Education By Design
The Education by Design podcast explores the architecture of learning environments—how schools are designed, not just operated—how culture is disrupted to make way for innovation and reaching potential.
Your host, Phil Evans is a career educator and creative. His guests bring inspirational and practical ideas into classrooms, all over the world. Join him as he engages with innovators who untangle the complexity of educational systems to align with shared values, common practices, and a common language to create powerful, human-centered learning experiences.
For any formal schooling system to have an impact, the central focus must be on learning. Let's learn together.
Dive deeper on the EduByDesign Blog: https://edubydesign.com/blog
Education By Design
S1:E11 Mel Coryell on "Braiding College and Career: Indiana's Innovative Apprenticeships Strategy"
In Indiana, a bold experiment is reshaping how students learn. Through the i-Lab, more than 150 leaders have joined forces to design a statewide apprenticeship model — one that connects high schools, employers, and higher education in new ways. At the center of this work is a breakthrough partnership with IU Health, which not only trains students but guarantees them employment upon graduation.
But the real story goes beyond jobs. As Mel Coryell explains, applied learning experiences become identity work. When students step into real workplaces, they don’t just practice skills — they discover who they are, what they care about, and what they are capable of. They learn to see themselves in new futures.
At the core are the ABCs of learning: Agency, Belonging, and Connectedness. Apprenticeships give students the chance to feel seen, to belong in professional spaces, and to build agency over their own paths.
This episode invites educators, leaders, and parents to see apprenticeships not as an alternative to school, but as a powerful extension of it — a design for opportunity, growth, and human flourishing.
Discover more about i-Lab Indiana
Listen to a recording of Mel and other key players speak on a panel at SxSW Edu earlier this year: Scaling Apprenticeship Statewide: Lessons from Indiana
Follow the EduByDesign Blog to explore the podcast topics, further.
And please let Phil know what resonates with you, in the comments.
Welcome to Education by Design, the podcast that explores how schools are shaping the future of education by centering on values, embracing community voices, and building systems that work for every student. I'm your host, Phil Evans. Education in Indiana is undergoing a quiet redesign. Instead of treating college and careers as a separate track, leaders are building systems that braid them together, opening access points and exit points that allow students to move seamlessly between school, work, and higher education. At the center of this effort is a statewide apprenticeship initiative inspired by the Swiss model, but adapted for Indiana's context. It's not about replacing school. It's about extending it. It's about a new layer of authentic learning where students gain skills, test their interests, and discover who they're becoming. In this episode, I welcome Mel Correal, who spends her entire career advancing opportunity in public education. In this conversation, she explains how apprenticeships expand opportunity, not by narrowing pathways, but by multiplying them. Students earn credentials, explore professions, and most importantly, begin to see themselves differently. They develop agency, belonging, and connectedness, the conditions that sustain both learning and work. This approach challenges the industrial logic of education. And in an AI age, it insists in human-centered systems where every outcome is tied to a person, not just a data point. And it offers a vision for school that is less about compliance and more about cultivating possibility. Mal invites us to think about the intersection between personal, professional, and academic skill development. For Indiana, a new model for youth apprenticeships is taking shape through what is called the Implementation Lab, or iLab. Since early 2024, more than 150 leaders spanning K-12 schools, higher education, businesses, philanthropy, and government have been working together in this intensive 10-month design lab. Their task has been to adapt the elements of the Swiss apprenticeship model for Indiana. I
SPEAKER_01:think the iLab approach is unique to the country from what I understand. And part of what makes it unique is how many different partners are on board with it and how much they are trying to engage the workforce side of the partnership. And so they have the ear of, you know, Thank you. take on students in large numbers, because a lot of times people think that the barrier would be on the high school side. And there are some barriers there, right? Like the high school schedule and meeting graduation requirements and student interests and all of these pieces are barriers for us. But we find that the larger barrier is just the different industries' capacities to employ many students and to know how to meet students where they are in their developmental Yeah, absolutely. If you're an employer, you know, how do you manage that? How do we acknowledge that a student is on a journey and they're young and they're going to make mistakes,
