College and Career Readiness

New for the 2022-2023 school year, every tenth-grade student at Lincoln School now takes a Career and College Readiness course that is co-taught by members of our high school administrative team. This course covers multiple topics aimed at preparing our students for their future, including their final two years at Lincoln School. It’s an important opportunity to address our students’ needs outside of their regular academic content, and it holds a special place in my heart because I get to help teach it.

What’s included? Well, no course called Career and College Readiness would be complete without college counseling. Our college advisors work together to introduce our students to the college application process, starting with interest inventories and other tools to help our students better understand themselves, their strengths, and their interests. They help our students start the process by researching their “best fit” schools, guiding them to identify universities that match each student’s academic interests, admissions portfolio, financial possibilities, and personal likes/interests. Eventually, each student will work with their counselor and family to create a sort of admissions “score card” that ranks schools based on what they see as a safe, best-fit, or stretch option as they work through the full application process in grades eleven and twelve.

In addition to starting the college application process, the College and Career Readiness course includes oversight of the MYP Personal Project (guided by the MYP Coordinator), instruction in research skills (Assistant Principal), practice in personal wellness and stress management (Guidance Counselor), and guidance through the course selection process for grade eleven. This guidance is provided by the IBDP Coordinator and the Entrepreneurial Academy facilitator, and it includes an introduction to our matriculation pathways as well as advisement in selecting courses relevant to students’ eventual college plans.

My part in the course comes in form of teaching students important self-management and organizational management skills. I teach experientially, engaging students in games designed and sequenced to bring about both productive discomfort and opportunities to focus on specific skills. I’ve taught some of these activities for more than twenty years (though others I’ve learned in just the past few months) but have re-imagined them through the lens of the IBO’s Approaches to Learning (AtL) Skills. After each activity, students complete a reflection in which they identify the skills they utilized most in achieving their goals and ways in which this is relevant in their “real” life. I am still amazed by the learning that can happen when students are taken out of the traditional classroom and given the chance to work collaboratively and creatively to solve a problem.

Even with all of the above topics, we still had a few days left over in the semester and our Dean of Students used them to provide opportunities for students to engage in school service. On those days, CCR classes work with our Preschool and Elementary School teachers to support their students’ learning. So far, our students have helped with reading, writing, and mathematics lessons, as well as helping students complete projects for various events.

So, there’s a lot of learning happening in our College and Career Readiness course this semester. Maybe its most important feature, though, is the opportunity it has presented for our administrative team to form genuine relationships with each of our tenth-grade students. Speaking for all of us, it’s often the highlight of our week when we get to spend a day in the classroom (or in my case, outside) with students, doing the work we all got into the field of education for in the first place.