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Keys to Your Future
Pros: Students drive the lessons. Content helps them understand the importance of setting short- and long-term goals while learning time management and self-regulation.
Cons: The lessons might slow students down or cause them to rush through, and there aren't many opportunities along the way for interactivity or assessment.
Bottom Line: This site will build high school students' future planning skills, but the design falls a bit short of offering a truly compelling learning experience.
For high school students who are grappling with what comes next and how to best get there, Keys to Your Future offers bite-sized lessons that inform students without overwhelming them. Consider assigning modules once a week or once a month to facilitate an ongoing conversation about how to implement the course's strategies. Class discussions can explore managing time, studying, juggling obligations, and setting short-term goals. The school-life balance tips can feel especially relevant for students who struggle to keep up with the demands of schoolwork, sports, clubs, and part-time jobs.
Since the lessons are only a small window into the possibilities and challenges of life after high school, plan on adding some supplemental reflection and extension activities. It might be helpful to have students share their own scenarios or concerns and get advice from teachers and classmates about how to solve problems that have them anxious about life after graduation.
Keys to Your Future is a six-lesson future planning course for high school students developed by EVERFI and provided by UBS Financial Services Inc. The course builds foundational decision-making skills that help with pursuing education and career goals. Available in Spanish, French, and American or British English, the modules include "My Life Goals," "Preparing in High School," "Choosing a Path," "Balancing Daily Life," "Starting Your Career," and "Career Success." Each lesson begins with a short assessment and then takes the learner through different characters' experiences with opportunities and obstacles. Along the way, students occasionally have chances to help characters make decisions that will impact their short- and long-term goals. At the end of each lesson, there's a 10-question quiz that assesses how well students grasped the main ideas.
Most lessons are set up as character studies where students read or listen to narration about the different choices characters face and then consider the consequences of each choice. Sometimes students are presented with pop-up activities to engage them in decision-making, but more often they're just following along with the story. Students can track and retake lessons via their dashboard, and teachers can view reports to see how students are progressing through the modules. The entire course is estimated to take one and a half to two hours.
Keys to Your Future provides a good baseline for students who are starting to think about what happens after high school. While the choices and scenarios presented often lack nuance, they do a decent job of representing some of the more typical situations that students are likely to face: how to set goals; how to manage time; how to pay for expenses; and how to form and maintain relationships, both personal and professional. They also offer a good enough foundation teachers can work from and supplement with discussions that connect more deeply with their students.
Some lesson components move more slowly than others, which may frustrate some students, but for the most part, students move at their own pace. Unfortunately, this can result in them rushing through parts of each lesson without really taking in much information; this may make the learning feel more passive than active. Still, the scenarios presented are relevant enough that most students who are interested in learning some strategies to navigate their lives will find some helpful tidbits in terms of time, money, relationship, and college and career management.