Green Jobs training in Adult Education

Going green seems to be the wave of the future. Just take a look at the many suggestions on how to go green on Discovery's PlanetGreen or Treehugger.com, where they offer a wide array of suggestions for being green from when you buy toys, to how you select beer, and how you buy a home. Green and Save has also published a guide to help you make being green a family affair. Being green is not just good for the environment, it is also good for home energy savings and hopefully for our national economy. Incorporating environmental sciences into your adult education class may help your students work green as well as live green.

We are learning more about how to live green from the media and a basic mantra of Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle, but what are green jobs and green work skills?? According to the WE Can Solve It site,

Green jobs provide healthy environments for workers while helping build a clean economy. These are good jobs involving work that is often familiar. Plumbers, welders, carpenters and others continue to use their skills, but in fields like renewable energy, sustainable agriculture or green building.

Some adult education programs already offer a curriculum designed to teach basic "soft" job skills. In PA, programs refer to the Workforce Education Research Center's Foundation Skills Framework Resources of basic workplace skills, workplace knowledge, basic enjoyability skills, and lifelong learning skills. Some programs also offer educational services tailored for specific work environments for incumbent workers as part of the PA Workforce Improvement Network program. As unemployment rises with the need for specialized job skills, it is likely many adult education programs will offer opportunities to gain more job-specific skills.

Green jobs are somewhat difficult to define, but they can be found within several of the PA's Workforce Improvement plan's nine clusters including Building and Construction, Advanced Materials and Diversified Manufacturing, Agriculture and Food Production, Logistics and Transportation, Lumber Wood and Paper, and Information and Communication Services and possibly Life Sciences as well as Education. According to the Center for American Progress, investment in green industries have the potential to create a large pool of jobs in 34 states:

The U.S. can create two million jobs and reduce the unemployment rate to 4.4 percent over two years by investing in the green economy

Adult education programs may also be able to find ways to receive funds through the H.R.6759 Renew Through Green Jobs Act of 2008. Alternatively, adult education programs may look to partner with new clean energy power companies, such as ethanol plants, or traditional labor companies who want workers with a specific set of 'green' skills at the entry level in order to develop credential programs or supplement work skills lessons.

If you are a teacher looking to introduce information related to green jobs, you may want to start with the list of green jobs on the Green Collar page at UrbanHabitat.org. This site also has an interesting article addressing the green job of cleaning brown fields.

The Blue Green Alliance web site may be a great place to begin looking at ways to introduce green jobs to students who are already interested in joining labor unions. The Blue Green Alliance also holds leadership seminars in various states, so workers have chance to share their experiences and learn from others. The green-friendly discovery company Treehugger posted an article in July 2008 stating that training for solar panels by Solar Enery International, are on the rise.

I have found additional websites advertising training programs for green jobs, such as the Eco-Academy in Philadelphia, which trains people to be home efficiency experts. People can also get training through the Solar Living Institute in California and at the Wind School in Oklahoma. I am sure there are many more out there. If your students are more interested in activism, they can also explore the Green Corps field school for environmental organizing.
It would be worthwhile class time to ask students to search for training opportunities, and then help your students verify the authority of credentials and the quality of any program before they apply.

Not surprisingly, websites are developing to help match workers with employers offering green jobs, such as SustainableBusiness.com, TreeHugger, and the Environmental job Directory, which links to other sites with postings.

You may also want to try the advocacy sites WE Can Solve It site as well as 1Sky for information on being environmentally responsible as well as on green jobs and the green jobs bill. If you use these sites, be ready to hold discussion that will give students an opportunity to debate issues.

Note: This entry is follow up to a previous entry on green jobs in adult education classes. I have expanded on why I think including green job skills will help students as well as a few more resources to supplement curricula. Be sure to check earlier entries.

Adult Learning Activities | Reading competency and Fluency

Many of the teachers I speak with tell me they want more short reading activities that relate to thematic units. Teachers want to develop reading competency as well as fluency as a part of speaking and listening proficiency. In this blog, I discuss online resources and easily accessible print readings, like the newspaper, as well as activities that can help develop competency and proficiencies in ABE and ESL classrooms. I also located a free online training available to help you develop how you integrate reading lessons in the classroom.

The first two resources were recommended in the Adult Basic Education and Literacy Journal's Spring 2007 volume.

The Adult Learning Activities | California Distance Learning Project offers short stories related an array of thematic topics: money, health and safety, housing, science and technology, working, law and government, family, housing, services, going places, nature, and school. You can play an audio of the story, so students can listen as they read. A few stories also have video.

After entering a thematic topic, you are provided with a list of story titles. These stories are like brief news articles written at about a 4-6th grade level. You can give students the basic story or the full story. You are also given a link to activities to build vocabulary. The activities are all online, but they will give you ideas to develop into a lesson for the whole class if you do not want to/or can not use the website with each student.

You may also want to try the AwsomeStories site. This site is very colorful and has links to different story channels such as Click2Flicks, Click2Disasters, and LawBuzz, which has won a Golden Web award.

The stories can help integrate information on civics and American history as well as health and other subjects into your curriculum. I like the way they graphically present options for selecting stories and the chapter divisions. Although this format also makes it more convenient for students to use the site online than for you the teacher to print the stories and distribute. Unfortunately, not every story as a feature for listening to the story, and there are few graphics. However, words are underlined and link to photos of people or sites with more information on the person, place, or thing.


Keep in mind that the newspaper is a great resource that is often overlooked and can be applied to lessons for English as a Second Language Learners. A great place to access news stories at level for your students is at NewsForYou! This site stays current, so students can read and listen level versions of the current top news stories. You can also subscribe to get paper versions sent to your school. Using these readings should help you launch into W questions (Who, What, Where, When) or Yes/No questions that can develop a sense of grammar structure as well as help launch into critical discussions of current events.

