 Welcome to this week's version of Wednesday webinar. Today, we're going to talk about career development. Why should schools have a comprehensive K-12 program? And what tools are available to assist in the implementation of that program? I'm Laura Leno-Keefe here at ESU-8. First of all, we're going to talk about state-level initiatives. The Nebraska Department of Education and the Nebraska State Board of Education had unanimously adopted the career readiness standards. Career-ready person capitalizes on personal strengths, talents, education, and experiences to bring value to the workplace and the community through his or her performance, skill, diligence, ethics, and responsible behavior. What we're seeing with these career readiness standards is they're really upping the game for all educators to be talking about what career-ready looks like and what does career development within our classrooms look like? The next state-level initiative is AQuest, our accountability system. And where does career development fit in here? Well, of the six tenets, career development and career readiness are specifically mentioned in four of them. In the student success and access tenets, in positive partnerships, relationships, and student success, a big thing to highlight here is the individual or personalized learning plans. That the state board seeks to support schools and districts to implement best practices in student, family, and community engagement to enhance educational experiences and opportunities. The individual or personalized learning plans we'll talk about a little bit more. I think this has a big place in where our career development programs are leading. The next one is Transition. State board believes that quality educational opportunities focus on supports for students transitioning between grade levels, programs, schools, districts, and ultimately college and career. Educational opportunities and access. The state board believes that all students should have access to comprehensive instructional opportunities to be prepared for post-secondary education and career goals. So those opportunities to be prepared is that career development piece in our classroom and throughout our school. And the teaching learning tenant, college and career ready. The state board believes that every student upon completion of secondary education shall be prepared for post-secondary educational opportunities and to pursue his or her own career goals. Rigorous college and career ready standards, technology and digital standards, and support for career awareness and career and college goals. So using AQUEST as the basis of some of our conversations that we have with stakeholders, this is a really good place to start. The next place that we see college and career readiness and career development is in the ESSA plan, Nebraska ESSA plan, sets two goals that I think are very, very important for us to look at. The first under success, access and support, their strategic priority is to ensure that all Nebraskans regardless of background or circumstances have equitable access to opportunities for success. And the way that they, one of the goals aligned with that strategic priority is by 2018, a baseline and benchmarks will be developed to track all students with disability, having access to participate in career counseling, explorations, self-advocacy training and work-based learning experiences. The second goal within the ESSA plan is under the college career and civic ready. And their strategic priority is to increase the number of Nebraskans who are ready for success in post-secondary education, career and civic life. One of the major goals that is gonna have an impact on career development facilitators and counselors and throughout our schools is by 2026, 100% of Nebraska's schools will provide all students with a program for career awareness, exploration and preparation. This also focuses back on that individual learning plan. Now we're gonna talk a little bit about the personal learning plan. They do have a resource and I've given you the link. It's on the Nebraska Department of Education's website. And they talk about, gives you step by step on how this learning plan should look. What research is showing us is that personal learning plans increases goal setting, increases motivation, increases student self-advocacy and improves GPA, career decision-making, readiness and lowers distress. So as you move into how you would like to create your career development program throughout your school, one of the things you may want to start bringing in is what does that personal learning plan or your individual learning plan within your school look like for your students? On the Nebraska Department of Education website, there is a nice packet for parent information. As we move toward a bigger interaction with our students on career development, career choices, career pathways, having parents on board is really, really important. So in this transparency, utilizing the tools that the Department of Education has provided might be a good idea. One of the surveys taken and inserted in the ESSA plan was a stakeholder survey. And it's how should student success be measured? And if you notice, community members and educators and parents feel like the second most important is college and career readiness. So again, utilizing some of this research and some of this data as a support piece when you go to your administrators, when you are talking to teachers, when you're talking to parents, this arms you with a little bit of research. But what we're gonna do now is talk about some tools and resources that you can utilize when you are looking at either expanding your career development program or enhancing it or just starting it. A good place to start is with the American School Counseling Association's mindset and behaviors for student success. This document has developmentally appropriate places where your students should be at different levels. What kinds of behaviors? What kind of mindsets are they going to have to have to be able to move on to the next level? So this is one good. Now we're gonna talk about some local Nebraska-based tools and resources. The career readiness toolkit is on the counselors page on the Nebraska Department of Education's website. It's got a variety of different activities, units that you could incorporate, you could share with your teachers. Nebraska Career Connections is a good tool if you don't have an online resource to do interest inventories. It is paid for by the state. It's free. If you don't have, if your SIS system does not incorporate a platform like this, this is a nice option for you. There's others also that we'll talk about. The Nebraska Department of Education is going to reface this page just a little bit and we'll be bringing in people to help do some professional development and so that you could really see what the benefit of the Career Connections page can provide. Another is the Engage Curriculum. This curriculum is primarily for seventh and eighth graders, but again, don't recreate the wheel. They have a place for you to start. So if you want to share that, maybe you have a teacher in your building that's teaching careers. This might be a good place for them to go. Nebraska Career Tours. This is a virtual, they're