Engaging students in learning experiences that facilitate thinking deeply about concepts and seeing relationships among progressively distant concepts in developmentally appropriate ways can help students gain insights from very different situations and foster flexible and creative problem-solving abilities and innovative thinking. Cultivating students' abilities to reflect, monitor, and evaluate their learning strategies will nurture lifelong habits that build adaptability, self-efficacy, and productivity.
Want to see how these standards were developed? View the Career & Education Development Standards Review for the full review history, timelines, and committee membership.
What Does It Mean to Be Life and Career Ready?
Career readiness is a process that informs individuals about career opportunities, helps them identify their talent, become aware of how their talent transfers into a wide range of occupational opportunities, and enables them to make effective decisions on the academic and post-high-school pathways that will enable them to pursue their career and life goals.
— Coalition for Career Development Center
Related reading: Career Development is Not Isolated from Human Development
Conceptual Understandings of the Standards
- Self-Knowledge – Understanding one's own strengths, challenges, natural abilities, emotions, behaviors, culture, and preferences and how they impact one's thoughts, behaviors, choices, and beliefs.
- Life Skills – The humanity all people have in common and the importance of understanding the perspectives of others and communicating with clarity and empathy so that conflicts can be resolved, ethical decisions can be made, and social interactions can remain positive.
- Problem-Solving – Exploring a situation from multiple angles, seeking information to uncover issues, obstacles, and larger systems at work, and reflecting on prior knowledge and experiences before evaluating options and selecting an approach.
- Aspirations – Building a network of trusted people and collections of credible sources of information can provide support as one grows confidence in their ability to make sense of new contexts, manage their own learning, and make choices that open up favorable outcomes now and for their future.
- Planning – Important roles curiosity and self-management play in focusing learning and shaping existing opportunities with intentionally desired outcomes and the actions taken to reach the desired outcomes.
- Career Awareness and Adaptability – Conceptual understandings learned in school to similar and/or dissimilar contexts in the world as they make decisions, solve problems and find connections to open up favorable outcomes for their own life.
Standards & Performance Expectations
The full standards document covers all grade bands from kindergarten through diploma. Grade-level performance expectations are listed below.
- Life and Career Ready Standards — 2020 K-Diploma document
Performance Expectations by Grade
- Kindergarten — 2020 Performance Expectations
- Grade 1 — 2020 Performance Expectations
- Grade 2 — 2020 Performance Expectations
- Grade 3 — 2020 Performance Expectations
- Grade 4 — 2020 Performance Expectations
- Grade 5 — 2020 Performance Expectations
- Grades 6-8 — 2020 Performance Expectations
- Grades 9-12 — 2020 Performance Expectations
News
Contact
Beth Lambert
Chief Teaching and Learning Officer, Office of Teaching and Learning
Phone: 207-592-4398
Email: Beth.Lambert@maine.gov