Five kinds of work are taped to the walls of the classroom: Working With Your Hands, Taking Care of Kids, Playing Basketball, Caring for Animals, and Making Videos. None of those five is arbitrary. They came from the students themselves, from the interests that surfaced over the preceding weeks as we worked on what jobs are made of. A different group would have different walls. The five are a mirror of this particular room, and in the next room they would be five other things.

The students have a stack of color-coded cards in their hands, teal for tasks, coral for settings, purple for the people you would be around, and the work of the next twenty minutes is to get up, walk around, and decide where each card belongs. Some cards feel like easy fits. Using tools looks like it obviously belongs on Working With Your Hands, until someone points out that you use tools in all five. Watching kids on the playground seems like a shoo-in for Taking Care of Kids, until someone makes the case that it could just as easily go on Playing Basketball. That ambiguity is the design, not a flaw in it. When a student argues for where a card should go, you learn something you could not have asked for directly: how they see these parts fitting together, which attributes they read as belonging to which kind of work. They discover, card by card, with their feet and not from a lecture, that work is made of parts, and that the same parts show up in jobs that look nothing alike.

This is the session I want to write about, because it does something I argued for in the first thing I published here but had not yet shown in motion. I said then that career exploration begins with helping a student hold their experience of work up and look at it, rather than handing them a test. Taking a job apart into its parts is what holding actually looks like when you make it physical. The wall is the object. The cards are the student’s hands on it. By the time the room has sorted a hundred cards onto five kinds of work, nobody needs to be told that work shares parts. They have just spent twenty minutes proving it to themselves.

Then comes the part the whole session is built toward, and the part no framework prepared me for.

The move, before the hard case

The structure is simple enough to describe in a sentence. Anything you love is made of parts, and those parts connect it to a whole world of work you had not thought to look at.

We do it together first, on the five kinds of work on the walls, so that no student is ever inventing the move alone. After the sort, I bring out a deck of real jobs: vet office assistant, tech support, teacher’s assistant, camp counselor, youth coach, and the class reasons out which wall each one belongs to, based on the parts they just sorted. A job lands on a wall because the parts match, and the student who reasons it out walks it over and tapes it up. By the end, each of the five walls has a small constellation of real jobs hanging off it, all sharing its parts. The students built that. The point that lands, and it lands without me saying it, is that the thing on the wall was never a single destination, but rather it was a doorway to a dozen.

Only then does each student go to their own desk, with the five worked examples still posted around them as living reference, and put something they love at the center of their own sheet. This is where it stops being an exercise.

The dream on the page

Some students write something that maps cleanly onto reachable work. They like animals, or kids, or being outside, and the path from there to a job they could hold next year is short and well lit. For those students the session does quiet, useful work.

And some students write basketball, baseball, NFL, or YouTuber. They write down the dream with the steep, long-odds path, the one a career program is, by long tradition, supposed to gently steer them away from.

Here is the thing I believe, and the thing this session is built around: the steering is the harm. A young person with a disability has very often had their working life narrowed for them, decided for them, planned around them. To meet a student’s dream with redirection, however kindly phrased, is to do the narrowing one more time, in the one room that was supposed to be different. The dream is not the problem to be managed. The problem is that we have not shown this student that the dream is made of parts, and that the parts connect to a whole sky of work that is closer than they think.

So we do not flinch, and we do not redirect. When a student writes baseball at the center of the page, we treat it with exactly the structural seriousness we gave Caring for Animals. What are the tasks of baseball? Practicing every day, running drills, studying the other team. Where does it happen? A ballpark, outdoors, locker rooms, travel. Who is around? Teammates, coaches, trainers, grounds crew, and the people who run the stadium. And then, alongside the dream, never on top of it, never as a correction, you add more stars: grounds crew at a stadium, equipment manager, athletic facility attendant, recreation center aide, sports camp counselor. Not as the consolation prize for a dream that will not happen, but as the rest of the constellation the dream was already part of.

Reflecting on this in retrospect, it’s captured in five words: More stars, never a correction. You walk up to the student’s sheet already holding three or four reachable jobs in your own handwriting, and you add them to the sky the student has started drawing. You never say “let’s be realistic.” The realism is not in anything you say. It lives in what you put in front of them, in the jobs now sitting on the page next to the dream, sharing its parts, engaging their curiosity.

Where the research stops

Everything to this point has a foundation under it. That a person’s dream is part of their identity, and that you do not get to delete someone’s identity in the name of helping them, is the spine of how career development has understood the self for decades. That you do not reproduce a marginalized young person’s constrained choices by making their choices for them is the moral center of the field I work in. That the student must remain the one doing the choosing is the most evidence-backed thing we know about good outcomes for these students. The research tells me, clearly and with one voice, that I must not take the dream away. What it does not tell me is what to actually do at the desk with the student in practice.

