CTE, PBL, and IS

Career and Technical Education (CTE)

DEF has worked with CTE school programs to help students organize their learning and be more productive. For example, in a media pathway, Decision Skills helped students decide on media content that would meet the target audience’s interests and values. Because Decision Skills are flexible and can be tailored to the situation, a front-end introduction allows the subsequent projects to leverage the language of Decision Quality in a way that improves collaboration and communication.

Project-Based Learning (PBL)

Decisions are a part of every project and high quality decisions lead to better projects. In group projects, organizing early around key decisions improves collaboration and productivity. Typically, longer courses with Decision Skills content culminate with a decision project using a tool like Conversations for Clarity, the Decision Workspace, or this Career Final Project presentation template. Project-based learning is at the core of the philosophy of our early partner A3, The Academy of Arts and Academics, in Springfield, Oregon. This charter school embedded DEF language and concepts into their rubrics to ensure that student projects were organized around clear values, had creative alternatives, and demonstrated useful, relevant, and reliable information.

Independent Study (IS)

Independent and homeschooling students have even more decisions to make than regular students about where and how they spend their time and attention in their studies. An Independent Study student who has the opportunity to learn Decision Skills has skills and a language to describe the process by which they have prioritized their work, where they stretched and took appropriate risks, and how the learning outcomes reflected what was envisioned, compared to how they might incrementally improve in a similar circumstance in the future.

Much of our material is posted to the website to support your teaching. If you would be interested in understanding what tailored materials may exist or talking with us about our experiences and what we would suggest for you, please reach out.

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