Most of my students are headed for college. Why do they need career guidance? | 50% of students drop out of college or do not graduate within six years. That statistic alone should convince you of the need for all students to receive a comprehensive guidance course. In addition, studies of college students show that students who are career-focused and career-committed are far more likely to graduate from college and transition into the workforce at the level for which their college education prepared them.
Today, 20% of 26-year-olds live at home or are not economically independent of their parents. Addressing the issue as it relates to economic self-sufficiency requires students to understand the necessity for a career focus. |
How is a comprehensive guidance course different than a career exploration course? | While career exploration is an important subset of a comprehensive guidance course (CGC), a CGC is so much more. In addition to career exploration, a CGC must help students:
- Learn to project into the future and understand the consequences of today's choices and actions
- Understand how to match academic and educational effort to lifestyle expectations
- Become identity-achieved through contemplation and self-discovery
- Learn and practice the communication, interpersonal, and self-management skills necessary to succeed in today's educational and workforce settings
- Identify and plan for the challenges and stumbling blocks that are inevitable in today's fast-paced, competitive world
- Analyze quantitatively what economic self-sufficiency equals for them
- Become proactive, rather than reactive, in managing change in their lives
Besides traditional career exploration topics, a CGC helps young people understand the challenges and the benefits of a consciously planned career path. Armed with this information, they are far more likely to persevere when they hit life's "speed bumps." |
Our school uses a software-based (or online) tool for helping students choose a career. Isn't that enough? | It might be enough for the top 20% to 30% of your students. For the students who receive this information and exploration at home, a couple of hours with a software program might be all the extra guidance they need. But for the balance of your students—the ones who do not see the relevance in education and cannot envision a productive future with plans to realize their dreams—a couple hours in front of a computer screen is just not enough to set them on the path to making the second most important decision of their lives: How they'll spend 40 hours per week for the next 40 years.
In addition, it is important that all students have the skills and information necessary to change direction when they are forced or want to change careers. If they learn the process using the real-world research and decision-making applications readily available on U.S. Department of Labor-sponsored websites (rather than relying on lab-based software programs that are unavailable once they graduate), they'll have the confidence to plot their own productive work-life course. They'll be empowered with the skills to manage their own career trajectory after they leave school and will not have to rely on tools that "magically" come up with a career choice or direction once a survey is completed. |
I teach English. Why should I get involved with career and life planning? | | Presenting a career-planning theme in an English classroom—or any other academic classroom—adds instant relevancy, capturing the imaginations of even hard-to-motivate students. Students are engaged because the reading and writing assignments address their most important identity issues most. The Possibilities anthology includes many required pieces, but encourages students to view the literature from a new perspective. |
What is Possibilities? How can it be incorporated into my Career Choices curriculum? | Possibilities is the language arts component in the Career Choices series, linking 50 selections of poetry, short stories and essays to specific lessons in the Career Choices text.
If you are not an English teacher or responsible for the academics of English, we suggest that you form a team teaching pair with an English teacher and teach the course together. An English teacher might consider team teaching this course with a home economics teacher, guidance counselor, career education instructor, or social studies teacher.
What students learn in the main text, Career Choices, will give their reading and writing assignments more depth and richness. Many of the literature pieces we ask young people to read include topics that require "experience with life" to be fully appreciated. The Career Choices process helps students better understand the challenges of their future as they gain valuable insight from the contributions of great authors. We call this our "Authors as Mentors" program. |
Does this replace the current English curriculum? | | It can. As instructors begin to use the curriculum, they quickly realize that outcomes required of students in English can be accomplished by using this thematic approach.
For example, the traditional novels used as required reading in the 9th grade (The Diary of Anne Frank, Bless the Beasts and Children, Romeo and Juliet) can all be incorporated into the life lessons students are learning in Career Choices. See pages 99, 105, 199 of the Instructor's and Counselor's Guide for Career Choices. |
Can Possibilities be taught as a stand-alone component? | | Yes, some schools order just Possibilities, but to achieve the full impact of the curriculum, it should be taught in conjunction with Career Choices. |
How can an English teacher and a home economics teacher, business teacher, or guidance counselor work together? | The Career Choices program is an ideal program for an English teacher and a home economics teacher, business teacher, or guidance counselor to team teach.
