Different Ways to Incorporate Career Choices into Your School
 Incorporate the Career Choices curriculum into your ninth grade English or language arts program.
In this format all students receive a comprehensive career guidance experience in an academic classroom. Career Choices is, first and foremost, a competency based curriculum. Students build basic reading, writing, and speaking skills through assignments in both the Career Choices text (along with the Workbook and Portfolio) and the literature anthology, Possibilities. Works by such renowned writers as James Thurber, Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes, Robert Fulghum, Emily Dickenson, O. Henry, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are included in this companion anthology. Discussion questions, activities, composition assignments, grammar, and vocabulary lessons meet your state's English/language arts content standards and, at the same time, build on the highly motivational themes of career and choices.
Use the entire Career Choices program as the core curriculum for a freshman academy.
This curriculum saves your staff hundreds of hours of planning time. Your English, math, and social studies instructors can easily join together to deliver a proven, interdisciplinary course using the Career Choices text and workbook, the Possibilities anthology, and Lifestyle Math. Academics will have more meaning for the learner.
Much as we would like students to learn for the love of learning, most young people need the added incentive of seeing how the subject at hand relates to their place in the world. Career Choices offers instant relevancy. In addition, it graphically illustrates personal benefits--what they have to gain from staying in school and putting forth their best effort. Finally, it gives them an opportunity to create a plan for their lives that offers guidance on bringing that plan to fruition.
Use Career Choices as the foundation for a required careers course or freshman orientation class.
One challenge School-to-Work programs continually cite is that students are asked to make life-altering decisions when they are as young as 14 or 15. Few schools have the resources to provide sufficient individual guidance for all students; there are just not enough counselors within the school. The high number of dual-career familiescompound the problem, because parental guidance is less available. And, even though today's teens may appear to be sophisticated and self assured, most lack real knowledge about the kind of work they would find most satisfying or what they need to do in order to obtain that kind of a job.
The activities in the Career Choices text and the Workbook and Portfolio center around self-awareness, decision-making skills, and career awareness. Because it guides students through a written life and career planning process that culminates in a ten-year educational/vocational training plan, Career Choices meets the guidance requirements for School-to-Work programs.
What are the goals and methodology of the Career Choices curriculum?
Career Choices is a curriculum designed to address career and life planning, topics of concern to all young people. It demonstrates the relevance of education, thus motivating teens to: apply themselves to their studies; help adolescents establish and consolidate identity; foster ambitious yet realistic career plans; and teach the skills and attitudes necessary for success at home and on the job in the 21st century.
The curriculum meets these admittedly ambitious goals by focusing on a topic of infinite interest to teens: themselves. The engaging text takes students through a sequential series of activities that help them uncover the traits, interests, and other characteristics that make them unique and valuable. Armed with this information, they move through another series of exercises that helps them decide what they want from their lives. They begin to understand how education relates to a satisfying future lifestyle. Next, students gain skills and attitudes necessary to the attainment of their goals. Finally, they develop a ten-year plan, oulining step by step how they intend to achieve the job--the life--of their dreams.
Sample measurable goals and objectives for grant proposals:
Upon completion of the class, ___% of students will have raised their career goals and expectations as demonstrated by pre- and post-surveys.
Upon completion of the class, ___% of students who, at the beginning of the class, had not planned any further education or training after high school will have changed their minds and will be preparing for post-secondary education.
Upon completion of the class, ___% of the students in the course will have changed their attitude toward academic subjects and, therefore, increased their performance, as evaluated by pre and post survey of their other teachers.
Upon completion of the class, each student will have a realistic educational and career plan for the next ten years. They will also be able to demonstrate the goal setting, analytical, and decision-making skills necessary to adapt that plan as they mature.
Upon completion of this class, all females will be able to articulate, in a quantitative way, why becoming a teen parent is not a good plan. Females who were ambivilent about teen pregnancy at the beginning of the course will have a strong opinion and attitude against teen parenting.
Students completing this course will be less likely to drop out of high school. This will be demonstrated by decreasing the drop out rate among the graduates of this program from ____% (current school average) to ____%
Test scores within academic subjects (define which ones) will increase by _____ within one semester of completing this course.
In post-class surveys, ___% of graduates' parents will report a positive impact on their child due to this classroom experience.
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