Implementation Guidance
Integrating explicit career connections and mentoring experiences within your STEM curricula helps to increase youth interest and awareness of local STEM Careers. The following guide provides tips, based on our experience with the STEM Career Connections project, to help you integrate career activities and community partnership into your STEM curriculum.
Integrating STEM Career Connections
The career connections activities serve as bookends to the unit, helping youth to see how the technology and STEM skills they are learning in their STEM program are utilized by STEM careers found in your community. The career activities also provide youth with the opportunity to explore their own career interests. We recommend that the career-focused activities be spaced throughout the unit to reinforce the focus on connecting STEM coursework to careers. The figure below provides an example of the types of career activities to integrate, as well as suggestions for when to integrate these activities within the technology unit. We have also included links to the integrated timelines that were used during the STEMCC project for instruction of the Sensor Immersion and 3D Printing units.
Tips for Implementing Career Connections in Different Settings
Your implementation of career connections may look different depending on your educational setting. If you work with youth during the school day in a STEM or science class, you have built-in time periods and student enrollment, but you may have less flexibility in your curriculum sequence. If you are working with youth in an after-school Maker or STEM club or during a summer program, you will likely have more freedom with content and pacing, but you will need to design student activities to be less “school-like” and less dependent upon prior knowledge.
The following implementation guides share tips for implementing career connections in different educational settings.
- Choose unit topics that have clear connections to STEM organizations in the community.
- Connect the in-school STEM learning experience with career awareness activities already utilized in your school district.
- Determine what background knowledge or learning experiences students need to have prior to meeting with mentors so that they can have meaningful discussions and know what questions to ask.
- Choose mentors that align with the STEM experiences youth will have in class.
- Provide orientation for the mentors ahead of their time with youth. Use these mentor orientation resources to help you.
- Consider having mentors record their presentations so that you can share them across multiple class periods.
- Plan to revisit STEM skills and careers multiple times throughout the unit.
- Build in reflection times for youth to discuss and build relevant connections between STEM activities and mentor interactions.
- Tie in the theme of the camp our after school program with career awareness activities (e.g., community heroes, sustainability, etc).
- Consider how you can integrate career awareness into any and all planned field trips and/or presentations during the camp or after school program. If they aren’t directly related to STEM, focus instead on STEM skills.
- Create more hands-on learning experiences and more opportunities for youth to tinker.
- Have multiple types of differentiated activities for the youth to engage with the technologies so that youth with some experience can go further.
- Attend youths' backgrounds, prior experiences, and cultural knowledge to make connections to local STEM in ways that are relevant and meaningful to them.
- Create ways for students to share their learning in a less structured way since you will not be using formal assessments.
- Plan for a presentation of learning at the end of the unit, inviting family and mentors to share in the youth’s successes.