Try to identify an English, home economics, business teacher, or guidance counselor (at the 8th or 9th grade level) who is innovative, enthusiastic and likes to try new ideas. Get them a 60-day review set of the Career Choices books. Once they’ve looked at the materials and are interested, set up a consultation with our Technical Service Administrator, who can help you strategize your efforts. |
How long does it take to complete the curriculum? | It all depends on your goals and how much interdisciplinary academics you want to include.
You can complete a comprehensive version of the curriculum in a nine-week course if you are only using the career and life-planning component of the main textbook. If you want to incorporate Possibilities into the same classroom, you will want to allow for a semester.
If two teachers are team teaching in a two-hour block scheduling situation (for example an English teacher and a home economics or career education teacher), a nine-week segment is adequate.
There are enough expansion ideas included in the Instructor's and Counselor's Guide and projects in Possibilities and Lifestyle Math to make this a complete year-long course. Read more about how the curriculum is being used by educators across the nation. |
Can we skip around and just use certain parts of the curriculum? | One of the strengths of this curriculum is that it teaches a process (and a very important process at that). This process can be used over and over again throughout your students’ lives. Individuals will want to revisit this questioning process (Who am I? What do I want? How do I get it?) many times during their lifetime. The experience will leave your students better able to cope with the challenges of life, changing jobs, losing jobs, choosing careers, changing careers, life planning and strategies, where to live, who to marry, and family planning issues. Therefore, we do not recommend skipping around within the curriculum.
Career Choices is a sequential curriculum, and each new skill and activity builds on previous knowledge gained earlier. It has been carefully designed to include scope and sequence and is best used in its entirety and in order. The average class can complete the course in its basic format (not incorporating the academic components of English and math) within one quarter, a nine-week time frame. |
What if we want to complete half in one grade and half in the next? | | Some schools choose this format because they want to complete the course work but can only devote fewer than nine weeks to teaching the material in each grade. In this case, we suggest that the first segment be the first six chapters and the second segment be the second six chapters. But, this is not the ideal and should be carefully reviewed each year. |
Can we photocopy the Workbook and Portfolio (or any other book)? | | No. It is not permissible to photocopy any of the textbooks. Because of our contracts with both authors and distributors, we have limitations on what we can allow. If you feel that you have special circumstances, please put your request in writing and send or fax it to our Permissions Department. We will respond to your request within 15 working days. Contact us. |
What if the students I work with are still struggling with basic skills? | | Career Choices is academically based, providing basic skill practice disguised as self-discovery. What was once viewed as "drill and skill" is now camouflaged by meaningful personal exercises and activities. By the end of the class, attitudes about education drastically change because students understand how being able to read, write, and compute directly impacts their futures. |
Is it really possible to get the average 14-year-old to write a comprehensive 10-year plan for their future? | | Absolutely! When taught in sequence, Career Choices leads students through a step-by-step process (up to 100 active-learning exercises) that enables them to articulate who they are and what they want their lives to look like after high school. Each of the activities builds on the ones before. When documented in the Workbook and Portfolio, students can easily compile their plan and store it online to reassess, review, modify, or update later. |
What is the reading level of the texts? | | Career Choices has been evaluated at a 9th grade reading level. Possibilities has selections that are included in the English "canon" for middle school and high school, primarily at 9th grade. |
My students have low reading levels (two to three grades below). Can the curriculum work for them as well? | | More than 17,500 JTPA participants used the Career Choices curriculum during the summers of 1994 and 1995. The JTPA population includes a high percentage of students with reading levels well below grade level. Because the material covered in the curriculum is so relevant to the adolescents, the motivation is present to try harder to read, understand and comprehend the written word. Instructors report that the unique design of the text is also "friendlier" to the students. Because students feel less threatened by Career Choices than by more traditional textbooks, they are more willing to struggle with their reading. |
Will Career Choices work with my special population? | San Gabriel High School, an East Los Angeles High School, combines Career Choices with Speech to introduce cooperative learning skills vastly needed in the world of work. This class population is 85% students of color, bringing to the table many different values and dreams. For greater detail see Career Guidance: Helping Students Make Smart Choices.
