Inside the Classroom: Marshall Streit - Northwest High School
Inside the Classroom: Marshall Streit - Northwest High School
Inside the Classroom is a series that visits Northwest ISD campuses throughout the year and highlights the magical moments that happen between teachers and students each and every day across the entire 234 square miles of NISD.
Northwest ISD’s Career & Technical Education program believes every student should get real: real academics, real skills and a real high school experience unlike any other.
Students and teachers are getting real throughout NISD’s CTE classes, and for this week’s Inside the Classroom we visited Northwest High School’s very real welding shop where Marshall Streit is teaching students real welding skills and connecting them with real working professionals.
Mr. Streit is in his second year teaching Agricultural Equipment Design and Fabrication at NHS, a class for juniors and seniors that is part of the Applied Agricultural Engineering program of study. The program is offered at all three of NISD’s comprehensive high schools and aims to prepare students for a variety of career fields, including welding.
A veteran teacher with over 10 years of experience in Missouri before moving to Texas, Mr. Streit has brought to NISD with him a desire to ensure his students are aware of the opportunities they have beyond high school.
Inside the Classroom visited Mr. Streit’s classroom two times, with the visits a week apart, and saw two distinct examples of the Texans getting real.
During our first visit, Mr. Streit issued a challenge to his students to execute a T-joint weld. These challenges are nothing new to his students, and they have an intended purpose as a T-joint weld is one of the first skills students must display when trying to earn their AWS (American Welding Society) Certified Welder certification.
In his more than a dozen years as a teacher, Mr. Streit has seen students with the potential to be great welders falter under the pressure of a certification test. That is why he starts introducing certification skills early in the year and does so in a competitive way to add a bit of pressure.
As students prepare their two pieces of metal to be welded together, Mr. Streit walks around the shop and offers advice. One-by-one, students step into cinder block bays along the edge of the shop where welding machines are located. Once they are satisfied with their progress, they bring their T-joint welds to Mr. Streit who checks them using the same criteria that will be used on the certification test.
As most students in the shop continued to refine their T-joint welds, a smaller group is working independently on separate projects. These students are enrolled in the program’s Practicum in Agriculture course. This course is designed to give students supervised and practical application of knowledge and skills, and students are working on various projects from a gate system for a family ranch to a drawer system for a truck bed tool box to an animal feeder system.
On our next visit to Mr. Streit’s class, he is joined by representatives from John Deere and United Ag & Turf. The two men are on hand to discuss career opportunities with their companies, the John Deere Student Technician Program and offer advice to students.
Mr. Streit aims to have real-world professionals visit his class regularly to personify to students where their hard work now can lead them to in the future.
For this specific visit, the United Ag & Turf Mobile Training Unit was on hand to show off some of the tools and simulators that the John Deere equipment dealer uses to train its various technicians.
Students got to see a driving simulator in action, as well as check out a system that allows service personnel to connect remotely to John Deere agricultural machinery while it is out working on farms and ranches throughout the world.
NHS students also got to check out an air conditioning training unit and electrical skill development trainers, offering students the chance to work with the same tools that current John Deere technicians train with.
The knowledge that these juniors and seniors already display in regards to the AC and electrical units that were on hand that day is amazing. Add in their welding skills, and it is easy to see these students are certainly getting real (skills, academics, experiences, etc.) every day.
Check back regularly all year as we continue to visit students and teachers throughout Northwest ISD and offer a rarely seen look Inside the Classroom.