STUDENT ENGAGEMENT:

Middle school students are in an interesting place. They are actively developing those real world skills that will help them find success in the workplace, but might not yet understand what these are and how they interface with their career paths. In this lesson, they will learn just how their personal skills are developing through the Agile Work Profiler and explore how these come into play in the work that they hope to do in the future. Begin by connecting the theme for the day with the work that students have already been doing in career exploration:
 

We’ve taken time to explore the types of careers that might be a good fit for you based upon your interests. Still, just being interested in something doesn’t mean it’s going to be a perfect fit. There are other things to consider too. What other things should you consider when thinking about what career might be a good fit for you? (Encourage students to share and discuss based on time available.)

If students haven’t hit upon the importance of matching skills with career, touch on this and explain that they will be doing an activitiy that will require them to tap into a variety of skills.

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DIGGING IN:

The students are going to be doing the Handless Cup Stacking Activity. For this activity, students should be divided into groups of four or five. Each group will need 10 disposable plastic cups and a single rubber band with four or five (one for each student in a group) 24-inch pieces of yarn tied to it (evenly spaced).

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The object of this activity is for each group to stack their cups into a pyramid without using their hands. This can be the only instruction that you give the groups. You can choose to announce a time limit, or allow the process to continue until all students have completed.

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Students will need to communicate with one another to coordinate successful expansion and contraction of the rubber band. They will need to listen closely to others to achieve this as well. Some will have to take initiative to lead the group. Some may have to navigate disagreements. Groups may have to be resilient with a trial and error process.
 

 

Once groups have had an attempt to stack their cups and achieve success, ask the class to discuss the skills that were needed to be successful in completing the task. Did everyone have to tap into the same skills? Why or why not? Did your group have a leader that directed you through the process? How did they become your leader? Where the skills they used in the process the same the skills everyone else had to use?

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INTO ACTION:

With an idea of how important a variety of skills can be in the workplace, the students are going to be completing the Agile Work Profiler to explore their own personal skills. The Agile Profiler is part of the Indiana Career Explorer assessments for students, and includes 69 questions. Most of these are on a Likert scale. It may work well to complete each of the 13 individual pages together as a class. This will allow for ongoing clarification of terms that may be less familiar to some students. Students can access this assessment at: intoolkit.com/agile Students should focus on answering each of the questions carefully to reflect their likes and dislikes. Students should be encouraged not to think of “Disagree” answers as negative, but rather indications of where their skill sets exist right now. After students have completed the assessment, results will show their top three “Agilities.” This term is synonymous with “skills.”

Students should list these top three “Agilities” on the three “Your Top Three Skills” lines on their “Reviewing Personal Skills” sheet. Next, have students click on the “Read More” link in each of these top three “Agilities” and use the information provided to develop three sentences explaining how each of these top three skills may be useful in the career field that they are interested in. For example, a students’ three sentences might read:

1. My top skill is helping others develop, and I can use this skill to help teach new workers as an auto mechanic.

2. Another top skill is managing, and this skill will allows me to lead and inspire a team of auto technicians in my shop.

3. The skill of selling and communicating will let me evaluate my customers’ needs and negotiate costs as an auto mechanic.

In the example above, underlined words and phrases represent the students’ top skills and boldface words represent some of the key words provided when students click the “Read More” link on their results.