Career Pathways – Virtual Trailheads – Exploring Careers Online
With the unprecedented move to remote learning necessary about the shelter-in-place orders tied to COVID-19, the P-20 Network had previously offered suggestions about how career exploration could continue while students are learning at home. From the dialogue that this post generated, we are excited to announce that we are launching a new series on YouTube – Career Pathways Virtual Trailheads.
Since students cannot be engaging in face-to-face or on-site work-based learning experiences, we’re excited to bring people from a wide range of occupations across the Career Pathways to students remotely. These videos will allow students to learn about their work, the skills that are most important in their work each day, and to benefit from the advice that these professionals have to offer students.
Teachers can benefit from the Career Pathways Virtual Trailheads videos in two ways. First, these videos serve as a resource that can be used as we engage students in remote learning in the short-term as well as in online, blended, or traditional learning environments in the future. Second, these videos can provide brief virtual externship experiences for teachers to hear about careers and workplaces outside of education in order to ensure that our instruction is as relevant and engaging as possible for our students and their futures.
For each interview, we will post a corresponding blog post. Videos and blog posts will begin to be shared during the week of March 30, 2020. To keep up-to-date:
- Follow the P-20 Network on Twitter
- Subscribe to the P-20 Network YouTube Channel
Elements of a Team-Based Challenge
A Career Pathway Endorsement Team-Based Challenge is a self-contained exercise that may vary in length and structure ranging from an individual activity to an instructional unit.
A Team-Based Challenge should require students to utilize and demonstrate competency with work-based knowledge and skills as they work to solve an authentic work-based problem as members of a collaborative team.
Career Pathway Endorsement Team-Based Challenges should include the following features:
- Challenges seek solutions to authentic problems that are identified from and/or in collaboration with industry partners, are regionally relevant and globally connected, and result in a real solution that can be applied and implemented in the “real world”. As part of or in addition to the solution/product, students must complete a presentation of their solution and its application to an authentic audience.
- Students work in collaborative groups to solve the problem.
- Students are supported by an expert mentor from the field. If possible, experts should also be present for student presentations at the culmination of the Team-Based Challenge.
- Challenges require students to demonstrate key technical, employability, and entrepreneurial competencies. Successful demonstration of the competencies through a Team-Based Challenge is typically represented through a rubric and/or another form of authentic assessment.
Career Pathway Endorsement Team-Based Challenges are also a strong vehicle for providing opportunities for new partners with school districts. Since Challenges are shorter in duration and do not require significant commitments of time or the need to host students on-site (and the ensuing policy challenges that may come with that), Team-Based Challenges provide a “lighter” way for new partners to work alongside the school district and to have their employees engage with students as experts. With the proliferation of advanced communications technologies in school classrooms, such interactions may be in-person either in school or at the partner’s site through a research trip or online.
A Career Pathway Endorsement Team-Based Challenge can take place within a course that is part of the identified sequence for a particular College & Career Pathway. Challenges can also take place as part of a co-curricular activity.
November 2019