Strategies for integrating Career Development Activities in PK-5
In my last article, I talked about a Careers Framework that provides Central Office administrators a way to organize our thinking and our work around Career Development. What are the best career development activities for elementary students?
Click here to download a PDF of the Curriculum Framework.
Today, I want to delve into the Framework and look just at the elementary piece. In the Framework, the component associated with elementary schools and students is Career Awareness.
At this level, our main focus is to expose students to many different possible careers and occupations. At the elementary level, we have several types of career development activities for students to explore.
As I said previously, kids aren’t making decisions about their future careers at this point. (Though many might tell you they want to be a veterinarian or a firefighter). But we do need to begin letting them know what the possibilities are.
Often students in elementary school, especially the primary grades, only think of work in terms of the jobs their moms and dads have. As educators, we want to broaden the horizon a bit.
So how do we do that from the Central Office? How can we do this for students without giving teachers one more thing to do? That’s always the Central Office struggle, isn’t it?
We can provide this support through age appropriate career development activities for students.
Career Development Alignment and Integration
At the elementary level, make sure students receive this exposure through aligning and integrating Career Development activities and opportunities into the curriculum.
As Central Office people, our job is to support our schools and teachers. One way is to remove obstacles and barriers for them. Let’s not make Career Development difficult.
Adding career development activities should not be something else that a teacher has to teach on top of their already full plate. Rather, we should utilize our existing curriculum guides as a tool for aligning Career Development opportunities and activities.
My guess is that if you look at your curriculum guides and maps, you will see where this is happening organically. The trick will be to make sure Careers is threaded throughout the curriculum consistently.
Before embarking on this work, you should connect with your Career and Technical Education (CTE) folks. If you have a business advisory group, then meet with them as well.
Talk with them about what their needs are and what the trend looks like for the future. How (and where) can you incorporate information on the positions they see as necessary in a few years into the current curriculum?
Career Development in the Curriculum Guide
How you go about actually making these changes to your curriculum guides is dependent on what type of system or process your district has in place for such work. (I am always curious about how districts tackle this work, so please share with me in the comments how this works in your school district).
Regardless of your process, I believe the Careers integration should be explicit and detailed in the curriculum documents. For example, once I’ve determined the grade level standard and the appropriate careers, then I am going to plug in specific information for the teacher.
I may link to an activity that could be incorporated into a lesson plan. Or I may indicate that this would be a great opportunity to have a guest speaker and list the person or organization, along with the contact information.
These are great career development activities for students that can meet standards and integrate seamlessly into the curriculum
Remember, this should be a natural integration for the teacher and student, so adding all the pertinent information in the curriculum guide provides ease for the teacher. Ease of use increases the likelihood of success.
Let’s look at some ways to add this specificity.
Utilizing Guest Speakers as a Career Development Activity
I mentioned guest speakers above. How can we best utilize them in our elementary school for learning about Careers?
I know. There is really nothing new about having a guest speaker talk to a class of students. We’ve done this our entire careers, right?
Here’s the thing – we can’t just say to someone, “Come talk to my class about your work.”
While many people are more than willing to do this, most don’t really know what to say. We need to help them with this struggle. Provide our guest speakers with some support.
The way to provide support and direction for guest speakers is to provide them with guidelines about what particular things you want them to cover in their talk. Provide this information to them on a handout or through an email.
Doing so will make this an useful career develoment activity for students, an easy experience for your guest speaker, and a win for the teacher!
What should be in the guidelines?
Let’s make sure to start out with the basics by giving the job title and where the person works. The remaining guidelines for the talk should be aligned with the curriculum standards.
For example, if the students have been learning about the life cycle of plants, you might have asked a tomato farmer or a greenhouse technician to speak to the class. Make sure that he or she knows that you need them to talk about how the life cycle of plants influences the work they do.
It is also a good idea to ask the speaker to bring in appropriate visual aids. For example, the greenhouse tech or the farmer might be able to bring in plants at various stages of development. That is, seeds, seedlings, transplant, mature plant.
