Giving Compass' Take:

• Stephen Noonoo highlights a program that exposes students to a range of careers, providing opportunities to explore through hands-on learning, meeting people who work in the field and eventually practicing skills related to each profession.

• How can these lessons be applied to jobs that do not yet exist but will be important in the next decades? 

• Here's why youth development is just as important as early learning. 

A few years ago, after 15 years in the classroom, something clicked for Melanie Brandt’s students. They started recognizing their own strengths and—even better from her perspective—the unique talents of their classmates. She was teaching fourth grade when a new integrated curriculum focused on careers was introduced district-wide—and it was making her lessons more relevant to the real world.

Suddenly, lessons on the physics of energy were tied to teaching kids how to be theme park engineers, and language arts and math lessons were anchored in running and marketing a profitable startup. She noticed her students were more engaged, and there were other benefits too. Their natural interests and abilities became apparent—whether it was writing, drawing or a head for numbers. They worked better independently, solving issues on their own and crucially, they began to collaborate more, relying on one another for things they were already good at. The end result was a class that was less stratified by academic ability.

“I saw a huge shift in my classroom where everybody’s unique skills now had a place and that just transferred over for the rest of the year,” Brandt says. “And in other subject areas, and on the playground. The students just rose to the occasion of learning about themselves.”

Brandt’s experience took place during the pilot year of a custom-built curriculum called World of Work, which leverages research on vocational psychology, namely the idea that students’ interests should influence their career aspirations. Under this premise, students as young as kindergarten can begin to find their place in a world they will one day inherit.

Read the full article about World of Work by Stephen Noonoo at EdSurge.