Intentionally Incorporating Careers

I have been incredibly fortunate to be invited to present with my peers and professor at Idaho School Counselor Association's Annual Conference this past week. Our presentation focuses on incorporating career guidance into the elementary level and was an updated version of a presentation we facilitated at the Washington School Counselor Association Conference last year.

We discussed different strategies and techniques to better incorporate a career focus into the school counseling program. These strategies primarily included becoming more intentional about using "career" as a category. For example, one of the activities we presented was the game Scattegories. In this game you have participants think of as many things as possible within a category that start with a specified letter. At ISCA we played a round where participants worked in team to come up and write down as many careers as they could think of that begin with the letter "N" within 2 minutes. The true exposure to different careers comes when you go around the room and everyone reads off their lists. Once a career has been stated, everyone with that career crosses it off. The final "winner" is the group with the most answers left. This encourages students to be creative and realize that there can be a lot of career options in the world.

We used the same strategy of intentionally focusing on careers for other "games" as well. Between the two presentations we altered the following games:

• Get to know the class Bingo - Find Someone who is an Expert on... 
• 2 Truths and a lie - Have each student pick a career that they get to research and use the 2 Truths format as a way to present the information. 
• Would you Rather - Question Handout
• Alphabet game - Come up with a career for each letter. See who can be most creative/fastest.

  

  Found Here

We also suggested strategies such as creating a "Career Library" where the books are all about different careers, or working with math teachers to do a lesson on how much different careers make.

There are many options for integrating careers, and I would love to hear what you do in the comments below!