That "CTE" Guy - CHAT-CTE: Finally—PD That’s Personal

Plano ISD's enrollment has dropped every school year since 2010-11. Their CTE programs have grown. They're opening a 150,000 square foot career center this month — designed so programs can be phased in and out as the trades change. Being the growing thing inside a shrinking district is a win. It's also a position worth having your radar up about. The lesson: every semester I write each kid a lette...

Plain, topic-forward, unmistakable. Any CTE teacher who's ever wondered which document they're supposed to be writing sees that and clicks. It's also the most searchable title of the season — nobody else is making content on this and people look for it. ALTERNATES "Nobody Needs Bloom's Taxonomy at a Workbench" — funniest, most shareable, most likely to get sent to another teacher. Downside: reads...

Windham School District in Texas has one hundred campuses and over forty CTE programs — welding, construction, CDL, the same NCCER credentials your kids are chasing. Every campus is inside a Texas Department of Criminal Justice facility. There is a welding instructor somewhere in Texas who drives to work, goes through a metal detector, and teaches shop. A state grant bought them augmented reality...

CTE might be the last bipartisan issue in America. Everybody agrees with us now — which is the most dangerous moment a movement ever has. New research says intensive CTE works: better jobs, better wages, real outcomes for kids the academic track was losing. But when comprehensive high schools just expanded their offerings, there was little effect on graduation and four-year college enrollment went...

Brown University looked at 1.74 million California students and found something the trades have known for three hundred years: attempting the hard thing and failing beats never attempting it at all. But only when somebody's standing close enough to catch it. In the shop, your mistake gets corrected and disappears into your skill. On a transcript, it gets recorded and follows you. Same kid, same mi...

Week one is over. The shop's standing. Nobody's bleeding. And a stack of IEPs landed on your desk with a bunch of acronyms nobody explained. News: College Station ISD opened its first CTE center on day one — eight pathways at once — and the scheduling detail that shows somebody actually thought about the kid. Plus the federal government rescinded a 1979 civil rights review requirement specific to...

Different kind of episode. School is starting for most of you this week. You do not have time to sit and think about individual episodes of a podcast right now. So here's the greatest hits. Six frameworks from Season 3 so far. In order. Fast. All of them. So when you walk into your building on Monday, you can carry the whole toolkit with you. Build, refine, lock. Teach less, build the fort, be you...

Who gets to shape what happens next in CTE? Not the boards. Not the districts. Not the state office. Not Rick Hess writing op-eds. It's you. In week two. Deciding — usually without knowing it — which kids belong in your program and which kids shouldn't have gotten scheduled. News desk: Lauderdale County, Mississippi opens a brand new CTE Center on the first day of school — and how to protect the w...

Trust is all we have in the end. And you have exactly one shot to prove it — the first ten minutes of the first day of the year. News desk: WSWHE BOCES is loading up a mini-excavator, welding equipment, and student demonstrations for the Washington County Fair. Actual CTE, in the middle of the funnel-cake stand, where the community can see it. And two students from Wilson Talent Center just won Mi...

This is a different kind of episode. Two news stories, both about what happens when the system fails to show up. First — the federal investigation into the Connecticut Technical Education and Career System, one of the largest CTE districts in the country, over the handling of alleged staff-on-student sexual misconduct. Handled with weight. No speculation, no rant, just the facts and what they mean...

Wrong question: is CTE working? Right question: is the system around your CTE program built to help you succeed, or built to slow you down? News: Anchorage moved the CTE door two weeks earlier — freshmen touching six trades before high school starts. The certification pipeline that keeps industry pros OUT of the profession while districts beg for CTE teachers. And the EdWeek survey where nearly ha...

Somebody's deciding what CTE looks like next. Question is who. Three stories this week that give three different answers — a North Carolina district that put pilots in the cockpit before graduation, the federal administration quietly rolling back CTE data collection, and the private equity story nobody's telling: investors are buying up trade schools right now, and your seniors' families have no i...

