The See More Opportunity Summer Program is a free program this summer in cooperation with DPS's Career and College Success department. The program is for rising 10th-12th graders, as well as students who will graduate this spring, and delivers:

• the CSM Course: a self-paced online course with next-generation adaptive learning technology for teaching math and literacy, as well as novel instruction in how to learn on your own, attention to detail and persistence, intention to excel and, most importantly, self-efficacy.
• CSM Certificate: Students who complete the program will earn college math credit in quantitative reasoning through a credit recommendation from the American Council on Education -- from experience, we know that this is attainable even by students who otherwise deeply struggle in math. In addition, participants will gain a Credly digital badge of High Performance employability skills through CSM's alignment with the Common Employability Skills framework.
• Career Strategies: a mini-course that teaches how to make career decisions throughout your life, so that students will always have an internal coach available. This is different from most career guidance, which focuses on choosing a career, and will give students a framework in which conventional career guidance will be more informed and effective.
• College and career events: meetings with representatives from colleges and CTE/apprenticeship programs
• a personal coach
• $100 completion bonus
• an inside track to a $10,000 postsecondary CTE scholarship

In addition, parents and siblings will be invited to take the courses at no charge, also being provided a personal coach.

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A few notes of interest

The CSM Course is not just for high school students -- the same course is taken by frontline workers and corporate managers with advanced degrees. The logic is that while different people need different skills, CSM's High Performance competencies are of universal value.

Students will commit to spend 50 hours this summer on CSM. Depending on the participants, many/most will complete CSM. All students, however, will have access to their CSM accounts forever, and will have permanent access to a CSM personal coach, so if need be, they can complete CSM after the end of the summer program.

CSM and Career Strategies are not just for summer programs, and if you're interested in exploring implementation  during the school year at your school, please use the contact form below and/or visit the CSM for High Schools page.

The teacher's role in the CSM Course is different from most instruction: it's the student's task to learn the skills on their own, and the teacher's role to help them learn how to do this -- we call CSM instructors' "coaches".  

Job description

We are looking for DPS teachers, counselors, administrators and staff who would like to become part-time CSM coaches this summer. As CSM coaches, you will:

• Work with students on their general performance characteristics, improving their learning strategies and mindsets, encouraging them to strive for excellence (the only passing score in CSM is 100%) and building their self-efficacy, discussing their futures. In general, the goal is to deeply engage with students in things that matter.
• Devise targeted interventions as you learn about student strengths and weaknesses through a next-general learning technology platform, and work to devise interventions that target their weaknesses and build on their strengths. This is facilitated through the CSM Toolkit that gives real-time feedback on a variety of non-academic/non-cognitive factors (learning strategies, persistence/frustration, etc.).
• Communicate with students through Zoom, text, email, and CSM's internal messaging system, whichever you and the students find most comfortable/useful
• Take the CSM High Performance Coaching training, a 4-6 hour self-paced online course that provides an introduction to CSM's novel pedagogical approach and introduces the Toolkit's unique interface that highlights non-academic aspects of student performance.
• Participate in college and career events with students and representatives from colleges and CTE/trade programs.
• Explore a two-generation model. The program is open to siblings and parents as well. We do not know if any family members will take up this offer, but to the extent that they are involved, this will be an opportunity to help us think deeply about how students and their families interact in this environment.
• Provide feedback on improving the program, including content, incentives, framing, choice of student participants, Toolkit features, etc. We will be trying to have a particularly low coach/student ratio for the summer so that you can experiment with different interactions with students. This will be supported by a weekly Community of Practice.

More general information about CSM Coaching is available here.

Be our partner

You will be partners with SeeMore Impact Labs in improving the Summer Opportunity Program, and if this is successful, we hope to expand the program significantly in future years. The "Labs" in our name is part of who we are -- we are always experimenting and working on improvements. For you, this is a chance to think differently about college and career readiness and how to interact with students, and this will hopefully give you a platform to try some of your ideas out.

We hope that this will be a fun and interesting experience for the coaches.

Specifics

• All the work will be remote, and you do not need to be in Denver.
• We expect 4 part-time coaches who will be paid $3000, working out to approximately $30/hour at 100 hours over the 10 weeks (1 week of training, and 9 weeks of the program).

• June 6-10, you will be taking the self-paced 4-6 hour High Performance Coaching professional development, followed 2 hours of orientation.
• From June 13 through August 12, you will be working with students, participating in college and career events, and participating in a weekly Community of Practice among the coaches and SeeMore staff. For CSM coaching, you will be working with somewhere between 20 and 25 students on a given week (there are multiple overlapping sessions).
• Coaches should access the Toolkit at least once every weekday and once on the weekend to plan interactions with students. This can be done in the evenings, as much of the communication with students will be done through text, email or other methods that don't require instant response. However, you will be engaging in some phone, Zoom or similar connection with students, singly or in groups, and participating from time to time in discussions with students.