Getting Started with Career-Connected Literacy
Three Tips to Drive Your Success
Whether you are curious about adding a unit, a course, or a vertically aligned series of competencies around career-connected literacy into your existing English curricula, getting started can sometimes feel daunting. Here are three tips to make that journey more enjoyable.
Try action research
Be open to new learning
Get their feet wet
1. Try Action Research
As English teachers, when we start preparing to teach new content, most of us dive into research. Usually that involves lots of reading and, sometimes, networking with others who are teaching similar content. These strategies hold true when preparing to teach a career-connected literacy course, but can be supplemented in a fun and rewarding way by adding action research to that process.
The summer before I started teaching my first career-connected literacy course, I spent time interviewing industry professionals, so I could learn- from the source-the role that reading, writing and speaking played in their professional lives. In interviews that lasted anywhere between 30 and 90 minutes, I spoke with a police detective, a hospital administrator, a salon owner, a realtor, a fire chief, the owner of a large construction firm, a data analyst, an engineer, business managers, and a corporate consultant. The experience was energizing and incredibly informative.
Key takeaways: All mentioned the importance of concise and correct writing and emphasized the impact these skills have on professional credibility. They also stressed that effective interpersonal communication skills are foundational to professional success. They loaded me up with stories, samples of workplace texts, recommended readings and resources and, most importantly, they became part of a reliable network of professionals who could offer advice or opportunities for my students to conduct informational interviews, onsite shadows or even internships.
Also encouraging was the great deal of overlap in the ideas that they shared. Regardless of how different their industries, there were universal skills that all needed, such as running a meeting, delivering bad news, persuading others, and writing proposals or emails (naming only a few). Those universal skills enabled me to teach career-focused literacy without having to create 25 separate lesson plans for each class section. For example, while all students might be learning how to create a persuasive pitch, write an incident report or deliver bad news effectively, the content of their work could be personalized to their own career interest areas. Rubrics, skills and strategies became universal, while topics and content were specific to individual careers.
2. Be open to new learning
One of the most rewarding aspects of this curriculum is that it is constantly evolving. The business world has recognized that communication skills are at the heart of workplace success. There is a constant flow of new workplace learning and approaches that involve literacy. Our ability to grow professionally, to research and innovate, to effectively problem-solve and to lead with authority and compassion are all deeply rooted in our abilities as readers, writers and speakers. Resources such as The Harvard Business Review, or Entrepreneur can offer articles that support our professional growth around evolving work-based communication theories and practices.
Not only are workplace communication skills constantly evolving, so, too, are the workplaces themselves. New innovations, practices, trends and controversies emerge in industry daily. All of this change may feel overwhelming, but, happily, the kids can be agents in this discovery as well, through research gathered for projects and informational interviews.
And, as is true with traditional literacy instruction, there are foundational concepts we can rely on that can serve as the backbone of our instruction, even as we explore new avenues and approaches to grow our curriculum.
3. Lastly, get their feet wet.
One of the most joyful parts of teaching this course is the excitement kids have about exploring their future fields, not just through research, but through conversations or shadows they experience outside of the classroom. Students returning from informational interviews or job shadows during which they controlled a robot-dog or interviewed the head of cybersecurity for the State of New Hampshire or were offered a summer job from a local construction company exude excitement about their futures and their pathways. It’s a privilege to be along for that journey and to help them build the literacy capacities they will need to thrive as they move beyond our classrooms. Seeing the immediate transferability and authenticity of their literacy learning by getting onsite and into the business world can be motivating and energizing for them. And, during the process, some may learn that a certain career is, perhaps, not what they really want to do. In that case, their efforts have saved them some time and money.
There are many rewards to career-connected literacy learning. . .
. . .but it’s OK not to dive in head-first. Talk to a few friends and family members about how they use their literacy each day. Try a unit, a lesson or a guest speaker to gauge your students’ interest (and your own). Read research around the value of relevant content in motivating students. Or, talk to us. Join our mailing list or email me at byork@literacythatworks.com