Instructional Units Overview

 

 

Instructional Units Overview

 

The Community Internship Program has an instructional component to it. Students meet in the instructor's classroom 1-2 days a week throughout the 18-week course. Each unit provides opportunities for students to apply power skills—communication, professionalism, research, synthesis, digital literacy, among others—to the career path in which they are interning. They also have opportunities to share their learning from their internship experience.

 

During this instructional period, students have the opportunity to engage in the following units of study:

 

Unit 1: Leadership and Professionalism. Students learn about and examine different types of leadership and define effective traits of professionalism. Students use this information to prepare themselves for their internship experience.

 

Unit 2: Research, Inform, and Evaluate. Students explore the importance of research and evaluation, focusing on researching career-specific mentors, skills, and pathways. Students also define an action research topic for their internship experience.

 

Unit 3: Communication and Emotional Intelligence. Students learn the attributes of emotional intelligence and the ins and outs of effective written, verbal, and non-verbal communication. Students connect professionalism and research to these skills and practice them through the lens of their specific career pathway.

 

Unit 4: Roles on a Team + Team Culture. Students learn about the roles they can play on a team and self-reflect on their own skills and personality traits that would make them an effective team member. Students also research organizations with terrific team culture and examine how that culture is created.

 

Unit 5: Digital Literacy. Students explore their own digital footprint, the importance of digital citizenship, and the possible role of AI in their career pathway. Students also learn about the tech tools at their disposal and use them to begin creating a digital portfolio for themselves as a way to document experiences and brand themselves.

 

Unit 6: Application Materials. Students learn about resumes and cover letters, as well as spend time researching interview questions for their career field.

 

Unit 7: Synthesis. Students dedicate their final days in class to building and completing their internship portfolio and developing a multimedia “pitch” for what they have learned through their internship experience. Students apply all the skills learned in their time to these final days.

 

Students also have the opportunity to develop meaningful and practical materials, which serve as authentic assessments in the class, that will help them in their future career pathways:

 

The Observation Journal. This journal is a log of the observations and work completed alongside the teacher mentor. Students track the application of their instructional learning throughout their internship.

 

The Community Internship Portfolio. Students compile documents and artifacts from their experiential internship and design a digital career portfolio. This document serves as the beginning of a portfolio they can continue building throughout their future career experiences.

 

Community Internship Pitch. Students develop a synthesized and argumentative sales pitch that sells the internship to the greater CBSD community; the pitch uses their own experiences plus the research, communication, and digital literacy skills learned throughout the semester