No paper I have ever read tells you to walk up holding three reachable jobs in your handwriting. None of them describe the parts list, or the gold cards, or the discipline of adding without correcting. The theory tells me where to stand. It tells me, emphatically, not to redirect. And then it goes quiet, exactly at the moment a sixteen-year-old is looking up at me with baseball written on the page, waiting to see what my face does. The move that answers that moment, the one that honors the dream and still does honest work, is not in the literature, rather it came from the room and it came from getting it wrong a few times and watching what happened to a student’s energy when I did.

This is the part of the work I most want other practitioners to recognize, because I think it is the part we need to spend real time talking about. The research gives you the shape and then hands you off. It can tell you what not to do, but it cannot tell you what to say. The standing is the science, but the saying and doing is the practice, and the practice is judgment, built one desk at a time, in the space the research leaves open because it cannot do otherwise.

What the path leads to

At the end, the five walls are still up, surrounded by all the other work that shares their parts, and every student has a sheet with something they love at the center and a small constellation growing around it. The student who wrote baseball did not leave being told baseball was off the table. They left with a dozen ways into the world they already love, on the same page as the dream, in their own constellation, put there partly by their own hand.

The dream was never the thing to remove: it was the center to build out from. The path does not lead away from what a student loves, instead it leads outward from it, in every direction, toward all the work that was always made of the same parts.

More soon,

Joseph

This is the first thing I’ve published here, so let me say plainly what Lincoln Square Coaching does and why I think it’s worth writing about.

We deliver Pre-Employment Transition Services, the work that’s supposed to happen before a young person with a disability is ever asked to commit to a job, a path, or a plan. Specifically, this piece is about Job Exploration Counseling: one of the five required Pre-ETS activities, and the one most often reduced to a worksheet. I want to walk through how we actually launch it. Not where we do it, but how. The where changes from one group to the next; the how is the part worth writing down, and the part that travels.

Here’s the short version of my argument: career exploration that starts by asking students what they want to be is starting in the wrong place. You can’t choose what you can’t hold. So before we explore careers, we spend several weeks building the handful of concepts a student needs in order to recognize themselves inside of work. Six of them: strengths, teams, tasks, people, setting, routine. That’s the whole curriculum spine. Everything else hangs off it.

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Why the usual approach fails

The spine is portable. It works with almost any group, Pre-ETS or not, a class of six or a room of thirty. What adapts is the delivery: the pacing, the materials, the amount of movement. The core stays consistent. But the place it earns its keep, and the place the conventional approach fails most completely, is the group where the stakes are highest. So picture that group: a 12:1:1 classroom. Students on alternate assessments, earning Skills and Achievement Credentials. Reading levels vary widely, and for some students print isn’t the way in at all. Several are already holding down real worksites, typically based within the school itself: library pages, IT support, kitchen helpers, paraprofessional work in elementary classrooms. They are motivated and genuinely inquisitive, and you can watch the curiosity arrive the moment the activity stops feeling like a test. They are also young people who have spent a long time being assessed.

This is the part that matters. If you hand this group a standardized interest inventory, you don’t measure their interests. You measure their reading level, their test fatigue, and their well-earned suspicion that the adult in the room is sorting them again. The instrument fails before it begins. Not because the students lack interests, but because the format asks them to demonstrate self-knowledge they haven’t yet had the chance to build, in a register (printed, evaluative) that has rarely worked in their favor.

David Blustein’s Psychology of Working framework names what’s underneath this. Work, in that view, isn’t just a slot in the economy; it meets fundamental human needs: survival, yes, but also social connection and self-determination. And the framework is unusually honest about the fact that for a lot of people, particularly people pushed to the margins, volition is constrained. The choice was never fully theirs. Students with disabilities have often had their work lives planned for them or done to them. This gap is structural, which is exactly why WIOA carved Pre-ETS out as its own resourced function instead of leaving it to chance, and why the rehabilitation counselor is the role built to work inside it: trained in vocational development and disability, working with one student or one small group at a time rather than to a class, mandated to grow self-determination rather than deliver content toward a credential. That is not a fix for something educators can’t do. It is a different job, done alongside the one they are built for. So if our very first move in “job exploration” reproduces that dynamic, adult-driven and evaluative and low-volition, we’ve confirmed the thing we’re supposed to be dismantling. The way we ask tells the student where they stand before they’ve said a word.