If you want to develop how you include newspapers in your ABE, GED, or ESL classroom, then you may want to take this professional development course offered by Verizon's education network, Thinktivity.

News articles and topic related stories, like those on CDPL, may be a good way to build content familiarity and vocabulary before transitioning into role playing activities. Role playing may be particularly useful for the ESL learner. At this site for ESL speaking activities, you will find various role playing activities and assessment ideas. They also offer an oral test and rubric. You will also find some role playing activities and other resources at the ESL-galaxy site.

One neat site is the English Express: A Website for adult learners. Here, students can select the level of their content. You can print stories as well as listen as you read along. they also have word games, readers stories, and a link to things for teachers and tutors.

My favorite site so far is the Reading Skills for Today's Adults on the Marshall Education website. This site offers a short, printer-friendly reading that students can listen to. The print out has the lines number with the word count to help students keep track of their correct words per minute score (WCPM). You can also access dictation exercises, which are often a shortening version of the reading. The dictation is also leveled, so students can work at the level most appropriate it to their listening and speaking skills.

I think timed oral reading samples are a good way of developing and measuring fluency. If you have students do timed readings, be sure you are also helping them to gauge how well they are reading the words accurately.

I helped a teacher with this type of activity when I substituted for her. I noticed that students were able to easily recognize some words they were mispronouncing, like forecaster and throughout. Other words, they were not really aware they were saying incorrectly, such as saying means instead of meant or say instead of says.

You can ask some students who are more fluent listen to others, which may help develop mentoring skills and a sense of class community. You could also utilize tutors to help monitor student speaking if you can not make time to listen to each student at least once during the time set aside for the activity.

According to the National Institute for Literacy's Applying Research in Reading Instruction for Adults, the timed oral reading samples are a good option for measuring fluency. I am not sure how you are having students chart progress. I noticed Jackie's students like to make a note on their reading to indicate how much further into the text they can read with each attempt.

The NIFL suggests having them read three passages for one minute as rapidly as possible, having them count the words, and then computer the average words per minute for each of the three passages. Next, they count the number of errors in each and computer the average number of words read correctly per minute. For each reading, you have the words read per minute score (WPM) and the words read correctly per minute score (WCPM).

There are a lot of resources available for readings. More things are online. I prefer items we can print as well as those that offer the word count as well as the option to listen to the reading. If you can try some of these sites, please let others know what you think. If you know of other sites that can be used to develop reading competency as well as language fluency, then please post them.

Multiple levels of students in Math and Multiplication

Teaching math in an adult learner classroom can be particularly challenging because the disparity between levels can be very wide. To resolve this problem, our teachers tend to create small learning groups, which can mean the need t0 prepare several lessons for the same day as well as the provision of many smaller tasks (fillers) which students can do while they wait for their turn in the teaching cycle.

Even though the students may have advanced to division and fractions, or even geometry, they may still be lacking some basic multiplication skills. It can be hard to ask an adult to drill the multiplication tables, but they need to have the ability to multiply quickly mastered in order to assist their skill in estimating for division. It is unfortunate that students are slowing working through more advanced problems simply because they did not develop a mastery of the multiplication tables.

Here are some websites with resources to support multilevel class preparation for multiplication. You may want to distribute these activities to the more advanced students as filler to give them time to develop mastery.

The site, Multiplication.com - Multiplication Worksheets, has a nice set of worksheets, flash cards, and links to games you can purchase. I like the quick, 3 minute, 40 question quizzes with the answer sheet below. You can fold the paper and ask the student to take the quiz as 'filler' while you help other students in the class, then go back to review later. The bonus is that the student can check her own work while she waits.

Another site has, as the title suggests, Free Multiplications Worksheets. My favorite here is the blank multiplication table (one is left-handed), but there are many, many sheets with different arrangements of questions.


In case you have this option, there are sites with online games or worksheets where students are automatically corrected. Try the worksheets at 123 Aplusmath.

Adult Education and Technology: Video as a Writing Prompt

Many teachers wonder how they can use technology in the classroom. One way is to use a short video as a writing prompt. I saw this idea in a recent entry on a blog I follow,
Adult Education and Technology, by educational tech enthusiast Marian Thacher.

The video she selected as an example is a montage of cats being silly.

I suggest finding something shorter then 2 minutes and linear in progression--one short progression of an event, not a series of unrelated events. However, you can make that call depending on what you think will work best for your students.

There are many videos on Youtube, and you can select things by looking for subject content relevant to your current class material or themes.

If bringing in video is not an option, you can use photographs. I suggest images from magazines or picture/coffee table books.

Additionally, you do not need to have students write their responses. If you are teaching ESL students, you can have them talk about the videos. Voice of America has great podcasts on short demonstrations. This will build listening and speaking skills.

Activities for ESL/EFL Students

The Internet TESL Journal collected a variety of materials on one site, Activities for ESL/EFL Students (English Study).
Here, you can access activities ranked according to difficulty as well as online crossword puzzles students can do on their own and audio as well as video podcasts.

Voice of America Audio for ESL/EFL: Podcast RSS Feed

Many of the ESL teachers I know want more content that develops listening and speaking skills.
This site from Voice of America, Audio for ESL/EFL, offers podcast programs in an RSS feed, so you should get new material often!

ABLE Resource Center

YES! There are a wide array of resources available at the ABLE Resource Center!

You can find lessons plans, access journals, and request materials. There is a link to things specific to teachers and tutors as well as a link to everything new from the Adult Basic Literacy Education Bureau!!