Award: Anna Clark is Metro Nashville's Academy Champion of the Year

One of the main factors that led me to working in Metro Nashville Public Schools is the district's commitment to making sure every student has access to success after high school. Thanks to the Academies of Nashville program, students are exposed to post-secondary skills, training, and job opportunities before they graduate high school. Each high school has a different set of academies that specialize in certain fields; at John Overton where I work, we have Interdisciplinary Research, Health Sciences, Informational Technology, and - my favorite - Engineering.

I'll be honest, when I first signed on to work at Overton, I wasn't really sure of what being part of an Engineering academy meant. I had the idea that students would learn about architecture and building things, but it was unclear to me how those skills would translate into jobs other than the vague 'Engineer' title many parents, colleges, and doll brands had started pushing. So, I was very fortunate when the academy leaders connected me with one of our business partners, Marc Pearson at Stantec.

Stantec is an international engineering firm which, in the beginning, added nothing to my understanding of the field. I signed up to do an externship with Marc where we would spend time on site at Stantec to co-create a lesson plan that I would teach my students in the upcoming fall semester.

Let me tell you, I did not expect to be as engaged and interested in engineering as I ended up becoming; there are so many different job options from environmental safety to marketing - who knew! And when I learned that Stantec had a hand in repairing the environmental damage caused by the Golden Ray shipwreck in my hometown (an event I still find utterly fascinating), I was hooked.

Marc is an incredible business partner (award-winning at that!). Together we created a mini-unit on professional digital communication or, in other words, emailing. We started by identifying a commonly shared need between the workplace and the classroom. We had both observed during the throws of the Covid-19 pandemic that people are terrible at sending emails. It was a shocking discovery for us both! But we realized that unless you are explicitly taught how to format and word an email professionally, it's not a skill that comes naturally.

The unit we designed began with a presentation from Marc about why emailing is important after high school. The subsequent lessons broke down the formatting and tone a professional email should have before students actually crafted emails sent to Marc. In the emails, they created a business proposal for providing proper hand washing instructions. Marc judged each email and selected the winner based on a set of predetermined criteria. It was a hit! And - hooray - I began to see improvements in student email responses.

This collaboration was so much fun, that I brought Marc back in the spring. We created a speaker panel of academy business partners, including Michelle Yun of Prisma Nashville, to speak to my juniors about the importance and drawbacks of social media in the workplace. The speakers were very accommodating as I also asked them to squeeze in any calls to action for motivation (Covid apathy is very real, y'all) and general career and life advice.

The speaker panel was my favorite day of the school year. I loved that the kids had a chance to meet and have an open, honest conversation with "suits," business executives with whom they may not normally interact. The students had a lot of questions about how to leverage social media to make money for small businesses and how to balance personal and work responsibilities. Marc and Michelle encouraged the students to embrace their unique skills such as being bilingual, a skill that is priceless in the working world but often seen as a deficit in the educational setting. My goal for the day was to have students be exposed to perspectives they may not have considered before, to gain insight on life after high school, and to see the possibility of themselves being in a high position of power in the future.

All of my rambling aside, these collaborations led to one of the biggest honors of my career so far: being nominated by Stantec as the Academy Champion of the Year. And what do you know, I won! Wild! In all honesty, this honor seems more than I deserve as a young teacher still learning the ropes. But, I am humbled to be recognized as I do strive to meet the needs and interests of every student.

I am one of three award recipients in the category of Partner Choice Academy Champion of the Year that were honored during the Academies of Nashville Summer 2022 ceremony. A huge thank you to everyone involved from the JOHS Academy team to everyone at Stantec to each of my students.

To read more about the awards and the academy system that Nashville has designed, click here.