The Story Behind Career Day

A Language Arts class was asked by the principal to plan a career day event for the entire school.

The students had approximately six weeks to plan, organize, and stage the career day. They were responsible for contacting people, organizing the schedule, and keeping the students and teachers in the school informed about the coming event. The students had the benefit of reviewing the experience of the previous year’s career day which had also been a student-directed event.

During the fall semester, the students performed writing tasks and a one-day work internship at a place of business that helped prepare them for the project—known as Vital Link. Most of the work was completed in class with feedback from peers and the teacher. Other adults in the building, including secretaries and administrators, assisted students with tasks such as phone calls, permission forms, and advertisements. The students worked on the project while completing other assigned tasks in the class.

The written work produced as part of Applied Learning projects commonly contains some errors. Documentation of these projects includes notes, journal entries and plans that students produced as working documents for their personal use. These kinds of documents were not prepared with the expectation of eventual publication and they have not been revised for inclusion in this book.

It is expected that finished work produced as part of an Applied Learning project will contain virtually error free writing.

This project illustrates a standard-setting performance for the following parts of the standards:
c	Communication: Publish information.
b	Information: Use information technology.
c	Learning and Self-management: Set learning goals and review progress.

What the work shows

c Communication Tools and Techniques: The student publishes information using several methods and formats, such as overhead transparencies, handouts, and computer generated graphs and charts; that is, the student:

• organizes the information into an appropriate form for use in the publication;
• checks the information for accuracy;
• formats the published material so that it achieves its purpose.

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This is a note written to parents and guardians seeking help in identifying businesses to participate in the Vital Link component of the project. The students adopted a style common for such notes from school to home.

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This handout was prepared to inform teachers about the schedule and other arrangements for the career day. It is presented in a format appropriate to its purpose and anticipates the readers’ needs by providing information in addition to the schedule

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The students prepared this map of the school to help direct the speakers visiting the school on the career day.

b Information Tools and Techniques: The student uses information technology to assist in gathering, analyzing, organizing, and presenting information; that is, the student:

• acquires information for specific purposes from on-line sources, such as the Internet, and other electronic data bases, such as a scientific data base on CD ROM;
  
• uses word-processing, graphics, data base, and spreadsheet programs to produce project reports and related materials.

The students used word-processing programs to produce a range of materials.

Students used a graphics package to produce the school map and a spreadsheet package to produce the charts scheduling the speakers.

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c Learning and Self-management Tools and Techniques: The student sets goals for learning and reviews his or her progress; that is, the student:

• sets goals for learning;
• reviews his or her progress towards meeting the goals;
• seeks and responds to advice from others in setting goals and reviewing progress.

These documents demonstrate that goals and a system of self-management were in place.

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The letter to the principal sets out goals for the project.

The description of roles and responsibilities explains the organization the students established to tackle the tasks involved in preparing for the event.

In these evaluations, the students commented upon the aspects of the event that were successful and the aspects that would need to be improved in planning for another similar event. The students produced these evaluations for their personal use and did not revise them for publication.

Through the formal evaluation forms, the students collected information to check their understanding of how well the event was planned and staged against the perceptions of the adults and students who took part in the event.

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