SPEAKER_00:but also... We'll dig into them a little bit more in a moment. You've really thought about the way in which you can create greater opportunity for more students.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. So we're in a place where every school now has a CTE pathway or more and an advanced academic program. But that was kind of, to me, step one. Step two is we have to acknowledge that College and career are not mutually exclusive. We know that in Indiana, across the nation, around the world, when a student has a credential or further education beyond their high school diploma, they're going to be better set up for their future. And we like to pretend, I think, just the world, well, I'll say in the US, we like to pretend that either you take a college track or you take a career track. And so, you know, choose the one. And if we tell you more about it earlier, we pretend that you will choose it and you'll stay in it all the way, right? And neither of these things are actually true about young people, about our own journeys. And so... About a year ago, I really started leaning into this language and this frame of, we need to show students how to braid college and career together. And we need to really acknowledge that each student is a human being who has their own journey, who has their own goals. And the more they know about their options and the more they can see themselves in a future, the better they will be able to make decisions for themselves and navigate. And that's really different from what a lot of folks are talking about in this space, right? Outcomes are so important. We're measuring outcomes. We're moving the needle. But each one of those outcomes is a person who has a unique journey and who needs guidance and examples in order to fulfill their goal. And so that makes scaling anything up difficult, but, you know, we've had some initial success with the IB program, then with the early college program. Now we're moving towards, um, we've, we've had this IU health fellowship that's been successful, um, which I'll talk a little bit about here. It's And we are working on replication guide for that health fellowship to use for a STEM fellowship. And for the STEM fellowship, our goal is really going to be not to create a standalone cohort of students in one specific STEM pathway who take CTE courses and go on to a STEM job. But instead, taking our existing STEM pathways and our existing early college program and really focusing on how do we get the students who want to do both of those things to have work-based learning experience that's high quality, earn dual credits both in their core classes and in their CTE pathway, and then their next step would be a four-year degree in a STEM-based field, and they would have this work-based learning experience that could carry them through through that process and into a long-term career or the first step career in a long journey of discovering who they are and what they wanna do. So our Indiana University Health Fellowship at Crispus Attucks High School has just had its second cohort of graduates. And with those students, before I was in my seat, the ambitious goal at that time for those students was, What if we could get a bunch of IPS, Indianapolis Public Schools students, to be able to get a CNA, a clinical nursing license, while they're still in high school? And what if we really ensured that they had strong work-based learning experiences? And what if we could get Indiana University Health to guarantee them a job upon graduation? So you can imagine, this is ambitious, right? This is six years ago this program began. This program has been highly successful. It has not achieved the goal that it set out to achieve. And we're really glad because yes, these students by and large get their CNA license. But what we learned is they don't want to work as a CNA for the rest of their lives. That's what they learn. And so 100% of our students in our first cohort pursued something related to medicine. Some of them want to be nurse anesthetists. Some of them want to be, there's one young woman who wants to work in the records office. There's one young woman who's already working in a pathology lab. Many of them are using their CNAs to pay their way through high school. They've claimed that guaranteed job at IU, but it's a part-time position so that they can pay their way through. And so what this program that aimed for this very specific outcome for students did was it opened up possibilities for these students through networking opportunities. They could see themselves through summer internships where they rotated through different positions in the health system. They could begin to see themselves and what they liked and they didn't like. And so Now, when you ask me, what does the IU Health Fellowship do for students? My answer is not they get a CNA license and a job, right? My answer is they get a CNA license. They have a guarantee for a job. But by and large, most of them continue on in a medicine-related pathway towards bigger and better and more wonderful lives for themselves than we ever could have imagined for them.
SPEAKER_00:Mel, this is absolutely what lifelong learning looks like in action. And it's just so refreshing Thank you so much. even in a comprehensive high school, could be experiencing their learning and development?