virtual industry tours that align with the five career clusters. They also, along with them, have activities that your teachers can do in class. They have pre-tests, post-tests, some worksheets, some research-type things that go along with the Nebraska Career Tours. These are all Nebraska-based industries, but it's a good way to show what's taking place out in Nebraska that if we're in a rural area, we might not have access to actually go to that location. Another good free tool. The Career Readiness Module. This is very interesting. It's in conjunction with the Nebraska Department of Labor and there are a variety of small units with videos that are attached, so you could watch someone interview. You could watch somebody give a presentation. You could watch a mock video on how to utilize decision-making. This is also a free tool. If you Google Career Readiness Modules, these come up. They're free in your school. You could assign them to your students. There's a multitude of different kinds of units that you could utilize. Again, like I said before, don't recreate the wheel. There are a multitude of K-12 career development programs, career development resources, activities available online. Some of the ones that I have found to be maybe better than others, the one from Missouri, the Oklahoma, the Department of Education in Wyoming, and the College and Career Readiness from Missouri again. All of these have great resources. You can download, you can tweak them to fit your school, your student, your grade level. Don't recreate the wheel. There's a lot of things out there. And as we talk about this, we need to make sure that we're having conversations with our students about our digital society. We're utilizing a lot of online tools and there are some things our students need to be aware of. Information society is a society where creation, distribution, use, integration, and manipulation of information is a significant economic, political, and cultural activity. The people who have the means to partake in this form of society are sometimes called digital citizens. And we all know that we talk about digital citizenship within our schools. One of the things with us as career development facilitators or counselors that we need to think about is when we're doing online searches and we're having students do online portfolios, what does that look like? So things that we need to consider are confidentiality, a professional image. And this is important to talk to your students about each one of them have a professional image, whether it's professionalism within their school, maybe it's a volunteer job, maybe it's summer work, but they need to maintain professional image. They also need to understand privacy and security, digital resources that are available, and how we're networking. So what is, what's that professional image portraying? Students need to recognize that that front facing needs to be appropriate and professional. So we talk a lot about professional do's and don'ts when in your public image on your online network, whether you're have Facebook or Snapchat or Instagram. One nice thing to tell students is this little graph from Challenger Gray and Christmas. How often employers review job candidates, social media pages? So right now, 40% never do. However, the remaining 60% of interviews or employers will take a look at their social media pages. And what impact does social media have on hiring decisions? Again, 40% say some, 22% say none, but we've got a large amount, we have almost 40% that are saying, yeah, this is gonna have an impact. So I think sharing these two pieces of data with your students is beneficial as well. So how do you go about helping a student clean up his or her public facing image on social media? I've provided a few links here for privacy settings and it's important that students know how to get to the privacy settings. Sometimes they know better than we do, but then if they're not utilizing that or if they wanna close down, if there's concern about bullying or if there's concern about people tagging them in pictures, this is a great way, some links that you can utilize to help them kind of clean up their front facing image on social media. Now I'm just gonna throw a whole bunch of digital resources at you. Since we're talking about being digital citizens and what is available to counselors, to career development facilitators, to teachers, to help students become career ready. One is Weebly. It's a free website builder. We have students oftentimes building websites to promote themselves, to promote an idea, to promote a business. This is a good online resource for you. Zeme is a mobile community where students and colleges connect. This is interesting if you have an opportunity to get on and look at it, what is happening is colleges are going to these online portfolio sites and looking at them connecting with their students and it's really a professional Facebook page that you are applying for college through this online portfolio. So this is very interesting. There are free trials so you can take a look at that. Again, Road Trip Nation, it's really a fun interactive online interest inventory. What is it, how do you get from point A to point B if I wanna be in this career? How do I get that, get to that point? On a Road Trip Nation is fun for a variety of ages. Onet Online is connected to what's called My Next Move and this I would limit to older students. This they can do career searches, interest inventories. It aligns with different regions. It aligns with the Department of Labor's occupation codes so they can look at how much education they would need to be able to get that career. So there's also aligns with the 16 career clusters and so you can align that with those kinds of career pathways that you have in your own school. Those are two online resources that are pretty helpful. And then we have a couple virtual field trip resources that NEPRUS connects industry professionals to classrooms. There is a cost for NEPRUS, however, NIDA this year has a virtual field trip mini-grant and it would cover if you apply for the grant it would cover a year subscription to NEPRUS. What students and teachers can do, let's say I want to know more about oceanography. I can get on NEPRUS and I can search for an industry professional. You could set up a personal one-on-one conversation with this professional. You could watch an archived video. There are other kinds of videos that go right into those particular industries and just do a virtual online tour. Another good virtual tour is discovery education. My last thing is starting in September of 2018. We're gonna try to put together a counselor career development Zoom network. This is gonna be kind of a counselor cadre. We're gonna, what I would like from you is to go to this website, this Google form and fill out what kinds of things would you like to talk about? Should we do case studies? Should we have guest speakers? So this online Google form asks you if we were going to do this Zoom network next year, when would we like to do it? How often should we do it? What kind of topics should we pull together? This concludes my Wednesday webinar on career development. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me at the ESU. Have a great day.