Self-awareness is built, not surfaced

The reframe I work from is that career exploration begins with self-awareness, and self-awareness, for these students, is not lying dormant waiting to be surfaced by the right questionnaire. It has to be built: through doing, through showing, out loud and on paper and in motion, over time.

This is where Robert Kegan’s constructive-developmental work does a lot of quiet labor in how I design. Kegan’s distinction between what we’re subject to and what we can hold as an object is, I’d argue, the entire game in transition work. Many of my students are subject to their work experience. They live it, they do it well, but they don’t yet have a way to step back and look at it. A student who has been a library page for a year knows that job in their body. What they often can’t yet do is hold it up, turn it over, and work out what about this fits them, and what that says about other work they haven’t tried. Our job is not to deliver information. It’s to build the meaning-making capacity that lets lived experience become something a student can examine, hold at arm’s length, and use. The classroom, in Kegan’s language, is a holding environment: structured enough to support that move, generous enough not to rush it.

So we build these first. Six concepts, one at a time, introduced and reinforced across weeks:

• Strengths: what comes naturally to you. We start here on purpose. Many of these students have spent years hearing about what they can’t do. The first concept of the entire service is an asset.

• Teams: a group of people who each do a different job to make something work. This reframes a workplace as a set of roles, not a single verdict you pass or fail.

• Tasks: what you actually do in a job.

• People: who you’re around while you do it.

• Setting: where it happens, and how that place feels.

• Routine: how a whole day flows from start to finish.

None of these requires reading. All of them can be entered through a student’s own worksite. And together they do something specific: they give a student the parts list for noticing themselves inside of work. That’s the precondition for everything that comes after.

What authoring actually requires

Mark Savickas’s Career Construction theory holds that we don’t find a career so much as author one. We make meaning of our vocational behavior and shape it into something with a theme. Savickas tends to describe that shaping as narrative, a story the person tells. He is right about the act and, I think, too narrow about the channel. Telling is one way to author a self. It is also the way that has always favored the students who were already favored by every instrument that came before. For the students this work exists for, leaving the channel unexamined is not neutral; the unexamined default is verbal, and the verbal default quietly rebuilds the hierarchy the rest of this method exists to take down.1 So I hold onto Savickas’s claim and widen it: authoring is construction, and construction can be spoken, drawn, built, sorted, acted out, or pointed to. When a student lays out that they like work where the tasks change but the people stay the same, and a routine that starts early, whether they say it, draw it, or move themselves to it, that student is not picking from a menu. They are constructing a vocational identity in real time. The six concepts are not content to be tested. They are the materials that make that construction possible for students who have rarely been handed any.

This is what authoring looks like when it is not routed through words, and so the design of how we teach is not incidental. It is the intervention. Every activity is low-floor and high-ceiling, so every student can participate fully regardless of reading level or assessment track, without anyone being singled out. Materials are visual-first. There is deliberately no assessment feel; engagement is built to feel natural, even game-like. Movement is purposeful, never filler. And we anchor relentlessly to the worksites students already hold, because their lived experience is the richest asset in the room and ignoring it to teach abstract “career content” would be its own kind of disrespect.

That design is, in the end, an application of Michael Wehmeyer's work on self-determination, the most evidence-backed predictor we have of strong post-school outcomes for students with disabilities. Self-determined action is volitional and agentic: the student is the causal agent in their own life. You do not produce that by talking about it, and you do not require the student to talk in order to do it. Wehmeyer's model of self-determined career decision-making locates the agency in a cycle, not a sentence: the student sets a goal, acts on it, sees what happens, and adjusts.2 That cycle runs the same whether the goal is spoken, drawn, or walked across a room. So you produce self-determination by building a service where the student is doing the choosing at every step, which concepts to explore, which jobs to go deeper on, which preferences to claim and in whatever form claiming takes for them. By the time these students reach a personal career snapshot, several weeks in, it is not a form an adult handed them. It is something they authored, in the channel that was theirs, and chose to author.

How we launch the service

So when people ask how Lincoln Square Coaching launches Job Exploration Counseling, the honest answer is: not with a test. We launch it by spending the early weeks building six concepts into a shared way of seeing, inside a holding environment designed for volition, anchored to the work students already do, so that the self-awareness career exploration actually depends on is built rather than assumed.

The order matters. Self-awareness makes self-determination possible. Self-determination makes an authored career possible. And an authored career, not an assigned one, is the entire point of doing this work with these students at all. The work isn’t a warm-up for the bridge to adult life. The work is the bridge.

That’s the thesis I’ll be writing from here. I’ll be sharing more of these as the service continues: case studies, session designs, the things that worked and the things I had to throw out. If you do this work too, I’d genuinely like to hear how you start

More soon,

Joseph