308: Build an Easy Careers Unit

The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA

This week let’s talk about careers. I don’t know if you can relate, but I graduated from high school with a general awareness of maybe six careers - law, medicine, teaching, ministry, science, and business. Let’s talk about how we can show our students a broader view of what’s out there - and build in some ELA skills to the process.

A fun way to start any careers unit is with a careers scavenger hunt, an easy form of research students can do as they move through their days. Just ask your students to begin noticing the careers they’re interacting with, making a list of every career they can think of that relates to what they do for one day. Challenge them to come up with at least twenty-five.

For example, they wake up and check their phones (social media influencer, programmer, designer, app creation, phone sales), pick up coffee (coffee shop manager or owner, organic coffee farmer, pastry chef, interior designer, contractor, advertising agent), go to school (teacher, administrator, politician, secretary, department chair, electrician, engineer), head for the mall (clothing designer, clothing buyer, social media for clothing lines, marketer, photographer, restaurant manager, chef, furniture buyer, urban planner etc.). As students begin to think about all the different jobs associated with their own daily routines, it’ll help open their eyes to the many careers out there.

Similarly, you can help students begin to think beyond the surface by having them write down a field they’re interested in and research to discover twenty-five different jobs in that field. What jobs are connected to film director? SO many. To doctor? To teacher? To chef? This is a really fun activity to stretch student’s imaginations. Then have students walk around to see each other’s lists, jotting down the one career on each other list that most appeals to them.

Diving a little deeper, one unique way of approaching a careers unit is to start a class careers blog, inviting each student to shadow someone whose line of work interests them and then make a contribution to the blog based on what they learn. The contribution could be a video they make about the experience, a narrative profile they write about the person they shadow, a Q & A style written interview, a photo essay, or something else. If you’re going to publish the careers blog online so that all students can access the many wonderful resources they create for each other, and so that other students can add to it in the coming years, be sure to get the permission of those being shadowed to publish their image and story online.

Another lower stakes project is to let students create timelines of start-up companies, based on NPR’s show, How I Built This. Let students choose an episode based on a company they’re actually interested in, and create timelines to show how the company grew (generally slowly, with lots of setbacks and lots of commitment and creativity from the creator!). Then share these timelines in a gallery walk or with mini-presentations so students get a taste of many different stories.

Similarly, you could create a class podcast, having each student contribute by recording an interview with someone about their career. Students could learn to reach out with inquiries, write interview questions, and record sound clips. So many valuable real-world skills here!

Hopefully after completing a few of these activities, your students will have a broader view of the working world and a little more motivation to care about the skills they’re learning in your classroom. After all, restaurant owners need to be able to write e-mail newsletters these days. Business owners may draw clientele through podcasting and social media captions. App designers must be able to pitch their ideas through strong presentations to venture capitalists. You know what I’m getting at.

A careers unit has the potential to be incredibly engaging - who isn’t curious about their life options? And it also has the potential for plenty of ELA skill practice - research, interview skills, writing and speaking. So today, I just want to highly recommend that if you’ve got a little hole and a lot of students who don’t really know what they want to be - you consider adding a creative careers unit to your lineup.

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