KASH Soft Skills Lessons

The challenge

Morgan County Charter High School is a College and Career Academy, and every classroom teacher also led an advisory class that taught career, employment, and soft skills. The district supplied weekly resources on a Google Site, but they weren’t enough for a full lesson, and many teachers had no time to fill the gaps. Administrators noticed the lessons weren’t always taught, and students had very different experiences from room to room. The resources also covered only one year, so students repeated the same lessons every year.

What I made

The district already had a calendar of monthly topics and outcomes. We mapped how many lessons each month needed, then sorted the existing materials into lessons to keep, expand, or remove. Next we chose new topics for each grade level within each monthly theme, so students studied something related every year without repeating a lesson. Some lessons pair content with an activity; others are overviews, discussions, or videos. Every lesson frames its topic from a professional perspective and ties it to the workforce.

KASH+

When students had to learn remotely during COVID, the lessons still assumed a teacher was leading them. As a proof of concept, I built KASH+, a self-paced expansion that students could complete entirely online. I wrote a design document with learning objectives and assessments, fully developed one module on Google Sites with a Google Classroom sandbox, and revised the navigation, layout, and presentation of content after testing it with users.

Outcome

I wrote 44 lessons for the program. After the first year, feedback from students and teachers went into a revision. KASH was my first instructional design and curriculum-writing project, one I took on to solve a problem I saw at work, and it taught me to approach content from different angles and to write for different grade levels.