Talk with your guest speaker prior to the visit about any hands-on or inquiry activities that might be appropriate for your students. Could students plant seeds? Could they help to repot seedlings?
Guidelines and the Central Office
For the most part, the guidelines should be standardized with areas for customization based on what standards are being covered. Teachers don’t have time in their weekly planning to develop the guidelines handout or determine the best speaker for a unit. That’s why embedding this information into the curriculum guide is so important.
Guest speakers can be a great asset to teachers and a tremendous learning opportunity for students in a Careers Framework. Central Office administrators can help by developing guidelines, locating the appropriate speakers, and aligning with curriculum documents.
Business & Industry Field Trips
You know one of the things I enjoyed most when I was in school? That’s right, field trips! Field trip day was a special day. We abandoned our normal routine and best of all, we typically went somewhere that I had never been before.
To an old farmstead with a pawpaw trees that produced fruit and which housed an old, but working mill. To the Biltmore House (Amazing!). Riding a passenger train – a real treat for a country kid!
I have been out of elementary school for a long time, but I still have wonderful memories of the field trips we took. Think about how easily it would be to integrate field trips to businesses in the community with the curriculum.
Short, local trips to various businesses and industries in the community are great career development activities for elementary students.
Virtual Field trips
Sometimes it won’t be possible to take an actual field trip, but that doesn’t mean that students still can’t have the experience. The solution? Virtual field trips!
Virtual field trips are career development activities for students that are easily integrated into our curriculum plans because there isn’t the logistics of getting a bus, providing lunch, having permission forms signed. All the things that are involved with going on an actual trip.
Oh yes. There is another huge advantage to virtual field, too. Often, the virtual field trip can be more detailed and nuanced than an actual trip.
How so? For safety reasons, some businesses may not allow students and non-staff into certain sections of the business, like a manufacturing floor or a sterile lab. But with a virtual field trip, students can visit those areas safely. Common Sense Education offers a great list of virtual field trip options!
Makerspaces, a fun career development activity
Often virtual reality experiences, like the field trips described above, are components of a school’s Makerspace. But Makerspaces can be used to support a Careers Framework in other ways as well.
For example, perhaps students have been studying how NASA engineers and scientists use robots in their work. Maybe they have even taken a field trip – real or virtual – to see how robotics is used at NASA. When students are in the Makerspace, they could be introduced to coding or even provided the opportunity to build their own robot.
Check out this post from ISTE on the many uses of Makerspaces!
Career Fairs
Most elementary schools have some type of parent and community events during the year. This is a great opportunity to integrate career development activities!
For schools that host STEM or STEAM nights, incorporating some career components should be relatively easy. One of the most popular STEM stations for elementary students is one that involves animals.
Invite staff from local fish and wildlife departments or state and national park services. In addition to their STEM activity, also ask them to provide information on all the careers available in their departments.
A Dual Role
Another opportunity – one that I think many districts and school miss – is when inviting community members to help out with an event like judging a science or technology fair.
These events are about students and their work, but we could enrich the experience for them by asking our judges and community volunteers to talk a bit about their work and how and why they chose their careers. A twofer.
This is especially valuable for students when a community member is also an entrepreneur. Schools and districts should provide examples of people who have married a passion with starting a business.
A student may say “I love sewing and designing patterns, but I don’t know how to make that a career.” By showing her someone else who started their own business based on something they loved, schools can show the student what is possible.
Career Development Activities – The Takeaway
Schools may integrate Careers activities in many ways. Adding Makerspaces, Career Fairs, Virtual and real life field trips are all great ways to expose young children to the plethora of careers that are available to them.
The best way though that district administrators can help support teachers and schools with the Career Framework is by integrating Careers into existing curriculum documents. Provide them with the connections and the contact information for guest speakers, for field trip opportunities, for specific activities that integrate a career with a standard.
Implementing these strategies will allow district administrators to support teachers by providing them with career development activities for elementary students.
Recent Comments