The College Choice Decision

What to do after high school might be the largest decision high schoolers will face before adulthood. This lesson plan from the Decision Education Foundation offers a structured way to ask students to review the decision ahead without being another adult just telling them what to do, using the Decision Chain framework to guide students through careful, fact-based exploration.

By combining the essential life skill of decision-making with a real-world issue students care about, this lesson helps them practice how to approach, often emotionally charged, decisions with comfort. Students will learn to:

• Recognize how their environment and experiences shape their decisions
• Weigh personal vs community values against each other
• Identify and research to find, missing information
• Use a weight and rate table to quantify how their values match their alternatives.
• Apply the Decision Chain to reach a reasoned conclusion

The goal is not to tell students what to think, but to show them how to think more clearly—developing informed conclusions rooted in scientific reasoning and not just emotional thinking. And then help them learn to balance the reasoning with those emotions to reach the best decision for them.

All links are included in the pdf file included with this assignment. If you have any issues accessing pieces please reach out.

Check out our new lesson plan, The College Choice Decision, here!