I had the great pleasure of participating in Martha Oesch's workshop: Teaching Job Readiness Skills in the ESOL/ABE classroom training. I was most amazed at the idea of having students treat their class as though it were a job.

Martha suggested having students write a job description for being a student in an ABE program. In her workshop, we examined various classroom jobs, including timekeeper, resource manager, and grammar monitor.

Martha also helped us to articulate how teachers often use the SCANS and EFF competencies intuitively as the basis for classroom instruction. (Editor's note: see definition of SCANS and EFF on this page.) She also gave us tools to make these competencies explicit to students, illustrated how the competencies and skills transfer from classroom to job, and explained how to help students with skills self-assessment.

Martha modeled many of the strategies she uses with students. For example, she took job want ads, matched them to SCANS competencies, and had participants identify the skills they already had that could be applied to the job in the ad. A simulated auction showed us that employers are looking for the SCANS competencies, but number one on their list is the interpersonal qualities students may already have or are developing in cooperative learning situations. Martha's treatment of the classroom as a job site offers a creative classroom management approach that gives students job preparation while structuring the learning environment. I have already started using this model in my writer's workshop with classroom jobs rotating on a monthly basis.

Mary Ann Sliwa is the technology coordinator and writing workshop teacher at Blue Hills ABE Program/ Norwood Adult ESOL. She can be reached at: masliwa@comcast.net