Kara Lowenhagen has spent much of her professional career helping vocational agriculture students find their career paths through the FFA’s supervised agricultural experience program. That experience, the vocational agriculture teacher said, has helped her with Fall Creek High School’s new capstone requirement for the school’s seniors.
In the capstone program, Fall Creek’s seniors must complete 60 hours of research in a career area in which they’re interested before they’re certified to graduate from the school. Part of the program includes creating projects and reports about the student’s selected career, with the student making a report about it to school staff and community adults.
“In our agriculture course, we really do preach that the classroom is a portion of learning, but SAE – supervised agricultural experience – is the second part of a well-rounded agriculture education, in addition to the FFA,” Lowenhagen said. “The SAE is essentially what these seniors are doing for their capstone projects.”
Lowenhagen said the capstone program, like the SAEs, gives students experiences in areas they want to learn more about.
The requirement of completing a capstone project before being allowed to graduate is receiving good reviews from the community and students, Lowenhagen said.
“The students who’ve gone through the project say, for the most part, that it’s been beneficial and that they’re glad they did it, and they learned something along the way,” she said.
Business and industry people from the community are asked to sit in on the students’ reports and then give feedback to the students. Those people also ask questions about the students’ preparedness in cases where the students say they want to pursue a career in the areas of their projects.
Lowenhagen said the projects seem to solidify some students’ interests in their selected topics, but it’s also served to steer others away from a topic. She talked about one student who was interested in a high-level medical field who realized he wasn’t prepared for the academic rigor that field required – instead realizing that he’s interested in web design after having designed a web site for his medical-field report.
The projects also help to start students’ foundations for lifelong learning, she added.
“A lot of our students know how to do the book-work and know what we want them to do,” Lowenhagen said. “But, can they think and expand their knowledge on their own by thinking about unique projects and how to go about them?”
Leave a Reply