It’s all designed to duplicate, as best possible, the essential adult situation of effectively presenting themselves and their skills to a potential employer.
Joellen Turvey, a family and consumer sciences teacher for the school’s Butler Tech program, described the school exercise as a learning opportunity for students to experience for the first time the “productive pressure of presenting themselves.”
“In a mock interview, students draw on everything they’ve explored: their post-secondary education plans, the academic pathways they’ve researched, their personality insights, career interests, work values, and leadership styles,” said Turvey.
“They combine all of this in a refined résumé and a clear career objective for the role they aim to be ‘hired’ for,” she said.
Teens practice “articulating their goals, demonstrating their skills, and practicing a professional handshake with business and education partners is unlike anything else we do,” said Turvey.
“Year after year, students tell me it’s the one experience they never want removed from the course. And watching them pull together a semester’s worth of learning to rise to the challenge and ‘ace’ their interview while receiving constructive feedback is experiential learning at its strongest.”
The course is a graduation requirement for all Monroe students in grades 10 through 12 and will soon become the prerequisite for a new senior-level course titled Internship and Industry Immersion, launching next school year, said school officials.
Turvey redesigned the experience into three structured rounds that allow students to learn from early missteps, apply feedback quickly and build a growth mindset.
In the first two rounds, students alternate between conducting and receiving a peer-to-peer interview and participating in an interview with a business partner. This allows them to experience interviews from both sides of the table while still working through their nerves in a supportive environment, said school officials.
For Monroe junior Noah Hollar, the two-and-a-half weeks of preparation made a noticeable difference.
During that time, students worked on résumés, interview etiquette, posture, greetings, and strategies for keeping a conversation moving, said Hollar.
He said he learned to “just take a breath every few seconds to decompress. It really helped me not rush into the next question.”
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