The Continuing Education Institute/Creative Workplace Learning of Brighton, Massachusetts, has developed a successful employment readiness program in collaboration with the Resident Services Department of the Worcester Housing Authority. The program—designed for residents of public housing at the Great Brook Valley Housing Development who need skills to enhance their employability—has been running since 2002.

The participants are generally unemployed or underemployed, and many are Spanish speakers. Many students are in a transitional housing program that supports their move from homeless shelters to a stable residence and employment. The intensive program offers 12 weeks of training, 20 hours per week, followed by a four-week supervised job internship. The program meets at a convenient location for the participants: the Great Brook Valley Homework Center equipped with 14 computers and classroom space.

The computer training covers Microsoft Office applications (Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint), Internet and e-mail use, typing skills, Windows basics, and general computer knowledge. All of the computer training is integrated with transferable skill development structured by a weekly pattern of daily themes, which are illustrated below.

Monday: Organizational Skills
Planning skills, materials organization, and computer file organization are explored and practiced through the use of Microsoft Windows file management, Word tables, Excel checklists, and Access databases. Students use multi-tab Excel workbooks to organize lists and checklists. The first of these is a personal endeavor with lists of exercises, healthy foods, and educational games. Starting with the content of everyday activities is an easy way to begin. Students introduce and demonstrate exercises as the group adds them to their lists. These basic lists are developed with additional columns that allow meaningful sorting by categories. For example, exercises are categorized by muscle groups and games by skills. This activity serves as preparation for both workplace applications of checklists and as an entryway into Access databases.

Tuesday: Language Arts
Writing activities are integrated with the use of Microsoft Word formatting techniques. Students do personal and creative writing using a process approach as well as business writing including letters, memos, and summary reports.

Wednesday: Mathematics
The math instruction is tightly linked to the use of Microsoft Excel applications. Number concepts involving fractions, decimals, percents, and the use of variable equations for problem solving are emphasized. Real- life applications include budgets for home and office; analysis of nutrition information for fast foods and home cooking; breakdown of the cost of computer systems; recipe conversions with ratios, and planning the cost of a project.

Thursday: Arts and Design
PowerPoint and Word provide excellent contexts for practicing the principles of design. For example, I provided students with structured outlines of information about computers and other topics. Students then create PowerPoint presentations that make these lessons stimulating and visually interesting by adding clip art, photos, music clips, and special effects. Students share their interpretations with each other and the computer "tricks" they used to create them.

Friday: Workplace Prep
Special guests discuss workplace themes including interviewing skills and practice; workplace comportment and dress for work; college education opportunities, and seed funding for small businesses.

Keys to Success
We can identify a few keys to the success of the program this year:

• Collaborative and comprehensive program design, inlcuding an advisory team of key participants.
• A strong support system, including a job counselor and integration of earning processes where computer activities and classroom-content are mutually reinforced and mutually stimulating. For example, students use a chart on paper and calculators to derive the fraction, decimal, and percent for each color of M&M in a large bag. Then, they go to the computer, realize the chart in Excel, and make a graph of the data. Thus, the math skills are practiced in three forms: by pencil, with calculators, and with formulas in Excel.
• Integration of "professional" workplace skills with "personal" organizational skills. Making a database of favorite songs with information about the artists, musical categories, and years of recording puts a student into the position of collector and organizer. The same skills are then practiced in the design and maintenance of a database to organize the "mess" of marketing documents used by a small company or social service agency. The key activities of indexing, filing, naming, categorizing, searching, filtering, and reporting the information in useful formats are best developed using hobby information because the student is already an expert regarding the information that needs to be organized. Learning Access with unfamiliar information is doubly daunting. A great transitional database has been a list of 400 businesses in the Worcester area; this is useful for working with a larger database and for its utility.
• Methodology, including Collaborative work, group computer quizzes, and workplace simulation themes.
• Small business simulation, where workplace applications of Microsoft Office software are supplied in a pretend small business: Dr. Pacifica Bellaguerra's Conflict Resolution Workshops. Working from memos issued by the director, students research the costs of computer equipment, office supplies, and monthly services using the Internet, a field trip to Staples, and telephone research. They create a budget for these costs in Excel. Then, they engage in the process of defining an administrative assistant position and prepare Word documents needed to hire an employee. The "play" business offers a real context for many projects for exercising computer skills, such as designing a letterhead template in Word, creating a database of potential clients in Access, and preparing educational presentations that illustrate Dr. Bellaguerra's approach to conflict resolution in PowerPoint. Dr. Bellaguerra provides abundant direction initially, but encourages the student to negotiate with her regarding the form of projects that she commissions. This serves as a context for working with an employer and learning to engage in the process of developing the purpose and specifications of a project.
• Supportive community for open reflection, where the supportive community formed by the cohort, teachers, and job counselors promotes confidence for entering the world of work, especially for those without much work experience to cite on their resume.
• Emphasis on oppositional thinking, where the use of oppositions, paradoxes, and metaphors to develop flexible thinking provides a unifying theme and a serious, yet playful educational spirit.

Examples for Oppositional Thinking
Looking explicitly at charged oppositions opens up new ways to understand just about any situation. We used a simple chart format to look at oppositions in terms of their basic meaning and their extreme forms (e.g., good/evil, clean/messy, reason/emotion, male/female, work/play). We then looked for creative syntheses of what a balanced approach would look like. The clean/messy opposition was great for identifying how dysfunctional operating at the extremes of organization/disorgan-ization can be. Students generated examples of people who represent the extremes, then considered personal ways to seek their own healthy balance along this dimension.

Matthew Puma is the CFO program director of Creative Workplace Learning. He has taught and developed curricula for ABE and college level classes for 20 years. He can be reached at: mopuma@charter.net