Southern Regional Education Board consultant Marty Sugerik leads a workshop at Lehigh Career & Technical Institute.

SCHNECKSVILLE, Pa. | You work as a line cook at an Allentown restaurant and your bosses are thinking about growing their business with a food truck. They’ve asked you and two other staffers to help them prepare a compelling business plan by creating an innovative food truck menu that minimizes cost and maximizes profit.

The scenario above serves as the foundation for a team project that Southern Regional Education Board consultants would say meets the “gold standard” for Culinary Arts students.

SREB consultants Marty Sugerik and Linda Moyer stopped by Lehigh Career & Technical Institute this week to lead a professional development workshop on project-based learning, or PBL. The last day of school for students was Monday, but LCTI instructors remained in the classroom Tuesday with Sugerik and Moyer, who taught them how to develop gold-standard projects.

Sugerik said effective projects mimic real-life situations and require students to call on a combination of academic, career and technical and employability skills.

Employers don’t want a nurse who, for example, is an ace at drawing blood (a technical skill), but can’t calculate drug dosages (an academic skill) or communicate clearly with colleagues (an employability skill) about patients’ care when it’s time for a shift change. “You can’t be a one-trick pony” in today’s job market, he said.

Some of LCTI’s instructors already use PBL in their labs and classrooms. For them, the workshop served as an opportunity to design new gold-standard projects for the 2016-17 school year.

Sugerik and Moyer visited LCTI as part of Pennsylvania’s Technical Assistance Program, a statewide initiative aimed at boosting academic and occupational achievement and success for all career and technical education students.