Kathy Granite Exemplar #5 Exemplar 5: Career Cruising Presentation to 9th Graders CSP 624: Learning Achievement and Instruction

Standards Addressed: 20, 27 & 30 Introduction: I chose the Career Cruising Presentation to 9th Graders as my exemplar because it demonstrates my growth in career development, collaboration, coordination, team building, and understanding of how resourceful technology can be for students while exploring future interests. To assist students in acquiring positive attitudes, knowledge and skills in career development, my fieldwork partner and I created a presentation on Career Cruising, a website to introduce an Internet-based career exploration and planning tool that helps students acquire the skills needed to explore future professions. To reach all 9th grade students, the presentation was given during each 9th grade history classes in either the Library IRC room or computer lab. The purpose of these lessons was to work with the 9th graders in creating and using a career portfolio. As a team, we chose the Career Cruising website to teach students how to make informed career decisions based on personal interests. During the presentation, we introduced and described the benefits of the Career Cruising website, giving the students knowledge and skills on how to use self-assessments and explore careers options. In addition, we taught the students how to navigate through Career Cruising to research post-secondary requirements needed to achieve their career goals. Standard 20: Career Development Standard C: B1.2: Identify personal skills, interests and abilities and relate them to current career choice was implemented by demonstrating how to explore Career Matchmaker, a self-assessment tool within the Career Cruising website where students answer questions about likes and dislikes to find careers that match up with their

Kathy Granite Exemplar #5 interests. Standard C: A1.8: Pursue and develop competency in areas of interest was shown by discussing the assessment results with the students and teaching them to recognize occupations that best fit their personal interests. The students were able to see a list of career options and decide which professions they would consider pursuing and which they would not. Standard 27: Collaboration, Coordination, & Team Building Through teamwork, my fieldwork partner and I created and delivered an effective career development program. To make this happen, my fieldwork partner and I collaborated to create a lesson that would best promote student achievement. Jointly, we familiarized ourselves with the Career Cruising website, created a curriculum, PowerPoint, a careersearch worksheet and together we delivered the presentation. To expand our presentation further, through collaboration with the AVID teachers, my fieldwork partner and I also delivered the Career Cruising presentation in each AVID class. During this time, we interacted with the students by sharing our own personal career paths and listened to their own career dreams. Standard 30: Research, Evaluation and Technology: Standard C: B1.6: Learn to use the Internet to access career-planning information was demonstrated by introducing the students to the Career Cruising website, an online tool meant to inspire students to achieve their full potential in school, career and life. A monthly fee is required to have a personal account with Career Cruising. Our site supervisor asked my fieldwork partner and I to use this website because the school has a paid membership, therefore offers a free service for students.

Kathy Granite Exemplar #5 Each presentation was conducted in a computer lab. After the Power Point presentation, all students were able to apply the information learned during our presentation by logging on to the computer and using the Career Cruising website. Standard C: A1.1: Develop skills to locate, evaluate and interpret career information was applied in this presentation by requiring the students to complete a worksheet to help with their exploration. Based on the assessment list of career options, we asked each student to select their favorite career. Once a career choice was made, each student had to research and answer the following information on a worksheet: job description, working conditions, earnings, education, the career path to reach that career and related careers. By completing this research assignment, the students were able to better understand the specific career details and evaluate whether or not the career they chose was a match for them. My fieldwork partner and I did not use a pre/post or survey to analyze the lesson. Instead, we tested the lessons effectiveness by the completion of career-search worksheets. The students were asked to research a career and document findings about the career, such as job description, working conditions, earnings, education and related careers. This activity let us know if the website was user-friendly and if the students were able to locate the information in a timely manner. We also used verbal feedback to learn if students liked the website, if they learned from it and if they thought it was helpful. Conclusion: The Career Cruising presentation was one of my favorite core curriculum lessons thus far. I enjoyed the collaboration between my fieldwork partner and I when creating it and the

Kathy Granite Exemplar #5 teamwork we demonstrated when delivering it. I thought we worked very well together and came up with a fun, informative presentation that the students seemed to enjoy. I not only learned about the amazing tools Career Cruising has to offer, but also how to show them to the students. I appreciated seeing the results after students identified personal interests, found a career they liked, researched the career and decided whether or not the career was a match for them. One thing I would change for this presentation was to eliminate presenting in the computer lab; some of the computers did not work and the ones that did were slow. This made it frustrating for the students to explore the website, complete the self-assessment and finish the research worksheet before the class time ended.