Connecting Classrooms to Careers Through Deeper Learning

• Connects classroom content and skills to real-world careers and industries
• Provides authentic career exploration and application through performance tasks
• Develops professional skills through minds-on  and hands-on activities and experiences
• Enables students to "test drive" careers
• Builds career awareness, preparation, and readiness
• Provides pathways for internships and work-based learning

• Essential competencies for workplace and life success
• Includes collaboration, communication, creativity, and critical thinking
• Develops leadership and problem-solving abilities
• Builds adaptability for changing environments
• Promotes metacognition and self-management
• Cultivates growth mindset and professionalism

• Present authentic, real-world challenges
• Connect academic content and practices to careers
• Students must transfer their knowledge and skills to new and varied contexts
• Open-ended and typically do not yield a single, correct answer
• Performance tasks can integrate two or more subjects, as well as future-ready skills
• Authentic contexts for performance and product development

• Engages students in complex, real-world problems and projects
• Promotes inquiry-driven, hands-on learning
• Results in meaningful public products
• Requires collaboration and project management
• Builds student ownership of learning
• Contributes to intellectual challenge and accomplishment with authentic, real-world contexts

Inquiry-Based Learning

• Project-Based Learning: Students actively learn by completing a sustained, real-world project, applying their knowledge and skills to solve a problem, often culminating in a tangible product or presentation
• Problem-Based Learning: Driven by solving complex, open-ended problems, prompting students to actively research, analyze, and present solutions
• Place-Based Learning: Centers around learning through the lens of the local community, allowing students to connect classroom concepts to their immediate surroundings and engage with real-world issues relevant to place