Cavitt Junior High School - Project Lead the Way

Project Lead the Way

Project Lead The Way (PLTW) provides rigorous and innovative Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education curricular programs used in middle and high schools across the U.S. PLTW is a nationally recognized project-based curriculum serving over 350,000 students in all 50 states.

The Gateway to Technology program is taught in conjunction with a rigorous academic curriculum. PLTW curriculum is founded in the fundamental problem-solving and critical-thinking skills taught integrating national academic and technical learning standards and STEM principles, creating what U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan calls one of the "great models of the new CTE succeeding all across the country." PLTW was recently cited by the Harvard Graduate School of Education as a "model for 21st century career and technical education." The middle school/junior high curriculum is Gateway to Technology. The modules to be taught in EUSD will be Design & Modeling and Automation & Robotics.

Cavitt's PLTW: Gateway to Technology (8th Grade) and Medical Detective's (7th Grade)

During the 2011-2012 school year, the EUSD Board of Trustees requested the District Office staff to research alternative curriculums to provide students with additional learning options. The option that the Trustees supported was the inclusion of PLTW Gateway to Technology curriculum to be offered. At Cavitt, the PLTW curriculum enhanced a current course we offered, STEM Sci Tech 8, taught by Mr. Ron Pozzi. Today, Mr. Pozzi has taken the coursework from PLTW and enhanced it to create one of the components that earned us distinction as a Gold Medal Model School in STEM education. Our courses allow students to experience enrichment while allowing them to delve deep into the Science curriculum which supports our students on the State Mandated Tests. Our students have achieved outstanding results on the STAR Science tests with 96% of our students being Advanced or Proficient!

The PLTW curriculum continues at Granite Bay High School with the Program of Study: Pathway to Engineering. Students will be able to take skills and learning from the PLTW Gateway to Technology courses to support this course of study at GBHS. The instructor at GBHS working with PLTW: Design and Engineering is Mr. Steve Dolan.

Our 7th Grade STEM Course also now includes a component of the PLTW curriculum. The Biomedical curriculum enhances the curriculum written by our team several years ago. We choose to focus this course on the 7th grade curriculum focus of Life Science as we believe delving deeper into required content creates more confident scientists! We are excited to have Christina Bickley joining our Science Team and teaching these courses!

PLTW Gets Results

92% of high school seniors who take PLTW courses intend to pursue a four year degree or higher, 51% intend to pursue a graduate degree, and 70% intend to study engineering, technology, or computer science. By comparison, 67% of all beginning postsecondary students intended to pursue a bachelor’s degree or higher as reported by the National Center for Education Statistics. (True Outcomes – 2009)
About 90% of students who take PLTW courses and were surveyed at the end of their senior year said they had a clear and confident sense of the types of college majors and jobs they intended to pursue. Those students also said that their PLTW experiences were very significant in developing this self-knowledge and their PLTW experiences significantly increased their ability to succeed in postsecondary education. (True Outcomes – 2009)
College students, who took PLTW courses in high school, study engineering and technology at 5 to 10 times the rate of those students who did not take PLTW courses in high school and also have higher retention rates in their fields of study.