Aliens and Assets - Introductory Career Inquiry Unit

Teacher Tips

Students will need to complete the self-assessments in Kuder or OCIS at the beginning of this unit. These assessments will be the basis for completing the portfolio project.

Students will expect you to make a production of when they are taken by the aliens and when they get to stay on Earth. This can be used during the project to keep students on track. This is a motivating project, and you’ll need to play it out: Get zapped or get to stay!

One of the suggestions experienced inquiry teachers share is to promote inquiries ahead of time. The build-up to the project is important in getting students excited and ready to do the project. Start ahead of time, prompting that "aliens are coming," and you will need to know about yourself to survive.

As teachers and adults, we can help students grow in healthy ways by building caring relationships with them, having high expectations of them, and encouraging them to participate in meaningful activities. These external resilience factors that build healthy adolescents are likely already part of your interactions with students. The intent of this inquiry is to direct students to find ways to build their internal assets. Teachers can provide opportunities for students to develop social competence, autonomy, and sense of self, and have a sense of meaning and purpose.

In this unit, the intent is to have students start to think in positive ways about their personal skills, talents, and fascinations as related to their career exploration. No one expects early adolescents to make final career direction at this stage, but to explore possibilities and start to eliminate some options and to imagine opportunities. The intent also is to give students a framework to think about careers (16 career fields) and a process to explore career possibilities using some standard available tools. The tools available to you will be dependent on your school resources, but certainly your library will be a major source if your students do not have easy access to the Internet.

Cooperative learning strategies will be effective in helping students explore careers as well as develop skills in collaboration and interpersonal communication. Working in assigned pairs using positive interdependence and individual accountability strategies will give students support for the exploration. Be sure to teach students to use group skills, process the use of the skills, and monitor and give feedback as they show they can use the skills.

Cooperative learning also may use a base-group strategy, wherein students meet, check, remind, and support each others’ work toward the final project. Groups of four students are a good base group. Often students have questions about how to proceed with the inquiry that other students can answer. Use the base group to get questions answered. Only when the whole group has the question, and raises their hands, will the teacher know everyone in the group needs help.

For assistance in managing inquiries in the classroom, read Managing Project Based Learning: Principles from the Field (2002) by John Mergendoller and John Thomas (2002), http://www.novelapproachpbl.com/PBLResearch.htm

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