Helping Adults Gain Complementary Skills

Instructional Materials

Complementary skills are not necessarily learned from a book.  They are learned from life and real-life materials.  As the VPI instructor, you will want to find real-life resources that you can use in the classroom. For example: You may want to visit a variety of community service agencies and gather forms, brochures and other materials that they provide.  You may want to develop a resource list of speakers from various agencies, which can come and share information with your students.  You will definitely need to keep some type of index of community resources that are available so that you can refer students for assistance whenever they need it.  Many communities maintain community resource handbooks that list the most common services with phone numbers, addresses, etc. It is very important that you keep this resource list up-to-date.

So How Do You Relate Complementary Skills to the Goals of VPI?

VPI seeks to provide the student with the academic skills that will enable him/her to be successful in his/her vocational/technical training program as well as on the job.  What better way to teach many of these skills than to put them in the context of real-life? Adults learn better if they can relate new information to their own personal experiences.  Can you think of a better way to teach students academic skills than to use real-life materials?  Although there are many books and materials provided by an endless number of publishers that "teach" basic skills - in the final analysis, using real-life materials such as the newspaper or a brochure can be the most effective.  This type of information is real; the situations or problems to be solved are not contrived.  If you do not already have newspapers available to students in your classroom, now is the time to order them.  From those newspapers, you can teach reading, writing and mathematics.  But more importantly you can help students to be smarter consumers, more informed citizens and ultimately more successful at home and in the workplace.