Eighth-grade students at Milford Public Schools are learning just how varied their future career choices may be.
In its first year, the Careers 8 class is encouraging youth to explore careers they may love – and some they’ve never thought of before.
“The class is based on how we can explore careers through the ideas of passions and purposes,” teacher Shelly Mowinkel said.
Mowinkel and colleague Mallory Gregory worked together over the summer to build the 18-week course from scratch, tying the ideas of “passion” and “purpose” to the MPS mission statement.
The course will reach about 40 students per semester, Mowinkel said, and the first semester just wrapped up.
Students participated in self-exploration activities to learn more about themselves, focusing on their personality traits and taking inventory of their own strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities.
They also developed personal learning plans with specific goals they intend to reach both as eighth graders and long-term. Students will continue updating their personal learning plans throughout high school as their academic and leadership goals, passions and career sights change.
Students also began to build their resumes by keeping an ongoing record of their academic honors, employment and volunteer experiences so that when the time comes to apply for jobs, all their information is in one place.
Part of the class is spent exploring the six different types of career fields and the jobs available within each one in Nebraska.
The broad fields include Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources; Health Sciences; Communication and Information Systems; Business, Marketing and Management; Human Services and Education; and Skilled Technical Sciences. Each career field is then subcategorized into 16 clusters.
“We spend time in each cluster,” Mowinkel said.
Each unit includes a “mini Olympics” activity in which students can practice one small skill used in that career cluster, such as dicing vegetables or swaddling a baby for Human Sciences and Education.
Students then research the career field to find out what other skills are needed.
“They look for careers that are high demand, high wage and high skill,” Mowinkel said.
They consider jobs specific to Milford and Nebraska, but they also explore careers on a global scale using the website h3.ne.gov.
Once students have researched a career field within the cluster, they give a 60-second overview to their peers, which incorporates some public speaking into the course.
“We also talk about how it looks in high school. Do you need to take certain classes? What leadership organizations would help?” Mowinkel said. “Then they work with Mrs. Kenney (the school counselor) to set their schedule and choose electives.”
Each unit ends with a project-based learning activity. For Human Sciences and Education, students broke apart a clay pot and wrote a career on each shard before piecing them back together.
The pieces read careers like “dentist,” “teacher” and “firefighter.”
“All of us at some point need help becoming our best selves. All of these occupations help put people back together and become their best selves,” Mowinkel said.
Students also learned about business management, setting up their own school store to learn what it’s like to start a business from the ground up.
A variety of guest speakers also visited the class this semester to talk about their industries and what it’s like to do their jobs.
“One of the fun parts is that I’m not an expert in all these career fields,” Mowinkel said. “I am learning right along with these students.”
Speakers included the director of family and consumer science for Lincoln Public Schools, an economics professor from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln, the founder of Athlete Nation, a military representative, an accountant and more.
Mowinkel said students won’t necessarily decide what they want to do for a living in the Careers 8 class, but they should leave the class better equipped to make decisions later in life.
“The end goal is for the students to be self-reflective, have options and help build their high school plan,” she said.
She and Gregory hope to develop the class into something better each year as they learn what works and what doesn’t.
She said the class is a great way for her to connect with students when they’re first starting to think about careers and to keep that momentum going as they advance through school.
“We want to make small connections with these kids as they move ahead,” she said.
