Welcome to Cooperative Education Specialist.

Cooperative education provides a bridge to the world beyond the classroom. It opens doors to opportunities and experiences that strengthen and enrich classroom learning. The individual nature of placement experience and the flexibility that the program demands of teachers can be challenging. But the program can also provide great possibilities for leadership, personal growth, and wonderful relationships for students and teachers alike.

Cooperative education gives students a way to explore how their aptitudes, attitude, interests, knowledge, and skills can be blended in the best possible way. It can also provide information that is beneficial to their planning beyond high school about career paths they may or may not want to pursue. In your role as an experienced specialist in the subject area, you will be able to enrich, expand, and facilitate the best learning experiences possible for your students.

Course Learning Expectations

In this course you will have the opportunity to:

• understand that preplacement/integration and placement process and activities are integral to the success of a co-op program
• explore ways that cooperative education is often built on collaborative relationships
• create, organize, collect, and use information and activities to make cooperative education meaningful and significant to a wide range of students
• identify ways to link cooperative education and experiential learning to other curriculum and other departments in the school
• learn how to design, structure, implement, and deliver a successful cooperative education program for a wide range of students with varied backgrounds, interests, and issues
• appreciate the reasons for reflective practice in cooperative education