In Minnesota, the English department teams up with On-the-Job (OTJ) to create Transitions, a comprehensive class for Special Education seniors headed for the workplace right after graduation. The innovative teachers used Career Choices to help these special students overcome their fears and start envisioning their future. For more detail see Vocational Guidance for the Special Education Classroom.
In the Medina County Ohio School District, the School-to-Work Coordinator overcame the challenge of reviving a failed training and employment program for at-risk youth. These students were mainly fifth year seniors who were not expected to graduate. The educators integrated Career Choices with Possibilities and Lifestyle Math to create a very successful, very real-life experience for these students that gave them a sense of hope. For additional information see Life 101: Career Guidance for At-Risk Youth |
How can we implement Career Choices in our Tech Prep program? | If Tech Prep programs are to succeed, students must come to them willingly and with enthusiasm. And to do that, they must understand what's in it for them, what impact it will have on their future life satisfaction. The Career Choices program was specifically designed to give the guidance experience in an academic setting that will produce motivated learners.
Young people today have more choices about how to structure their lives than any other generation before them. And because of the complexity of today's technological world, it is imperative that students make more and more sophisticated choices at a younger and younger age (for many states, as early as the 10th or 11th grade).
We can no longer afford to leave the career planning and guidance tasks to "time and experience." Students need to focus on their educational options early, as they will be asked to make a choice of Tech Prep versus college prep.
It is imperative today that young people receive 45 to 180 hours of in-classroom guidance curriculum that teaches them a process for dealing with the various changes and choices they will face over their lifetime. The ideal age for this is between 13 and 15 years old, just prior to them being asked to make important educational decisions that will impact the rest of their lives.
This can be accomplished in the English/language arts classroom while at the same time meeting the learning objects of the traditional English classroom. |
Most of my students are headed for college. Why do they need career guidance? | 50% of students drop out of college or do not graduate within six years. That statistic alone should convince you of the need for all students to receive a comprehensive guidance course. In addition, studies of college students show that students who are career-focused and career-committed are far more likely to graduate from college and transition into the workforce at the level for which their college education prepared them.
Today, 20% of 26-year-olds live at home or are not economically independent of their parents. Addressing the issue as it relates to economic self-sufficiency requires students to understand the necessity for a career focus. |
Why a 10-year plan? Isn't a four-or-five year plan enough? Our school has each student complete a four-year graduation plan. | | It's important that young people be able to envision—and then plan for—a productive future as a self-sufficient adult. A four-year plan gets the typical student through high school graduation. A five-year plan may get them into college but, as we all know, the college dropout rate is 50%. Therefore, a 10-year plan is needed to take them through high school, post-secondary education/training, and into the workforce understanding what it takes to become financially responsible for themselves and their future families. |
How is a comprehensive guidance course different than a career exploration course? | While career exploration is an important subset of a comprehensive guidance course (CGC), a CGC is so much more. In addition to career exploration, a CGC must help students:
- Learn to project into the future and understand the consequences of today's choices and actions
- Understand how to match academic and educational effort to lifestyle expectations
- Become identity-achieved through contemplation and self-discovery
- Learn and practice the communication, interpersonal, and self-management skills necessary to succeed in today's educational and workforce settings
- Identify and plan for the challenges and stumbling blocks that are inevitable in today's fast-paced, competitive world
- Analyze quantitatively what economic self-sufficiency equals for them
- Become proactive, rather than reactive, in managing change in their lives
Besides traditional career exploration topics, a CGC helps young people understand the challenges and the benefits of a consciously planned career path. Armed with this information, they are far more likely to persevere when they hit life's "speed bumps." |
Our school uses a software-based (or online) tool for helping students choose a career. Isn't that enough? | It might be enough for the top 20% to 30% of your students. For the students who receive this information and exploration at home, a couple of hours with a software program might be all the extra guidance they need. But for the balance of your students—the ones who do not see the relevance in education and cannot envision a productive future with plans to realize their dreams—a couple hours in front of a computer screen is just not enough to set them on the path to making the second most important decision of their lives: How they'll spend 40 hours per week for the next 40 years.
