CEIAG & Careers Leaders
Calling Secondary Subject Teachers
Tuesday 8th July 2014
Can you spare 5 minutes to help your fellow subject teachers?
I was lucky enough to be invited by ICEGS to attend a community of practice yesterday. I'm very glad that I agreed to take part. I was aware of the existence of ICould and have been for a while. However, having been classroom bound up until last December I'd not done much about it.
The day yesterday centered around all the bells and whistles that the website gives and how that fits in with 'hands on' use in school, HE & FE sectors. ICould is a wonderful resource of short videos and articles about people's career journeys. It is run by a charity whose aim is simply to make employer engagement and career information more available to all. The videos and articles are accessible and linked to lots of good information and further ideas, so if they can be utilized in the educational community.
OK I'll cut to the chase
Settling into groups according to our sector to discuss how ICould could be used. One of the major stumbling blocks identified by those working in schools, is the idea held by many, that careers isn't a teacher responsibility. We all understood the reasons why and nobody was apportioning any blame, we just wanted to do something to help.
We felt that most teachers, if handed a 3 minute video that fitted in say with the geography syllabus and could be pinned down to a topic, such as geology, they would be more than happy to use it. In fact we felt if a suggestion was made about how to use it, say as a starter or to illustrate a point by adding a question or a follow-up activity, it would be very warmly received.
Thus, we moved on to discuss how we, as careers professionals, didn't have the subject knowledge to be able to support teachers in the way they, we think, would be glad to be helped. So here is where I get to my request for 5-10 minutes of your time. Please could you just look at and just jot down ideas for the use of one single video, something similar to this
1) Go to http://www.icould.com
2) Browse by subject (picture of somebody carrying books)
3) Choose your subject (I picked business, but you pick whatever you teach)
4) Pick a video (I picked Richard Branson)
5) Board (AQA Business Studies)
6) Unit (Setting up a business)
7) Topic (3.1 Finance and Support for a Small Business - sources of finance -sources and types of advice available to small businesses.)
8) Follow up activity Question Richard Branson obviously succeeded in his venture - what would his options have been if he'd not been able to repay the money his bank manager had said he wanted?)
What do I get out of it?
Well the evidence is pupils who see the relevance of what they are studying to the working world are more motivated. Better motivation, better results!
The idea is that I'll collate all the ideas together and make them accessible to subject teachers to access, either via the ICould website or via my own resources pages. (The group is still working out how best to support the use of ICould so anything is possible) I promise that I won't use your work for financial gain.
Either scroll down and share as a comment on my blog, or email me. Encourage your colleagues to do one too. There are approx 1500 videos on the site, if we all did one each, how quickly we'd achieve full coverage. That's a lot of starters or plenary sessions you won't have to plan for.
