MA adult education programs are required to provide students with career exploration and planning content while simultaneously building academic skills, though they often need support to do so effectively.
Providing standards-based career contextualized instruction is a win-win for teachers, advisors, and students as it maximizes classroom instructional time. The Inspiring Career Development and Action (ICA) series is designed for teachers, advisors, and directors whose goals include supporting learners in pursuing educational and career opportunities while achieving their academic goals.
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Program teams (including teachers, advisors, and directors) interested in deepening their ability to integrate standards and contextualize instruction with career exploration content
This session is for program teams, which will be composed of at least two members from each program. Program teams can be composed of any combination of teachers, advisors, and directors. Please invite another teacher, advisor, or director from your program to join you. If you are unable to participate as a team, please enroll in the course and send an email to Dani at dani.scherer@jsi.org so that we know.
This professional development activity/course is designed for:
The goal of this series is to support teams in developing career-contextualized instruction and advising content that can be immediately implemented with learners. Your work in this course will ultimately motivate learners to strive for higher educational, professional, and personal goals to improve their lives.
You will begin by exploring the Inspiring Career Development and Action (ICA) Curriculum and building your own skills in contextualization, collaboration, and standards-based instruction. Together with your team, you will then consider your students’ needs and interests and choose a goal for the between- session work. Programs may choose from the following goals:
- Strengthening program collaboration by developing a year-long plan for staff collaboration
- Developing a set of ESOL, ELA, or Math career-contextualized lesson plans using a provided template and the ICA Curriculum Guide
All teams will receive feedback from the presenter and will have an opportunity to improve their work and reflect on the process.
To support standards-integrated and career-contextualized instruction and advising, this offering is a collaboration between the Program Support, English Language Arts (ELA), Math & Numeracy and English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) teams. Depending on their teaching focus, participants can be supported by an ELA, ESOL or Math coach.
Format & Requirements: This course consists of two 1.5 hour sessions and four to five hours of independent work. The total estimated time to complete this course is eight hours. In addition, another one to two hours of coaching are available to support application of your learning.
- Part 1: Independent activities in Canvas (11/16/26–11/18/26)
- Part 2: Virtual session on Zoom (11/18/26, 1–2:30 p.m.)
- Part 3: Independent activities in Canvas (11/18/26–12/09/26)
- Part 5: Virtual session on Zoom (12/09/26, 1–2:30 p.m.)
- Part 4: Optional coaching on Zoom (12/09/26–12/18/26)
Access & Support: You will receive instructions for accessing the synchronous sessions via Zoom and course materials in Canvas from Lucy Burriss. If you need technical assistance to access the course or its features, please contact Lucy at lucy.buriss@jsi.org.
- Identify lessons and activities in the ICA that connect to your learners' career-related needs and interests, and to program goals
- Adapt lessons to fit your program and learner needs, including adapting language and literacy standards and objectives
- Use collaboration strategies to bring teachers, advisors, and directors together around career contextualized learning
Upon completion of this professional development activity/course, you will be able to:
United States