In addition, it is important that all students have the skills and information necessary to change direction when they are forced or want to change careers. If they learn the process using the real-world research and decision-making applications readily available on U.S. Department of Labor-sponsored websites (rather than relying on lab-based software programs that are unavailable once they graduate), they'll have the confidence to plot their own productive work-life course. They'll be empowered with the skills to manage their own career trajectory after they leave school and will not have to rely on tools that "magically" come up with a career choice or direction once a survey is completed.
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How much does it cost to use My10YearPlan.com? | For every Workbook and Portfolio purchased ($8.95), the school receives one seat license to My10yearPlan.com. Each seat license is valid for the term the student is in high school or up to five years from purchase.
There is an additional one-time charge of $99 for setting up each school's account. Beyond that, an annual server maintenance fee of $29.95 will ensure that the data in each school’s system is properly organized and attended to for the life of the school’s account. |
What is a seat license and how does it work? | Each participating school will appoint a School Site Executive. This individual will be responsible for managing the seat licenses by adding, deleting, and assigning student and teacher accounts. Once a seat license has been assigned to a student or teacher, it is deducted from the available quota (based on the number of copies of the Workbook and Portfolio purchased) that has been granted by Academic Innovations. Forms and computerized functions make this easy and quick.
Each seat license has its own ID and password for student security reasons. It will be up to the school administration through the school site executive to determine who has access to the accounts and how. |
Who is responsible for creating student and teacher My10yearPlan.com accounts? | | Each school will appoint a School Site Executive to set up and oversee the school's use of My10yearPlan.com. Click here for a complete list of responsibilities. |
What personal student information is required to set up their accounts? | Required information includes:
- First and Last Name
- School Name
- Career Choices Teacher Name
- Expected Graduation Year
- Grade
- Username
- Password
Optional information includes:
- Student ID (which makes soring students in large schools more efficient)
- Middle Name
- E-mail Address (to take advantage of the site's available e-mail functions)
- Age
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Who has access to a student's username and password? | | Because Career Choices teachers and School Site Executives are responsible for setting up student accounts, they have access to student usernames and passwords. However, Career Choices teachers only have access to the usernames and passwords of students enrolled in their classes. In the event that a student forgets his or her username or password, or posts something inappropriate on the site, it is important that the student's Career Choices teacher and the School Site Executive have access to this information. |
Do parents or legal guardians need to give their consent in order for their kids to use My10yearPlan.com? | | Not necessarily, though some districts may require it. Check with your district administration to see if parental consent is needed. |
A lot of our students change school from year to year or even mid-year. What happens to their data when they leave? | If a student transfers to another school that is using My10yearPlan.com, Academic Innovations can easily transfer their data to the new school. It is the responsibility of the School Site Executive to alert Academic Innovations of their student's school change. If the School Site Executive doesn't know where the student is going, or if s/he will be attending a school that doesn't use My10yearPlan.com, the School Site Executive must decide whether to keep or delete that account, bearing in mind that the school assumes full responsibility for any data kept.
Also keep in mind that choosing to delete a student account has no bearing on seat licenses. While deleting a student account will ensure that your school is no longer responsible for that student's data, it will not "open up" a seat license for another student. |
How much added work per week will My10yearPlan.com require of our teachers and the person we choose to be our School Site Executive? | In the beginning, the person acting as the School Site Executive will need to spend 45 minutes on the phone with a member of our Technical Support team to get acquainted with My10yearPlan.com. Once this orientation is complete, the School Site Executive will spend one to two hours (depending on the size of the school) creating My10yearPlan.com accounts for the teachers and advisors who will be using it. It is then recommended that the School Site Executive lead a one-hour training session to introduce Career Choices teachers and school counselors to the web site. To keep planning time for this meeting to a minimum (approximately 30 minutes), Academic Innovations provides a PowerPoint presentation that can be used to structure the meeting.
Once teachers have gone through this training with the School Site Executive, the School Site Executive will likely only need to dedicate one hour per week to making sure the site is being used and maintained to its fullest, and also to answer any questions the faculty and staff may have about using it.
