This eCourse provides professional development for the Building a Bridge to Your Future curriculumthat is used with middle school students. This will also give an overview of the Career Choices series curriculum.

1. Building a Bridge to Your Future: Developing the Skills and Motivation Necessary to Succeed in High School, College, & the Workforce (used in 8th grade)
2. Career Choices: A Guide for Teens and Young Adults: Who Am I? What Do I Want? How Do I Get It? (Presented here for middle schools whose high schools don't use it in a 9th grade course. The recommendation is to implement Career Choices in the 8th grade and Building a Bridge to Your Future in the 7th grade. For middle schools that implement the second strategy, we'll cover the highlights of Career Choices, and then we recommend completing the eCourse entitled: How to Implement the Freshman Course: Strategies and Resources to Ensure Success for Your Classroom-Based Comprehensive Guidance Course.)

Building a Bridge to Your Future

Co-authored by best-selling Career Choices author Mindy Bingham (over 2 million copies in print) and college regional director Karen Miles, the NEW middle school workbook, Building a Bridge to Your Future, was designed to do three very important things:

1. Prepare students to engage in a rigorous career exploration, decision-making, and planning process in high school.
2. Raise the self-efficacy of students so they believe that they can be successful in high school and beyond.
3. Introduce students to the 10-year Plan process and get them enthused about becoming long-range planners as they enter high school.

In this eCourse, you will first study the implementation of the Building a Bridge to Your Future curriculum.

Too many middle school students believe that they will not be successful in high school. The Building a Bridge to Your Future curriculum was designed to address those fears by helping students understand more about their attitudes, self-concept, self-motivation, and self-management. Woven throughout this beginning career exploration course are important activities for social and emotional development. Because they are learned in the context of planning for their future, these concepts have more meaning, and students are more likely to embrace and practice what is learned. This coursework provides students time to reflect on what they learn, increasing their self-efficacy and success. It also gives the teacher an opportunity to validate students' improved readiness to engage in career exploration and decision-making.

Career Choices: A Guide for Teens and Young Adults: Who Am I? What Do I Want? How Do I Get It?  

In this eCourse, we will introduce the award-winning Career Choices series. It is a unique semester or yearlong classroom-based comprehensive guidance course that could be used in middle school in the 8th grade.* When taught with fidelity in the designed scope and sequence, your students will develop the motivation to succeed in high school, post-secondary, and into the workforce. Career Choices is the "Get Focused" portion of the Get Focused...Stay Focused!® Program developed at Santa Barbara City College. It meets the Freshman Transition Standards developed at The George Washington University. The Career Choices course is a scalable, cost-efficient program that ensures students will graduate from high school with a carefully-considered career path through the development of their online 10-year Plan.

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• Instructors getting ready to implement the Bridges to the Future or the Career Choices series in their schools
• Principals or Vice Principals responsible for these courses.
• District personnel responsible for the Get Focused...Stay Focused!® Programs in the secondary schools.

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Required Texts or Materials:

• Building a Bridge to Your Future: Developing the Skills and Motivation Necessary to Succeed in High School, College, & the Workforce
• Instructor's Guide for the Middle School Course: Building a Bridge to Your Future: Developing the Skills and Motivation Necessary to Succeed in High School, College, & the Workforce
• Instructor's and Administrator's Guide for Career Choices and My10yearPlan.com® 8th Edition 2020
• Career Choices: A Guide for Teens and Young Adults: Who Am I? What Do I Want? How Do I Get It?
• Possibilities—A Supplemental Anthology to Career Choices
• Lifestyle Math—Your Financial Planning Portfolio

Online Course Materials and Platforms:

• Online license to The Teachers' Lounge
• Online access to The Quick Start Study Guide for Career Choices
• Special participant license to the online Academic Innovations University. Access the site using the login information. This will allow you to create your own username/password.
• Access to a demo account for My10yearPlan.com® Interactive that is populated with a sample student plan