For Educators - Learning Activities

Workplace Reporter Assignment

Curriculum Outcomes: Careers, Personal Development, English, French

Background

This activity would be an excellent assignment for use with the highly successful Take Your Kids to Work program or some other job-shadowing program.

Student Learning Outcomes

• Formulate questions to assist them in their research
• Use personal interviews and print or electronic sources of information
• Listen attentively to their subject and take notes
• Organize the information they have gathered to support a point of view
• Create a written (or oral) presentation of their findings
• Appraise their own work and that of others and offer suggestions for improvement
• Revise and edit their work
• Proof read and correct final drafts
• Use correct spelling and grammar

Materials Needed

• The Workplace Reporter Assignment Sheet (PDF) or one of your own devising
• Multiple copies of the CARS Reference Guide or access to the electronic For Youth section (CD-ROM or web site).
• What to Ask section of the For Youth section.

Time Needed

• Preparing to Go on Assignment- 40-50 minutes.
• Writing and Editing - 40-120 minutes.
• This will depend upon how much class time you are willing to give to students for their work on the assignment and how much you expect them to do on their own. Some students may need to have class time to do all or most of the assignment.

Suggested Procedure

• Stage 1 - Preparing to go on Assignment (40 min.)
  • Have students read a number of the profiles in the For Youth section. Emphasize that these are examples of the way people can write about work and workers. This written picture of a person is often called a "profile".
  • Ask students to discuss what they like and do not like about the profiles. What would they do differently, if anything, if they were writing a profile? Make a note from the discussion about the characteristics of a good worker profile and have the students copy it into their notebooks. This will be the basis for assessment of the articles they will write themselves.
  • Have the students look at the What to Ask section which has a list of questions that students could use when talking with a worker in the automotive repair and service industry. Using this as a base, ask students to make a list of questions that they themselves will use on Take Your Kids to Work day. They can make whatever changes seem appropriate for the field of work they will be observing. This could be done individually or by the whole class together.
  • Make sure that students understand all aspects of their assignment. Emphasize the importance of taking detailed notes about their observations and their worker's answers to their questions. These notes will be the raw material for the writing assignment. Explain the term "On Assignment", which means simply doing an assigned job away from the usual place where a reporter works.
• Stage 2 - On Assignment (Job Shadow or Field Trip)
• Stage 3 - Writing and Editing
  [How you do this will depend upon how much time and effort you want your students to put into the writing and editing, how much feedback you want them to get in the process, and how much class time you are willing to devote to this. Add to or subtract from the process outlined here.]
  • After the Take Your Kids to Work experience, have students bring to class their questions, notes, outline and a rough draft of the article on their worker, which they have prepared on their own. (See the suggested assignment.)
  • Have students work in pairs to critique each other's draft articles. This can be done using a checklist based on the criteria the students chose previously for a good written profile.
  • Students will then work on their own (in class or as homework) to edit their drafts and create the final versions of their articles.
  • How you choose to assess the students' final work will depend upon the learning outcomes you wish to examine.

Optional

• Have the students give copies of their profiles to their hosts on their job shadow or field trip (who may or may not be their parents). Knowing that the finished products will be shown to the workers who were interviewed will increase student motivation to do excellent work.
• If you prefer, have students do oral presentations about their workers, based on the same questions and notes, instead of a written profile.
• You might want to suggest that students use some kind of audio-visual technique to enhance their articles: drawings, photographs, audio or video recordings, computer graphics, etc.

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