The classroom is lit from the ceiling in bright white light, but the warm glow from the window still manages to make the space feel playful. A large, multicolored rug dominates the middle of the space, broken up into rainbow rows of squares. Spreading its branches across one corner wall, a twisted paper tree cheerfully offers imaginary shade to a reading nook with a collection of oversized stuffed animals lounging within. This is the faux–kindergarten classroom that serves as half of Kate Wooldridge’s Future Educator’s Pathway lab in room 22A.
The Future Educator’s Pathway is a Career Technical Education course with three classes and a co-enrolled internship at one of several partnered CVUSD schools. The pathway strives to provide aspiring educators and other future educational professionals with core tenets of teaching and child development to give them a head start on their careers. By merit of being a CTE pathway, it is designed to get students as ready as possible to enter the workforce in their desired career immediately after graduating high school.
“In any CTE program, there’s a big emphasis on career exploration but also college readiness,” said Wooldridge. “The programs combine those two things with a strong emphasis on career focus […] but also works on preparing them with skills to go to college with. In my program, there are four classes. In Child Development, students learn how we grow [… in] my Foundations of Education class, which is open to 11th and 12th graders, is just like the name implies. It teaches the basics of teaching, like teaching theory and how people learn, what strategies teachers use to educate and [how to do] classroom management and lesson planning.”
At its core, the Future Educator’s Pathway focuses on the applicational processes of teaching and learning, pushing students outside of the box with projects and presentations that prioritize demonstration of skills rather than textbook knowledge. With little by way of standard testing or homework, the classes are structured to impart as much practical knowledge as possible in order to give students a tangible idea of what educational careers really look like.
“It’s really nice to have such a unique and specialized course in highschool so that students can start learning about potential career fields while they’re still learning,” said Lex Kirkpatrick ’26, who has been in the pathway for two years. “That way, when they go out into the real world, [people] have some kind of metric of [what teaching is like].”
One of the most valuable pieces of the Future Educator’s Pathway, beyond the core teaching practices it imparts, is the opportunity offered to concurrently enroll in an internship program. Students are granted the chance to intern with a teacher at a partnered elementary school if their schedule allows them to be off campus during the school day, or with a teacher at WHS if they cannot.
“At Conejo [Academy], it’s a dual immersion course, so [the students] have one class in English and one class in Spanish,” said Kate De Alba ‘25, who is concurrently enrolled into the educator’s internship program. “I help teach the one in Spanish. They still learn all the normal skills, but it’s in Spanish. It’s really nice because you get to do hands–on stuff with the kids, and you get to interact with them and see them grow over the course of the year, all with a teacher there to help you and guide you.”
The internship portion of the pathway gives students the unique opportunity to be simultaneously in a student position and a teacher position as they explore education, getting to put the psychological concepts they are learning in Wooldridge’s course into practice in real-time.
“It’s fun because [at first] the kids were shy, but now they say they miss me. You’re really able to build that bond with the students,” said Josselyn Villatoro ‘25, a student in the Foundations of Education class who is currently interning with a fifth grade class at Westlake Elementary. “You also get to see different aspects of being a teacher — sometimes I grade, sometimes I have to teach lessons to them, so it kind of prepares you to get comfortable in front of a class.”
Beyond the engrained educational benefits and work experience options, the Future Educator’s pathway also offers other unique opportunities that Wooldridge establishes individually.
“We get grant money [in order to] go on field trips to colleges,” said Wooldridge. “This year we’re going to UC Santa Barbara, last year we went to UCLA and [CSU] Channel Islands. I try to get them exposed to a private school, like Cal Lutheran, and then we go to Moorpark for community college and we go to a UC and we go to a CSU. [On the field trips] they get presentations from the schools, so they know what the schools offer.”
The Future Educator’s Pathway is completely unique to WHS, and each part of the curriculum and the extracurricular activities have been hand–curated and pulled together by Wooldridge. The program is still in its fledgling phases, having just introduced its internship program this year, but students already emphasize the abundant benefits from both the dedication of the teacher and the scope of the pathway.
“You can tell [Ms. Wooldridge] really, genuinely cares about all of her students,” said Kirkpatrick. “She’s like a safe space to be around, and I don’t feel any trepidation around her. You can also tell she really cares about the program because she’s the one who built it from the ground up, and there aren’t a lot of resources out there for a class like this. She literally created the entire curriculum by herself, and she’s still creating it as she goes.”
The skills that the Future Educator’s pathway aims to impart are useful beyond the main target of students who aim to be primary educators later in life, too. Elements of child psychology, workplace management and collaborative problem solving all come into play in various stages of the pathway.
“I would say that you shouldn’t think this education course is just for people who want to be teachers,” said De Alba. “It’s really just education in general — it could be counselors, school psychologists, speech therapists [or] special educators. There’s so many [positions] in education [that the pathway teaches about], not just teachers. There’s also value in it if you’re not going to pursue education, [such as] the psychology aspect. There’s so many opportunities from just one class, so I think it’s really valuable.”
