Sonoma Valley teachers enjoy externships

Some Sonoma Valley teachers had a chance to participate in industry externships last summer and to bring what they learned back into SVHS classrooms.

The Northern California Career Pathways Alliance, in conjunction with the Sonoma County Office of Education, sponsors teacher teams to participate in externships with industry professionals, in order to bring back industry practices in the form of a performance task for the students.

From Sonoma, two teacher teams (Jonathan Southam and Tom Edwards from SVHS Engineering Academy and Mimi Sommer and Eric Brockway from Adele Harrison Middle School) spent a week at Keysight Technologies (formerly Agilent) in Santa Rosa in June. The team toured the large Keysight campus, and were exposed to a detailed week of learning. The “task” they developed was creating LED wearable devices, which they are developing into projects for their students this year.

SVHS Workplace Learning coordinator Wendy Swanson said she hopes for a second teacher team, made up of culinary and social science teachers, to extern with a local restauranteur next summer.