A grade six-12 college and career readiness framework from an Arizona school district provides a model for other districts who want to improve their postsecondary advising and move students purposefully toward their next, best step after high school graduation.
The framework and scope and sequence of courses (intended to be delivered through advisory periods and other in-school opportunities) were developed by Diana Miller, College and Career Readiness Coordinator and AVID District Director at the Tempe Union High School District in Tempe, AZ.
The framework covers the following areas:
- 6th-8th grade: College and Career Awareness
- 9th grade: College and Career Exploration
- 10th grade: College and Career Evaluation
- 11th grade: College and Career Planning
- 12th grade: College and Career Implementation
Students in Arizona are required to have an Education Career Action Plan (ECAP) starting in ninth grade. An ECAP, “empowers students to create a meaningful and individualized plan toward a postsecondary pathway. With support and guidance from their families, school personnel and other advisors, students undergo a process of self-exploration, career exploration, and career planning and management.”
According to the Arizona Department of Education, “The ECAP process results in a student portfolio. Students outline their secondary and postsecondary plans aligned to their career aspirations. They will also collect artifacts and documents that reflect the activities completed and the skills and knowledge developed throughout their ECAP process.” The portfolio covers four attributes:
- Academic
- Career
- Postsecondary
- Extracurricular
Back to the TUHSD framework. To facilitate the ECAP process for students and families, Miller considered both the ECAP’s list of activities and past district plans related to college and career readiness. At the same time, she looked at the lessons and content available from MaiaLearning, which the district had adopted as a college and career planning platform.
“This is a curriculum, and I needed to develop scope and sequence on how to do this,” remembers Miller. “Curriculum has always been a thing we do and can do; how are we going to lay this out over the course of four years?”
The challenge with curricula and content is they’re time-intensive to produce. “No one in the district had the time or bandwidth to develop all those materials,” says Miller. “Not having the curriculum to push out to students really hinders districts. You can say, ‘Here’s what students need to do at each grade level,’ but if there isn’t a systematic way to provide the content…”
According to its website, MaiaLearning offers, “comprehensive support for college applications, resume building, financial aid guidance, and academic planning tools, tailored to each student’s needs.” The platform currently powers California’s statewide college and career planning portal.
The MaiaLearning platform includes a college and career curriculum that covers an expansive number of topics; it offers pre-constructed lessons on career exploration and interests. Miller considered the available content and began to scaffold lessons and activities that students could engage with in each grade. She also built out a checklist to share with students and families, indicating which were required and optional.
The college and career readiness framework is largely delivered through advisory periods of about 30 minutes each, although Social Studies, English, and other content areas build on the lessons and continue to work with students on them outside of the advisory. Each quarter there are two advisory periods dedicated to teaching the framework’s required lessons, so there are eight required lessons per grade for each school site to deliver. The framework also offers some additional activities when staff or students want to go further outside of advisory.
Frameworks are everywhere in education and have been for decades, so it’s understandably easy to get framework fatigue. In this case, districts and schools should read “framework” as “roadmap” and follow where this one leads. Editorializing a bit, treating college and career readiness knowledge like a curricular area like math and reading makes a lot of sense. After all, the knowledge and skills that help students to be aware of and pursue postsecondary pathways build off each other over time. Districts and schools should have a purposeful plan for postsecondary readiness the same as they do for other critical content areas.
The National College Attainment Network (NCAN) has previously highlighted Illinois’ Postsecondary and Career Expectations (PaCE) framework, which is required for middle and high schools to implement statewide. More recently, NCAN released, alongside more than a dozen other national partners, a “District Framework for Enabling Postsecondary Success” which identify five conditions that appear most often in district and schools that successfully support their students to take their next, best step after high school.
Have questions or comments about NCAN’s district- and school-level engagement work? Email me at debaunb@ncan.org. Have questions about TUHSD’s CCR framework? Diana Miller is available at dlmiller@tuhsd.k12.az.us.
Author: Bill DeBaun, Senior Director, NCAN