Interviewees discussed several ways in which the STW curriculum focus was initially determined in their locality. These processes included faculty brainstorming, student input and selection, area needs assessments, community "conversations," trial and error, individual teacher initiatives, and soliciting advice from those localities with past experience. These selection processes ranged from simple, unstructured in-house discussions to highly structured community-wide efforts. One eighth-grade academic teacher described the curriculum development process at her school as follows:
So what we did is we sat around and we talked about it, and basically the principal said what you come up with, what you create, it's not going to be wrong, because this is the first year that we've done this. So that gave us the opportunity to kind of feel like "Okay, I don't mind experimenting." We had a few guidelines and things like that, but basically each individual teacher kind of came up with the way they wanted to do it.
A city school principal explained how both teachers and students were involved in determining the curriculum focus at her school:
The entire faculty worked on it. We looked at one hundred topics of interest that we thought we could support with our resources and expertise. After narrowing that down, the students selected the themes that heavily addressed school-to-work. We asked for input from students and actually let students vote at different age levels which themes they would like to explore.
A rural site administrator discussed how themes emerged from a number of activities designed to discover a community's concerns and priorities:
It's kind of an organic process here that goes out ten years or so. A lot of conversation within our community through school improvement teams, focus groups, community education, advisory councils, action teams, ad hoc committees, school reform teams, where people were just talking a lot about what it is we need to do to create good teaching and learning environments for students. A lot of our priorities were changed within our district through a variety of these conversations and themes really have emerged in part from that, and part from individual teacher initiative and various expertise. We didn't adopt it from anywhere else. It was an internal organic process.
A junior/senior high school principal described the purpose and results of their district-wide needs assessment survey:
Basically, we asked a lot of questions like, "What do you like about the school system as it is?" "Where do you see room for improvement?" and "What do you think the school district should be all about?" The purpose of that was to identify what the priorities of the community were and how we can implement those things when we look at things like curriculum, school-to-work, and instructional improvement areas. One of the things identified as a top-ten priority item was doing a good job of preparing kids for work, technical school, or college.
Many of the site respondents indicated that the curriculum focus or themes were constantly "under construction" and "always evolving." Efforts were being made to keep up-to-date and anticipate possible roadblocks and new avenues of interest. One guidance counselor elaborated on the continuous effort required in developing a viable STW curriculum:
I think it just kind of slowly evolved from year to year and not really being static and not just saying "that's good enough," but every year we try to put another layer on top of what we did the previous year. Each year we try to find a new way, integrate something new into our curriculum or our opportunities for our students or in our career educational package. To take it one step further and try to stay on top of it rather than be static for three or four years and then have to catch up again.