Hi all, May is upon us. We had a great Zoom meeting last Wednesday and look forward to another this Wednesday. Take a look at the May activities. Come to the Zoom meeting if you can or write us if you have questions!
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May Activities
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Planning your event with a checklist and assessments in mind
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Planning Template 2018 – to be attached
TEDEd (Experimental series to explore career information)
Assessment Techniques
2018
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Overview
March and April focused on discovering your community with new eyes and ideas. While you will continue to make efforts to understand your community in new ways, May activities are centered on planning. You will begin to use the Planning Template, review the Assessment Techniques and also watch a TedTalk on how to create an interactive career discussion with students and professionals.
Planning Template
We offer you the Planning Template as a checklist for organizing your information to make sure you have the information you need at your fingertips. This is simply a template so use it in the best way that it works for you. If you want to make changes or restructure it or add ideas, by now you should know that we applaud your effort and would love for you to share your improvements. We all work and organize differently. The important aspect is, of course, to be organized and to be able to demonstrate your plan of action. Once you’ve identified your project, begin to fill out the template. Share the (incomplete) template with your support team or on the Community of Practice. Ask for feedback. That’s why we are all here.
The Planning Template will be attached as a Word document with this post. Please let us know immediately if you are unable to open and save it to your own computer.
Assessing Your Project
Think about how you will evaluate your program at the very start of your planning.
Review Caitlin’s presentation in Denver. As you consider how you will work with your community partner, think about and discuss your goals and how you will measure the achievement of those goals. This is a good time to remind you that the only failure in this project is to not give it your best effort. When you create goals and intentions, you may very well find some of your goals were not achieved while some are. Many unintended goals and insights may happen along the way. Be sure to capture those in your assessment as well.
One of your goals is to listen to your community in order to create a program (or programs) to address the needs or gaps in helping prepare your middle school students for success in their college and/or career choices and document what you do to achieve those goals. How can you evaluate that goal?
Evaluating your program is important. Observable activities, pre-post tests, feedback cards, audience participation by raising their hand or responding by writing on Post-it notes, writing questions, saving real or imaginary money, etc. are all examples of ways to evaluate whether your goals are being met (or not). You will think of many more ways to measure how your programs are received. Remember photos are an excellent way to document. Remind yourself to be the one to photograph or assign someone else to do so when you are writing out your goals.
Talk with your potential partners about how they would like to see your collective efforts measured.
Write a few draft ideas about what your MEASURABLE goals might be. Write an email to your support team leader about your thoughts about assessing your project.
TEDEd Click your Fortune
Watch the three demonstrations on the TedEd link. The introduction is the same for all three, but the questions are different on each demo. We thought it might provide food for thought for questions and a technique you might use to get people talking about careers. To be clear, this series is no longer taking feedback so we’re not asking you to interact with it. We simply want you to see the process and liked the experimental nature of the demonstrations.
If you don’t like fortune cookie idea, try something different. Putting the questions in something else that creates a bit of fun and/or surprise. Wrap them around a small candy bar, put them inside plastic eggs, have students fold them into an origami shape, roll them around a pencil or some kind of school identified object are some ideas that spring to mind. Having a bit of fun with how you deliver the questions puts both your students and your career guests at ease and helps get the conversation going.