SPEAKER_01:This is an interesting question for this day because I've been in a reflective space. I've had some conversations with just some people around me and people in meetings. I'm going to come to your question in sort of a roundabout way. So what I see when I look at the educational landscape right now is that The pendulum has swung very far towards outcomes driven education. And I believe in outcomes driven education. I believe in data informed everything. We have to know what's happening in order to move forward. But I believe that. the solutions that we seek have to be human-centered. And I think about, someone said yesterday, it's the little ABCs, the agency, belonging, and connectedness. And I think about that for students, but I also think about that for adults. I have done some research during COVID. I worked with an organization to conduct some research of educators and their mental health. And I did some work with co-regulation, with fuel ed, and did some training around social and emotional learning with CASEL. And it was so clear to me that we have in so many ways tried to systematize human relationships And I do think there are things that we can learn and things that hold true when it comes to human relationships. But I think that sometimes in the systematizing, we lose the humanity, if that makes any sense. And so yesterday I was thinking about the next step for my team. We have created structures and systems. They are solid. We are seeing outcomes, positive outcomes in some spaces. We've seen our graduation rate increase significantly. We met our ambitious graduation goal, we met it a year early.
SPEAKER_00:Incredible.
SPEAKER_01:We have these outcomes, but there are other sort of blind spots, other spaces within our work where we're not seeing these outcomes. And so my reflection this week was, what is the lever that from a systems level I can flip that will empower, enable, my team members in those spaces to see the same kinds of outcomes that we've seen in the spaces that have been more successful. And what I landed on, I just kept coming back to, it's the humanity, right? It's the humans. And I landed on you know, that we all really need to be coaches. Like we all, like when I think about my most successful team members, they're able to collaborate with teams and schools by listening, being empathetic, asking questions. You know, I look back, agency, belonging, and connectedness, like that's what works for adults as well. And so I think, I don't know if it feels like I'm answering your question to you or not, but for me, it just all comes back to agency, belonging, connectedness. And even work-based learning comes down to that, right? When a student feels seen and they're in a work-based learning opportunity, That feels different when it's the person who's actually doing the job who's seeing you, right? When I show up to an electrician's job and I put on the outfit of an electrician and the person I'm working with is an electrician and they're helping me be an electrician, that is just an inherently different experience, not just in terms of skills, but also in terms of my own identity, you know, going into that space. I think differently about myself and I feel differently about my agency, my belonging, and my connectedness when I have an experience outside of school. But we need that in-school experience too, right? We can't, these things are not mutually exclusive. I don't imagine a world in which we just start abbreviating students requirements for core classes and pushing them into the work world earlier. I don't think that that is the answer. I think flexibility is important and relevance is important for students.
SPEAKER_00:I couldn't agree more. And it's our agency and our belonging and connectedness that makes us want to keep coming back, like whether it's to work, whether it's to school, whether it's to a friendship group, to the dinner table, like these things are just so characteristically human and so deeply entwined in our learning experiences. And helping young people to find a connection to their learning is possible and is And the meaningful way in which you're talking about doing this, just shifting from a traditional notion of what school is to an experience where I can see opportunities to leverage this learning that I just didn't see before. I mean, the possibilities that young people who may not have necessarily had a nurturing home or may not have had all the advantages that other students have have. you know, these young people are able to see themselves in their learning and come to life in a way that, you know, is transformative.