Earn Observation Hours and Gain Teaching Experience
By Volunteering for Junior Achievement
Junior Achievement Overview:
Junior Achievement is a non-profit educational organization dedicated to educating and inspiring young people to value free enterprise, business and economics to improve the quality of their lives. JA’s programs bring the free enterprise system to life in the classroom and reinforce the importance of staying in school to students from kindergarten through 12th grade. Since its charter in 1940, Junior Achievement has promoted economic education to more than 1.5 million students in the greater Chicago metropolitan area. JA of Chicago provides it programs to 12 counties in Northeastern Illinois and 2 counties in Northwestern Indiana.
The JA Partnership:
This school year, JA plans to reach more than 250,000 students in the Chicagoland area. To accomplish this goal, JA needs volunteers to devote their time to teach the program in the classroom during the school day. Since National-Louis University Education students must fulfill required classroom observation hours and JA needs volunteers to teach in a variety of classrooms, JA hopes that you, the student, will elect to volunteer for JA as part of your educational requirements. Plus, it makes great sense to partner so that more young students benefit from JA programs.
Benefits to NLU Students:
By teaching a JA class, you would…
• Satisfy a portion of the NLU Education Department’s required observation in a classroom situation.
• Participate in real-life situations where you can observe and interact with a teaching professional.
• Become a role model students can easily relate to.
• Encourage classroom students to continue their education until completion.
• Be able to build your resume to show actual teaching experience.
• Have the opportunity to volunteer in a variety of grade levels (k-12) and age groups, thus sampling different grades to determine where you want to focus your educational efforts and make plans for your teaching future.
• Have the flexibility to teach in a school anywhere in the Chicago Metropolitan area. (see contact information below).
• Be able to volunteer in the fall or the spring semester and teach more than one class, if desired.
How does volunteering work?
JA provides the training, materials and support necessary to ensure a positive experience. Each grade level taught has its own curriculum with an easy to understand volunteer guide. NLU students would teach the Junior Achievement curriculum in a school convenient to your location with the choice of grade levels to teach. As a volunteer for JA, the individual class time commitment is five visits of 30 – 40 minutes each for K – 6th grades; eight visits of 40 – 50 minutes each for 7th and 8th grades; eight to ten visits of 40 – 50 minutes each for high school.
Interested or would like to learn more?
Please Call…
- City of Chicago - Sara Cory (312) 715-1300 ext. 234
- Lake/McHenry Counties & NW Suburban Cook County – Peter Truschke (312) 715-1300 ext. 244
- Southern Cook County and Northwest Indiana - Rosemary Koziel (847) 879-1300 ext. 247
- Will, Kane, Kendall and DuPage counties - Derek Ernst (847) 879-1300 ext. 259
Junior Achievement of Chicago, 651 W. Washington Street, Suite 404, Chicago, IL 60661-2123 or on-line at www.jachicago.org
