#Driving Learning in The Résumé Project David Ng
The unit starts by giving the students a little background on résumé writing. Then they create a first draft of their own résumé. Instead of producing a résumé on a sheet of paper, entries are written on individual index cards so that entries can be swapped in and out, and moved around.
The students know how sad their résumés look. They complain that they’re just kids who haven’t had a chance to do anything yet. They think résumé writing in eighth-grade is dumb. This makes me smile inside because I can imagine how shocked they’ll be when they see how compelling their résumés are in the end.
These students have done a lot more in life than they realize; they just need to build a stronger narrative to bring those stories to the forefront.
I select a few students who listed babysitting under experience and conduct a model interview. By asking probing questions, I uncover details about their babysitting experiences, which I write on the whiteboard.
Once the students see how details can punch up a résumé and add color, more details pour out until the whiteboard is covered in them. We marvel at some of the anecdotes and students view each other with new appreciation. Reading these details, what impressions do we form about the babysitter? Is this babysitter caring? Responsible? A problem solver? We generate a list of babysitter characteristics from the list of details, and I pick one characteristic to build a babysitting entry around. Which details would we include if we wanted to show how creative we are? How would we rewrite those details to emphasize our creativity? What if we wanted to highlight our resourcefulness instead of our creativity? After creating a sample entry as a class, we break into small groups to write other entries, using the characteristics and details on the whiteboard as our mystery box ingredients. When each group shares their babysitting entry at the end of class, we try to guess the characteristics being highlighted.
When each group shares their babysitting entry at the end of class, we try to guess the characteristics being highlighted. The next day, we summarize our takeaways from the babysitting entry activity:
- We use a résumé to tell our story.
- The details we choose to share create an impression.
- In a résumé, we describe ourselves through actions, not adjectives.
- Because a résumé is so dense and economical, every word counts.
- We should read our résumés through the eyes of a potential employer.
- A résumé should be focused to create impact.
- We have done a lot more than we realize.
- You can tell a lot about a person from their actions.
The students then pair off to interview each other and brainstorm. Their goal is to generate lists of characteristics and details based on their own personal experiences before narrowing their stories down to a focused résumé. Once they think they know the characteristics they’d like to highlight, they start writing entries on index cards and workshopping those entries with other students.
This engine starts with three nested feedback loops, which the students internalize by repeatedly asking themselves three key questions:
- Can I rewrite this action to make the characteristic that I’m highlighting stand out more?
- Are there other experiences and actions in my history that better reflect this characteristic?
- When analyzing my experiences and actions, are there other characteristics that could be highlighted that I have overlooked?
This engine starts with three nested feedback loops, which the students internalize by repeatedly asking themselves three key questions:
- Can I rewrite this action to make the characteristic that I’m highlighting stand out more?
- Are there other experiences and actions in my history that better reflect this characteristic?
- When analyzing my experiences and actions, are there other characteristics that could be highlighted that I have overlooked?
We’re writing explicitly to communicate a message to an audience, and résumés are short enough that we can revise them rapidly over many drafts. For an assignment less personal, creating ads has similar mechanics. I allow students to stop revising their résumés once they are satisfied because my goal is for them to develop their own standards, not try to guess mine.
It takes time for some students to realize that any action, no matter how minor, can go into their résumé as long as it highlights a selected characteristic.
Taking advantage of our brand new résumé writing skills, we create character studies for characters we create ourselves and characters we find in works of fiction.
We explicitly leverage our résumé writing skills and analytical engine to develop strong characters in fiction and to study people in general for the rest of the year. Along the way, we rebuild our engine by adding a fourth gear or feedback loop: What does a person’s actions tell us about that person?
Shifting their engines through the first three gears and not finding the answers they were expecting slammed students into the fourth gear, triggering cognitive dissonance: What do my actions tell me about me?
We use these questions to rebuild our engines, adding a fifth gear; and we use that engine to set new personal goals by writing the résumé we would like to write in two years — at the end of our freshman year in high school — if we were the person we wanted to be.
In Why We Should Learn Vertically, I lay out the case that, given the necessary materials and culture, we are all capable of developing active sense-making mindsets that enable us to act coherently and strategically. The key is:
- Building an engine (grounding mental models)
- Rebuilding the engine with new gears (scaling mental models)
- Using the engine to take us places (leveraging mental models)
- Driving into the unknown (seeking out cognitive dissonance)
Here is the engine we built in The Résumé Project:
- Can I rewrite this action to make the characteristic that I’m highlighting stand out more?
- Are there other experiences and actions in my history that better reflect this characteristic?
- When analyzing my experiences and actions, are there other characteristics that could be highlighted that I have overlooked?
- What do my actions tell me about me?
- Is the truth of me always reflected in my actions? Can we change the truth of ourselves by changing our actions?