Guest Speaker Series: Career Talk and Senior Talk
As a part of the project, the class organizes and hosts a guest speaker series, 직업의 세계 (Carrer World), in which guest speakers from various professional fields give a Career Talk. Each talk series offers an engaging QA and discussion session after the speaker’s talk. Mentors can be invited as guest speakers, and usually, one or two speakers are invited in the semester. The following sample career talks feature speakers who are former students of KREN 153. Senior Talk Series, a graduating senior heritage student in the university community, are invited as a speaker and share their experience, thoughts, advice as a Korean American to fellow students.
Objective
1. Providing an alternative perspective on topics, students will benefit from their independent thinking and immersive discussions.
2. Guest speakers talk about specific topics that will benefit students’ studies and mindsets.
3. Inviting guests to share their experiences and stories is highly effective in:
- Creating novelty to boost learning.
- Sparking student interest in a new topic.
- Affirming and reinforcing new learning.
- Making real-life connections that add relevance to the learning.
- Exposing students to other insights and perspectives.
- Inspiring students to consider vocations or avocations for their future.
OUTCOMES:
1. Students can gain insight into various career pursue and paths (i.e., finance, med schools, law schools are not the only outcome of successful college education)
2. Students can participate in hands-on experience: Hosting an event, selecting and inviting guest speakers, producing an event poster, advertising, scheduling, and moderating Q/A.
3. Overall, this career talk series in an advanced language course is educationally meaningful in many ways:
- can provide students with opportunities to link their language and cultural learning to their career/academic endeavors
- can enables classroom learning to be connected to content subject learning and real-world applications
- can render language learning more relevant and meaningful
- can provide well-rounded learning opportunities in all five C standard goal areas—Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons, and Communities. In other words, vocabulary and grammar learning is not the heart of language learning.
Sample Student Reflections During in-class discussion after the first talk, students expressed the following as their reflection:
- “learned about the diplomatic world in both Korea and in the rest of the world.”
- “gave me a chance to stop and breathe and think about why I am doing what I am doing, why I am working so hard, what I am working toward”
- “helped me to gain a better sense of what I needed to do to pursue my dream”
- “it is nice to have someone who I can contact again in the future for help and advice”
- “gave me to re-think and re-evaluate deeply about my future and the direction.”
- “seeing somebody in the exact same position I want to be is a good motivator”
- “helped me to shape a better path for my future”
- “gave me an opportunity to see what the major of my interest would be like as a career”
- “found it overall very insightful”
- “I am proud of being Korean American and my Korean language skill can be such valuable skill in professional world!”
TASKS:
- The teacher may identify and assign students roles and responsibilities. Or let students choose roles and responsibilities. Assigning each student a role helps students stay engaged and on task while working as a group. It is also an equity strategy that equalizes status in group work.
- Students can also generate and assign individual roles and responsibilities for the visit. For example, they can determine whom they will invite, who will introduce the speaker, who will serve as the room host, who will ask the questions, who will monitor the chat, who will set up and test the equipment, who will facilitate the Q&A session, and who will confirm plans with the guest.
- Design reflective activities. It is also vital that students reflect on how they learned. Taking time to do this reflection will help them develop their metacognition skills. Students can use the following questions, sentence stems, and resources to support their thoughts.
- Students take reflective learning process: pre-talk, during talk, and post-talk discussion
Guided Questions for Reflective Learning
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- Pre-Talk: List questions you would like to ask the speaker.
- Post-Talk: What are your best quotes from today’s talk?
- What are your takeaways from the speaker’s talk?
- What did you hear that surprised/inspired you the most?
- What new questions do you now have?
- How has your understanding changed?
- What new perspectives or insights did you gain?
- How will you use what you learned?
- Something unexpected I heard was _____.
- During this process, I have become better at _____.
- The next time I do something like this, I will be sure to _____.
- I used to think _____. Now, I think _____.
- List several points you would like to discuss with your peers.
5. Finally, after class discussion, each student writes a reflective essay. The class may share those reflections and additional follow-up questions with the speakers. Students write-up a brief (1 page) reflection on their own personal takeaways from the talks in the target language (Korean). They will address the following suggestions but not limited to:
- How did the experiences and stories they shared inspire or motivate you?
- What did their stories and experiences add to your understanding of professional world and/or your career goal?
- How can you relate some of what they talked about to one (or more) of we have discussed in class this semester (Incomplete Life, career, expectations, “Specs”, corporate culture, reality, meaning of success, etc.?)
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