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Small changes to your teaching
We will explore some quick ways to incorporate curriculum-linked careers learning into your scheme of work and broaden your students’ experience.
NEIL: As you move through this week you will explore some first steps to incorporating curriculum-linked careers learning into your teaching practice. To start, you’ll build some foundations by drawing upon guidance and resources we’ve selected for you. From there, we will feed in the expertise of teachers, employers and supporting organisations that each have their own experiences of building a careers linked curriculum in STEM subjects. A study by the Office for National Statistics asked students about the careers they wanted, and their actual career 6 years later. The findings have significant implications about the way we talk about careers.
Less than one in 50 were in the career they initially wanted, but this is more about awareness of careers than students not meeting their original aspirations. Nick Chambers, chief executive of the Education and Employers charity commented that young people’s ambitions were often defined by the limited range of jobs they knew about, in his words “You can’t be it, if you can’t see it.” The small changes we consider this week are driven by purpose and context for learning, and in doing so we allow more students to “see” the possibilities available to them.
Providing your students with a wide range of career learning experiences will support them to be better informed about their options, and draw links between what they are learning in your classroom and its importance to their future employability. As we move through this week, we will explore some quick ways to incorporate career learning into your schemes of work, providing multiple opportunities over a longer period of time for students increase their careers awareness.
Small changes
We’ve all had that moment when a student asks…“why are we learning this?”Drawing links between lesson content and careers is a strategy for strengthening engagement and promoting positive attitudes towards a subject.In the next few steps we look at three small changes, which draw on readily accessible resources to incorporate careers into your lessons.- Using examples of people, jobs and industries.
- Making explicit links to the skills being used.
- Contextualising the curriculum.
Choose a topic
By the end of the week you will have begun to incorporate curriculum linked career learning into a section of your scheme of work.For now, have a look at your scheme of work and choose one topic area that you would like to make small changes to. You may find it useful to choose a topic that is coming up in your teaching, so you can try approaches out during the course whilst supported by mentors and other learners.
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Linking Curriculum Learning to STEM Careers
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Linking Curriculum Learning to STEM Careers
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