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think that's true. I think, you know, I think about, I got quiet there for a minute because there are just so many things I think about. I think about that, right? Like I think about the students I work with, you know, are disproportionately, they live in poverty when compared to their peers. the demographics do not reflect the larger demographics of our city on really any level in my school district. And, you know, so often I hear, you know, students need to learn to be resilient. And I look at my students and I think many of these are students who've had to be resilient in ways that many of us could never imagine, right? And I think about how, you something I learned from my own experience as, you know, the child of blue collar parents, you know, I am a first generation college student myself, um, my brother and I are, and, um, you know, my mom did get, she got an associate's degree when I was in high school, but in terms of a four year degree, my brother and I were the first. And so I think about, you know, my brother getting his degree in aeronautical engineering and, um, When my grandparents said to him, there's a job on the assembly line at Delco Electronics in our hometown. That's a great job. You're paying to go to college. You're not going to get a high paying job when you get out of college immediately. We think that you should consider just taking this job on the assembly line, right? And I remember that that was a hard conversation with my very caring grandparents, right? And I think about how In my own family, by going to college and going to grad school and being a person who loves language, there were times when my family began to feel like I was judging them because I was using different language or because my experiences had been different, right? And so I think about my students, and this is potentially true of many students beyond my students, but I think about just what a lift that is to have to choose something that no one in your family has done before, that there's just no collective knowledge in your family around that experience. I think about return on investment, right? And I think about how we frame college, and college is expensive. And for a family that doesn't have a lot of money, it's maybe not a great... investment in terms of return on investment actual money coming back to that family right and we have families who you know they've they've experienced almost it will become generational poverty because they took out student loans in the early 2000s and then did it weren't able to get you know a job that paid the wage that they wanted to get um and so All of that is very real. And the need to end generational poverty is very real. And people who live in poverty are having... just as much of a right to have a job that they love, that they're passionate about, and where they make a difference as people who don't live in poverty. And so I think about just the ways we potentially could limit students' possibilities when we make assumptions about what they want for themselves or what's best for them based on limited information. Instead, I think you know, agency. Let's get them the information that they need. Let's engage with them. Let's let them begin to be in charge of their own lives as they grow up and as they're able. And, you know, let's see where that takes them. I know maybe 15 years ago, one of the things that, you know, was what I was thinking about in education that I was sort of obsessed with for, I don't know, a couple months was I was trying to map out, like, what I... know i can do or what i believe i can do what i believe a student is capable of what the student believes they're capable of and then what each of us actually could do right and that's i know that's sort of like a deep and esoteric thing but it's like and i do not know what the possibilities are for any student i can't know it i don't even know them for myself the student doesn't know their own possibilities either. So how would we act in a classroom or when we build a program, if we were to just ground ourselves in the assumption that that's true, we would build things very differently than the way we tend to build things these days in education. And also, and this is my dissertation work, but we have research that shows us without a doubt, that tracking is not the best way to do business. That telling students you are an IB student or you're not an IB student, you know, you're an honors student or you're not an honors student. We know that when we track, we hurt kids. We hurt the students who are arguably most vulnerable. And when we detrack students, We get the same outcomes for the highest achieving kids, but those students who are most vulnerable, they have much better outcomes. That rising tide lifts all the boats. We know it. We see it over and over again. And a parent who has to make a choice about where to place their high-achieving student, and sometimes not even their high-achieving student, right? Over and over again, they will not believe that research, and they will think that what being a good parent means is getting their student to be in a tracked class environment. To me, that's just another structure we've put into place, because if we really believed that all students could learn, And that being in a healthy ecosystem of learning is good for all students. We would never divide them up in this way. But that's what we do.
SPEAKER_00:That's what we do. Yeah. Yeah. I just want to point out the incredible empathy that you have and others like you that are working in this space. Let's talk a little bit more about the infrastructure behind all this work. It's called iLab, right?
