college and careers. When using challenge-based learning, teachers must integrate and assess both types of skills. However, integrating academic and career technical education (CTE) content can be intimidating for teachers. Schools need structural support for teachers to collaborate on integration. Coaches should provide resources and suggestions to help teachers partner in assessing skills, rather than asking teachers to assess unfamiliar content. Over time, integration and assessment will become more seamless as teachers learn each other's content.

1. Module 5
Facilitating Challenge Case
Exploration
Section 3
Lecture 2: Assessing Academic and
Technical Skills
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2. Academic and Technical Skills
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What is it?
Academic and technical skills, when integrated and taught
collaboratively, support BOTH college and career readiness. For
schools and teams working within a career academy model, there is an
explicit expectation that
academic and work-based
instruction are combined to equip
all students with both academic
and career skills that will poise them
for success in the pathway of their
choice after high school.

3. Why It Matters in
Challenged-based
Learning
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4. Workplace Competencies
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Challenge-based learning is, by nature, interdisciplinary and
grounded in workplace competencies. The nature of a Challenge
Case requires teachers to integrate and assess both academic
and technical skills. However, as many coaches working with
career academies have discovered, integration of academic and
CTE content is not always an easy process.

5. Although CTE teachers are
required to integrate academics
into their content, the reverse
has not typically been expected
of “core” academic teachers.
The process of figuring out how
to integrate and assess both
kinds of content can be both
intimidating and overwhelming.
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Process and Integration

6. Structural Supports
Further, such integration requires
structural supports from the school
and district to provide opportunities
for teachers to collaborate and plan
together. Academic/CTE integration
does not happen by itself, and in
settings where it is not well
established, coaches will need to
both anticipate challenges and
provide relevant and practical
suggestions and resources to
teams and to district and school
leadership.
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7. Protocols
Coaches should consider how to leverage both the CTE
teachers and the core academic teachers to partner and
support one another in assessment, rather than trying to
ask both groups to assess unfamiliar skills and content.
Protocols for mapping the Challenge Case exploration onto
course standards should attend to this integration explicitly
(see the Facilitating a Challenge Case Exploration Toolkit
and PBL to CBL Guidebook for helpful tools). Over time, as
teachers become more familiar with each others’ content,
integration and assessment will become more seamless
and less time-intensive.
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8. Helpful Readings
• “Integrating Academics and CTE.” College and Career
Readiness Success Center: American Institutes for
Research (2012).
• “Career and technical education must be integrated with
academic coursework” by Gary Hoachlander and
Christopher J. Steinhauser. EdSource (November 2015).
• “Approaches to Integrating Academic and Technical
Studies.” Achieve (June 2010).
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