This lesson is taught deductively, leading the students from generalizations about life skills necessary to adult life to particular instances of these skills used in various careers. Look at the specific benchmarks before discussing life skills with your students. Help them to arrive at their own reasonable definitions within the context of career use of the skills

Procedure

1. Help students navigate the Life Work and Self-Regulation standards on the McREL Web site.
   • If the use of the term "standards "confuses students, remind them that graduation standards (use the appropriate terminology for your district) describe not only the graduating senior, but also adult citizens. Thus, this list of life skills standards is also a description of what adults must know and be able to do to function in modern society.
   • If students are unsure about what any of the skills mean, recommend that they click on the standard in question and examine the list of benchmarks. These benchmarks describe the skill in greater detail.
     
     
2. Have students choose three life skills to list on their Data Recording Sheets, color code, and define.
   
   
3. Help students navigate the Careers section of the Genesis Web site, pointing out the relationships between individual careers within each career cluster.
   • For each individual career, there is a brief description followed by several links. The first link describes the career in more detail, which is the information they need to print out from the Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH).
   • Students will need to print out three sets of career information.If this will tie up the computer lab's printers, find alternate ways to accomplish this task. One suggestion is to make a list of desired careers, and have a student aide print them for use the next day.
     
     
4. Discuss the manner in which to look for skills that are mentioned or implied in the OOH reading material.
   • Some students may need assistance detecting implications in the OOH text about specific careers. Assistance should take the form of guiding questions such as: "If the "Nature of the Work" section for this job says you will be collecting data, what skills would you need to keep the data available for later use?" and "If the "Working Conditions" section for this job says you will be giving information to the general public, what communication skills would you need?"
     
     
5. Remind students to circle or underline mentions of skills as they read. If applicable, refer to pertinent information from your school's study skills unit.
   
   
6. Students will then go through the OOH reading a second time, using the highlighters to code the words they underlined or circled. Now they will be able to easily identify which of their three chosen life skills are used in the three careers they are investigating.
   
   
7. Students firm up their understanding in the last two steps, in which they fill out sentence stems.