SPEAKER_01:Summit's iLab is the name of the entity that's really leading this work. The Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation has funded it and is one of the conveners of the work. And they work closely with Ascend Indiana, which is a workforce development arm of the Indiana government. And so... What they're doing is re-envisioning what apprenticeship could look like in the United States and in Indiana specifically, and they're really looking at the Swiss model. So they've taken many, many constituents from education, from the workforce, from government, over to witness the Swiss model in action, and then worked with all of these different entities, Indianapolis Public Schools included, to pilot a program, Modern Youth Apprenticeship, and to look at the barriers to implementing this, to scaling this, so that it could really support students to meet the workforce needs in Indiana over the next decade and beyond. And so for our students who are in those apprenticeships, a student who works on a finance team. We have a student who works on an IT team. We have students in different placements. And there is this attempt to bridge from high school to college. And so a lot of times when people hear apprenticeship, they think this is a track, right? This is a track straight to career. But that's not really what the Swiss model is. Students engage with apprenticeships early on and then they decide do they want to pursue a four-year degree that's in like a traditional academic experience or do they want to pursue a professional degree that is a split between that work-based experience and career-based experience and so um What iLab is doing is, again, looking at those barriers and trying to figure out how to scale up this apprenticeship pilot that Indianapolis Public Schools has been involved in. And they're finding that working with CEOs and workforce partners, as I mentioned at the beginning of our conversation, is really an area of need because the workforce is not ready for, you know, 10,000 high school students to descend upon it. Upon it, there's capacity building that has to happen in that space. And, you know, we know certain sectors are better equipped for this and have been doing this work already. And so it's no coincidence that the IU Health Fellowship is our first big fellowship, which those are not apprentices per se, they are interns. And also they do clinicals. But the health sector, has been more invested in a pipeline that starts with high school and college than some other sectors have. But we know that cybersecurity, for example, is a sector where there are thousands of jobs every year that a high school student who has experience in high school with that work could potentially move into if they had the experience. But Employers are not necessarily equipped yet in that field to take on a large number of them. And so for the iLab and CEMETS people, they're really looking at that scalability and that capacity building. For us on the high school side, we have to be involved in that conversation, right? Because we have to build something that meets the needs of our students. How we have engaged has really been piloting, trying to figure out like what the needs are, what we need workforce to do. Because obviously, there are graduation requirements and a student has to be at school a certain number of hours a day in order to meet those requirements. And so an employer who says, the only way we will do an apprenticeship is if a student is there every day of the week from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m., that high school schedule may not allow for that. And so that flexibility is key. There's curriculum that the employers are going to need. So we have these career discovery meetings that are now required in Indiana. So every student has to engage with these in their junior and senior year. And It can be college representatives or workforce representatives, but they have to engage with community folks who help them with their path and their planning, which is amazing, I think, and a huge lift for us, right? We reached out to a partner, Junior Achievement of Indiana, to help us envision what this could look like. Thousands of students having individual meetings, which can't be large meetings. So there's a limit on, it could be a small group or an individual meeting. One of my first concerns was, all right, we're going to have dozens of career folks coming in and meeting with our students, career folks who may not understand young people and their needs. Career folks whose return on investment might be convincing a highly qualified high schooler to want to be in their career. Career folks who may not understand the cultures that our students come from, as if anybody can understand anybody's culture, but who may not be sensitive to whatever experience our students have had. We have this at times with even substitute teachers who come in and really don't understand how to work with an urban population. So we needed to create curriculum for those folks who were coming in. We worked with our partner, Junior Achievement, to create training materials for the employers who were coming in to meet with our students so that they would know what to expect and how to engage. And so just imagine that. again, for thousands of apprenticeships. Imagine the interpersonal lift of all of this. And the question of who's responsible, you know, I think Summit's iLab, and I think you heard them say this as well, you know, they are really leaning on the employer carrying the picking up their share of the lift here, which I'm really excited about the employers they've engaged because this can be a really hard thing for employers. We were talking about this today in a collaboration meeting that I was in. Sometimes I hear from employers that their return on investment is, again, a student who's in high school, meets with them, gets excited about their pathway, takes pathway courses in that pathway, does