Lessons Learned: Teaching Students to Articulate their Job Skills for the Future (E)
Stream: Supporting Teaching, Learning and Student SuccessFanshawe College recently implemented an institution-wide curriculum initiative called “Job Skills for the Future.” The job skills were developed through consultation with local employers and draw from the contemporary discussion of ‘future-ready skills.’ The job skills were integrated into every program at the College with the goal of better preparing graduates to reflect on and articulate their workplace readiness. To implement this initiative, the College’s Centre for Academic Excellence (CAE) enacted a three-phase rollout. In phase one, CAE facilitated curriculum workshops with every program team to discuss how faculty can meaningfully teach and evaluate the job skills. In phase two, Curriculum Consultants at CAE created centralized teaching and learning materials for each of the job skills to support faculty as they integrate the initiative into their curriculum. This presentation focuses on phase three, in which CAE worked with faculty champions to conduct a study assessing whether the centralized curricula designed to teach specifically about the job skills are effective in enhancing students’ abilities to reflect upon and accurately articulate the skills. The presenter will situate the research question in relation to recent teaching and learning scholarship, and will discuss the project’s methodology and analysis. The primary finding of the research project, triangulated by students’ self-proclaimed confidence levels; the researcher’s analysis of the quality of student responses; and faculty’s impressions of the students’ learning, is that delivering the curriculum materials developed in phase two of the initiative improved students’ knowledge of a given job skill, and their ability to articulate it.
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