How Do You Know When Career Exploration Succeeds?

"Success" is a tricky topic when it comes to teaching. Everyone wants to know whether they′re successfully teaching - but how do you actually measure that success? For career exploration, you have a couple different methods at your fingertips.

First, you can measure the percentage of students in your class who have concretely chosen a career they want to investigate further.

In other words, you keep track of how many students have a definite answer in the decide portion of career exploration.

For the students who don′t have a definitive answer, you know that you have to follow up with them to get them engaged with the subject or a career that′s more suited to their interests.

Another way to measure success is with a summative assessment given as a traditional test or essay.

This lets your students answer questions about the class based on what they learned - not necessarily a right or wrong answer.

Instead, you get students to talk about what they learned in a class, why they liked something, why they disliked something, and what they want to do next.

The students who really get into your career exploration class will get into this assessment in no time! All they have to do is talk about what they liked and why they liked it, which is a fun and expressive activity for students of any age.

The students who aren′t quite feeling the career exploration class may have more difficulty. Again, this shows you that they didn′t quite engage with the curriculum as you might′ve wanted, which gives you the opportunity to circle back and engage these students in other ways.

With these two options, you′re all prepped and ready to run a career exploration class with a clear indicator of success!

So with everything said and done, let′s talk about one big question we haven′t answered yet.