A podcast for Career and Technical Education teachers — the welders, cosmetologists, chefs, auto techs, designers, and builders who know their trade cold and then got handed a classroom with no manual. Hosted by a working CTE teacher who's still in the room, it's real, teacher-to-teacher talk about the part nobody trained you for: turning a binder of state task codes into a year you can actually t...

Season 2 finale. Short one this week — five minutes, signature open, no news, no rant. Just a few callbacks to the season that meant something, and the thank-you you earned for pressing play. The show comes back July 1st. When it does, it's a different thing. Bigger. Sharper. Some stuff I've been building for a while that I haven't talked about yet. We'll get into all of it then. For now — finish...

At least 26 states reported a CTE teacher shortage this year. And here's the gut-punch: the industry-to-classroom teachers — the electricians, chefs, and nurses we recruited specifically for their skills — leave the profession about 25% faster than teachers from traditional ed programs. When they go, the class doesn't get a sub. It gets canceled. Whole programs disappear because nobody else in the...

It's late May. You've got two, maybe three weeks left, and the tank is empty. So this episode breaks format on purpose. We open at the News Desk with three stories about who actually values CTE work. First, the good one: Dean Technical High in Holyoke, Massachusetts unveiled a permanent wall of apprenticeship pathways — ten local trade unions, each with a QR code linking kids straight to wages, be...

What to Capture NOW Before You Forget Everything It's May. You're cooked. And every August, you wish you had notes. This week on CHAT-CTE: the five-minute capture system that protects everything you learned this year — before grading season eats your brain. Plus the news desk hits hard with Virginia's CTE Signing Day, the Trump administration's praise-then-cancel routine on CTE grants, and the tea...

Summer is almost here, and if you're a CTE teacher, you're probably caught between two feelings: relief that the year is ending, and that nagging voice in the back of your head reminding you that you said you'd plan better next year. Sound familiar? Here's the truth: the teachers who plan in summer have a completely different school year than the ones who don't. Not 10% better — a different univer...

Every CTE teacher knows what August feels like — a stack of district task lists, a half-broken curriculum from whoever taught the class before, and 180 days you somehow have to fill with real, standards-aligned work. I lived that for years. So I built Blueprint-CTE — an AI tool that reads your district task list and builds you a full year of curriculum, lessons, and assessments, all mapped to your...

Being the lead SkillsUSA advisor looks great on paper — competitions, leadership, student growth. But what does it actually cost you? In this episode, Steven sits down with a fellow CTE teacher to talk honestly about the advisor role: budget battles, student participation, getting other teachers involved, and the time it really takes. If you're advising now, thinking about taking it on, or quietly...

Forget counting down the days. In this episode I break down the strategy that gets me through the wildest stretch of the school year — when seniors are checked out, schedules are unpredictable, and real curriculum feels almost impossible. It's simple, it's practical, and it just might change how you feel about the end of the year.

Twenty four years ago I walked into a CTE classroom from the advertising industry and made project packets that looked like vacation brochures because nobody handed me a curriculum and my brain is wired for design. That was the beginning. Since then I've built curriculum using Ning communities, class websites, online course structures, instructional design frameworks, AI tools, and vibe coding pla...

In this episode, we talk about something that does not get enough attention in schools — watching out for the people you work beside. In a small school, and especially in CTE, coworkers become more than just the adults down the hall. Over time, they start to feel a little like family — the wise mentors, the work siblings, the fun cousins, and yes, the occasional crazy uncle energy too. That can be...

In this episode, I talk about the teachers union in a real and honest way — what it actually is, what it is not, and why so many educators misunderstand it. This is not about using the union as a complaint desk or a shortcut around every frustration in the building. It is about understanding the contract, respecting the purpose of the union, and recognizing why it matters so much over the course o...

Leadership changes happen in every school eventually. A new assistant director, a new principal, or a new director can quickly spark uncertainty — and the rumor mill usually starts spinning long before anything actually changes. In this episode of CHAT-CTE, we talk about what leadership transitions really mean for teachers, especially in CTE programs where classrooms and labs run on strong systems...