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Brainstorming with faculty at Indiana State University after the faculty workshop on integrating professional skills training into language courses. |
In 2016 I've been posting daily professional development and career prep tips using the hashtags #CareerPrepLangs (English) and #CareerPrepSpan (Spanish).
Regular blog posts explain how those 140-character tips manifest in a Spanish 2 class I'm teaching. Here's one on networking and numbers from the first week of classes.
In addition to using some of the examples I've provided, think of how you might design professional development and career prep activities that meet your own needs:
Start with a problem and reverse engineer a solution.
My hashtag idea got started with a problem: the flurry of end of semester grade-grubbing emails ("Can you round up?" "I swear I submitted that online assessment back in October" "Can I do extra credit now that the course is over?!"). My own experience coincided with a Facebook feed full of frustrated faculty members dealing with similar situations.
This was a problem I wanted to solve. But I didn't want to start a new year and a new course scolding students about their future grade grubbing nor complaining about previous students.
Over winter break, I designed the hashtags and #CareerPrepLangs blog posts. The in-class professional email writing activity coincided with midterms and trained students to solve their own problems in a professional manner.
After midterm grades were recorded, I let students know that they should contact me with a professional email if I made an error grading or recording in the electronic grade book--I want to make that right. But I won't reply to any grade grubbing emails before deleting them (my actual wording was more professional: "I won't be able to accommodate requests to retroactively improve grades that have been accurately recorded.")
What problems do you have that you can reverse engineer solutions to?
Here are a few that have come up in recent conversations with faculty:
1- Letter of recommendation requests
The quantity of requests and amount of time each one requires is a problem for a lot of faculty. In addition, I found that the resumes students sent along with the requests for a recommendation had little or nothing to do with our shared experience--and therefore almost nothing I could use in the letter. Another problem.
The solution: require that students provide three things.
1- Complete demographic information: full name, semester(s) of course(s) with me, and titles of course(s) with me.
2- A concise summary of the content of assignments and projects they completed in my class (this is not the generic content of the course as presented on the syllabus, but rather the unique features of the individual's work).
3- How my course and the work they did in that course is connected to whatever they're applying to.
If they can't do numbers 2 and 3, how can I? It is challenging, but an entirely appropriate challenge with which to task students.
I add two more pieces of information for students:
1- I will quote them--even if they provide low quality content. I've seen things like, "I liked Spanish because Spanish is important and your class was fun, you are peppy." So the corresponding letter of recommendation would say: "When asked what this course has to do with this job/program, Joe said, 'I liked Spanish because Spanish is important and your class...'"
2- If they don't provide the information I request, the best I can do is fill in my generic letter of recommendation. I've posted it here and highly recommend having a similar document so that when students can't be bothered to provide important contextual information, you don't waste your time either.
Finally, it is important for students to know that providing this content to faculty in college is excellent preparation for writing cover letters. Those letters have to do much the same thing as the recommendation information I request: convince the reader that you are the best candidate, get that person thinking about you, and--most important--show explicit connections between you and the employer/company. A good cover letter puts the employer first and says, "you need X; let me illustrate for you that I have that" or "the problem your company has is Y; here's a detailed explanation of how I solve that problem."
2- Memo writing as accountability for in-class group work
A faculty member at a recent campus workshops wanted an idea for holding students accountable for effectively reporting back after in-class group work.
Analysis and synthesis were the key soft skills that students would have to develop to succeed. Throughout the course, her students will be directed to deploy those skills to generate a professional memo that summarizes their group's accomplishments. This should look like a bulleted list or talking points and the reporting group member should be able to communicate them in writing or verbally. As this activity is integrated into the course, students will be prepared to rotate through the role of reporting member, have a system for presenting their results in writing (either on the classroom electronic screen or board) or verbally (by standing up and being prepared to deliver the information).
This reversed engineered solution gets at a) the analysis and synthesis work that is foundational to the humanities and b) the kind of independent analytical and communication skills employers want in new hires who are recent grads.
3- Emotional over-commitment --especially with female faculty, especially in the humanities, where increasingly the instructional burden falls to adjunct labor. Here, the expectation is that students can deposit their problems with you for you to solve in the context of your course.
For me, this led me to reverse engineer the in-class activity on professional email writing mentioned above. It includes: professional salutations and sign offs in the target language, presentation of the problem, your offered solution that is considerate of my time and availability--all in a short form that just gets at the who? what? when? where? and why? of the situation.
The complete lesson (in Spanish) on professional email writing in the context of a missed assignment is on my blog here. This was a productive way for me to channel my frustration at the expectation of emotional over commitment on my part and it allowed me to handle it in a professional, "teachable" manner.
If you feel bad withdrawing nurturing support from your students, think of the employment situations of these young adults in 2-3 years: no matter how much they want to call their supervisor "seƱorita" and share all the details of their lives that got in the way of completing a work project on time, it won't be appropriate. Students who aren't accountable to professional standards won't be employees who are accountable to professional standards.