work-based learning in that pathway, gets a job in that pathway and stays in that pathway until they're 90 years old, right? Like this is perfect return on investment, like check mark, like that kid, we really nailed it with that kid. That is not what I believe is a return on investment as we discussed earlier. When you engage with students in this way, your pipeline will grow. It may not grow by the individual students that you are engaging with. We hear stories of someone whose brother or cousin became really excited about what that person was doing, and then they ended up coming over to get a job in that space. I think there are some employers who really understand the landscape, and those are my favorite people to work with. So I think about IU Health and their COO, when he speaks at our white coat ceremony every year, when we're giving students their white coats as they start the fellowship, he says, every one of you has an offer of employment at IU Health upon graduation. And my greatest hope is that none of you will take me up on it and that you will all go to college and that you'll be at four-year university and maybe go to med school and you'll come back to IU Health or you'll contribute to some other healthcare organization. And he says that would be a win for me. I was a classroom teacher and an IB coordinator for 20 years. And I know what kind of environment influenced the best outcomes for my students. It was an approach that encompassed the fact that young people are learning their identities and that they need to be seen and that there's room for inspiration and passion and creativity. And that when a teacher can model that they're happy doing the job that they're doing and they're engaged with their content area or with teaching as, you know, just as an avocation, I would always get better outcomes for students when I created an environment that was like that. When we reduce what it means to be a teacher down to a set of steps or outcomes, and we deprofessionalize teaching, we get a reduced outcome for students. So how do we give teachers agency? How do we, you know, how do we use those ABCs for teachers? Because again, we've worked so hard on systems and if you are a teacher right now in a public school in the United States, this is not my district. This is, again, I've done, I've done this research of holding focus groups and bringing information together from other people who held focus groups, you are being asked, you're being told to do many, many things that seem irrelevant to the learning that students should accomplish in your classroom. And you're being asked to do an impossible job. And sometimes you're faced with a choice between doing what you know as a professional is best for students, what you've been trained to do, and trying to meet the mark with all of these impossible asks that come from multiple directions. And what I learned as a teacher was, and I don't know if I could do this now because the world has changed a little bit, was that if I could... if I could diminish the noise and really focus on what I knew to be true about relationships and then show my outcomes, people would sort of leave me alone to do the work that they knew I could do because I would outperform other classrooms. which is not outperforming other teachers really, right? But I hope, again, that the pendulum is swinging away from this like machine business model of education.
SPEAKER_00:Industrial.
SPEAKER_01:Industrial, military industrial complex education. And like, I think there's also, you know, I work with a lot of educational partners and I read something recently in one of my grad classes about educational partners as technocracy, like educational intermediaries as technocracy. you know, when your bread and butter is to teach schools how to crunch data and respond to it, then, and you're creating, you know, evaluation tools for teachers and they're based on, you know, your bread and butter, then we sort of have the tail wagging the dog in terms of what we do in education, right? And I had never thought of it that way before. And, yeah, And I love my education partners and many of them are shifting away from that model, right? Like they're shifting more to a whole child model. But, you know, sometimes I meet people who they've just, they've swallowed the pill, you know, the miracle pill of this way of thinking about education. And I just see that as one really important part of what we need to do. And so, yeah. To me, the systems, that's a fun strategy game, right? To create systems that allow students to have access to things. But what's so much more difficult and more important is empowering educators as professionals who can do their jobs. And when we do that, we will really see those outcomes shift. And I think about my work as an IB workshop leader for language and literature. And how many times, you know, I know that a teacher's wanting to do the work that is, you know, that the research tells us is the important work and the systems that they're in do not allow for them to do that work. And so as a systems level leader now, sometimes what I do is block and tackle. I don't really tackle people, but block, right? Or buffer, I guess is the gentler way to say this or translate, right? And say, you know, This seems like a good idea to you, central office person, but here's what this looks like in implementation.
SPEAKER_00:In the classroom.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah. And so do you want to contribute to that dissonance for something that's unachievable? Or do you want to engage with the people in schools and to partner to figure out how to create a climate and culture that works for students and teachers and school leaders and central office employees.
SPEAKER_00:You've been listening to the Education by Design podcast. I've been your host, Phil Evans. If you like this episode, please hit subscribe or follow and join me for my next episode. Until next time, keep on learning.
