Lisa-Marie Reinhart

Speaking at

• ALL Ohio Conference 2026

  Expanding Access to CTE: A Career/Workforce Readiness Design Incubator Model

  Wednesday, July 22 · 9:45 AM – 10:30 AM · Regent 1

  The challenges in our CTE context include limited space and programming capacity to meet growing demand in CTE pathways. In this session, we highlight a collaboration among a CTE program, regional school districts, a nonprofit education organization, and several nonprofit community organizations to design and deliver a high-impact career and workforce readiness professional learning experience. The primary goal of the learning experience was the redesign of the content curriculum for students in grades 5–12 with opportunities to learn “beyond the classroom.” Together, we developed and implemented a professional learning model that expanded the reach of CTE programming in Delaware County to nearly 100 general and special education who created career and workforce-ready learning experiences for over 6,000 middle and high school students. The students gained and practiced vital durable skills, explored careers, and used modern workforce processes, such as design thinking, to solve real problems for a real community partner. We call the model a Career/Workforce Readiness Design Incubator. Design incubators emphasize teacher creativity and design thinking to address the limitations of traditional curricula that often lack an intentional focus on workforce and durable skills such as leadership, creativity, problem-solving, and communication. The goal of an incubator is to generate opportunities for students to learn their academic content while also engaging with future work skills and practices, including awareness of generative AI and automation (McGowan & Shipley, 2018). To this end, teachers learn practical strategies for aligning their academic content with the needs of community and business/industry collaborators, which is an approach we call learning beyond the classroom. This approach centers learning on the content while solving a genuine problem alongside a community partner. It’s within this real-world process that students gain practical workforce skills, and, even a simulated work experience. To make this a curricular and pedagogical reality, teacher participants learn and apply authentic learning models, such as design thinking and service-learning, to up-skill and modernize curriculum in which students solve real problems for real audiences, gain critical workforce skills, and explore careers and future pathways in the process. The incubator provides wrap-around support to teachers with dedicated time to collaborate with CTE, teachers from other districts, and pedagogical experts; and, network with industry partners, gain knowledge and skill in organizing simulated work experiences, and engage in panels and gamified resource fairs that give them confidence and capacity to take learning beyond the classroom. This model is replicable and scalable, and we will share the core components that enable others to adapt and implement it in their own contexts. Participants will be active, able to reflect on these core components with pre-planned discussion and idea generation for their own contexts. Future work requires a future-ready education.