As for teachers, they will need to go through the one-hour training with the School Site Executive and then spend an additional 30 minutes to one hour creating accounts for their students. This initial training and set up is the most time-intensive part of using My10yearPlan.com.
Once the student accounts are active and students have entered their information into the system, it's really up to the teacher to decide how much time s/he will spend reviewing student plan summaries each week. Some teachers may ask students to enter their Workbook & Portfolio information over the course of the semester or year, in which case they'll have to schedule computer lab time each week for their students. Other teacher may wait until the end of the course to have their students enter their Workbook & Portfolio information online, in which case teachers will spend little, if any time, during most of the rest of the course using the site. |
My10yearPlan.com stores a lot of very important information for students. Does Academic Innovations have a back-up plan for making sure this data isn't lost? | | Most definitely. The servers that drive My10yearPlan.com currently reside with a top server-hosting provider, where they are maintained and monitored in climate-controlled comfort. To ensure the integrity of all My10yearPlan.com data, these servers are routinely backed up and stored in three different secure locations. |
Isn't it time consuming to have students complete a workbook and then re-enter everything at My10yearPlan.com? | The success of the Career Choices curriculum (click here for awards and evaluations) is based on the fact that it is an active learning course, designed to promote self-exploration through discussion, contemplation, and journaling. This personal discovery process is key to the success of your program. The computer lab is not the ideal setting for these dialogs and activities to take place. For that reason, we recommend you wait until the end of the course and the completion of their workbooks before having students data-enter their information.
The functionality the online plan brings is an ease of sharing and updating over the tenure of the student's high school career. It's designed in such a way that it should only take students a couple of hours to enter their information from the workbook. |
Can we skip the Workbook and Portfolio and just use My10yearPlan.com? | | For the reasons mentioned above, we don't suggest it. The Workbook and Portfolio is required for the student to develop a meaningful 10-year plan because there are activities in the workbook not included in the online tool. These pre-requisite exercises help students gain personal insights and begin a self-exploration process that will eventually provide the data to be compiled online. |
Is My10yearPlan.com a mandatory part of the Career Choices curriculum? | | No. My10yearPlan.com is an optional component meant to enhance the curriculum’s consumable Workbook & Portfolio. Schools that choose to use it will benefit from its many functions, but some schools may not wish to use it due to insufficient access to technology. |
Beyond the 10-year plan, what kinds of documents can students upload and store on My10yearPlan.com? | Because My10yearPlan.com was designed in part to function as a career/education planning and portfolio tool, students may upload and save documents such as:
- Resumes
- Cover letters
- Writing samples for job, scholarship, and college applications
- Letters of recommendation
- PowerPoint presentations
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Does My10yearPlan.com have any data-reporting functions? | | Career Choices teachers have the option to enable students to take a pre-course survey (found on page 6/12 of the Instructor's Guide) online within the first week of class. When compared with the same survey to be taken at the end of the course, School Site Executives can generate reports that measure how well the class influenced students' attitudes about high school, post-secondary education, and their future career and lifestyle goals. |
How do we convince parents of the need for this type of course for their teenagers when faced with the all-too-common refrain, "My child doesn't need this. They're going to college!" | In the United States, young adults who require economic support from their parents (past their schooling years) are known as Twixters (see Time magazine, January 25, 2005). In Great Britain, these young adults are known as KIPPERS, which is an acronym for:
Kids In Parents Pockets Eroding Retirement Savings
Next time you are with a group of parents who question the importance of this type of class, ask how many of them know families whose adult children returned home after graduating from college because they couldn't find a job that would support them. Watch the hands go up and the heads nod! |
We'd like parents more involved with their students' planning. What can we do? | The personal information students organize and store at My10yearPlan.com should be shared with parents. As students work on updating their plans, parents can provide valuable input and support.
To take parental involvement one step further, consider a combined parent/adolescent activity that develops the career decision making skills of both the adults and teens. (Click here for a sample) Studies show that parents are the most important supporters of a student's future plans. And, because so many adults are going through their own mid-life re-evaluation when they have adolescent children, you'll be doing them both a service.
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How can I convince our administration and school board of the need for My10yearPlan.com? | | Click here to view the online training module, Tips for Getting Buy-in from all Stakeholders.
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