Preparing special education students for life after high school begins long before they enter high school itself. It’s never too early to think about the long-term goals for your students and the skills they will need to succeed in a vocational setting. Whether you teach in an elementary or middle school classroom, the foundation for future vocational success can start now.
By focusing on pre-vocational tasks, building soft skills, and incorporating community-based instruction (CBI), you can provide your students with the tools and experiences they’ll need to transition into adulthood with confidence and independence. This proactive approach ensures that every student has the chance to thrive in a vocational setting and beyond.
A good work task system can help with independence and learning pre vocational learning. The routine of a work task system, using left to right directionality, using a schedule of tasks, and working until completion are all skills that can fit into a vocational setting. Within the work task system, there are ways to decrease structure to slowly mimic a more typical work routine. This can be as simple as writing down tasks on a post-it rather than using a visual schedule with pieces.
Students can even work on retrieving work tasks from a shelf across the room off a shelf rather than containing them to a workstation where everything they are working on is within arm’s reach. Endurance can be increased by adding work tasks or amount of work for each work task. Increasing complexity/ steps can also help with endurance. With students with higher needs, work tasks can help increase simple skills that students may use in a vocational setting.
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Sometimes soft skills can mean more to vocational success than the hard skills you know. Make sure to be working on communication in a natural setting, like in the cafeteria. Soft skills have many overlaps with executive functioning skills. For example, problem solving, a crucial part of executive functioning skills, is important to ensure how to manage problems that arise. However, it is also needed for critical thinking and adaptability in a vocational setting. These skills can be worked on in your classroom setup and routines with simple routines and important elements. Some examples would be visual schedules, timers, and visuals.
CBI (or community-based instruction) can help open doors to a lot of natural teaching opportunities. For example, learning to plan for cooking lesson by following the steps to buy groceries (making a shopping list, finding items in a store, paying for items). This is a great way to work on those soft skills in a natural setting. Open ended questioning can also be utilized to promote problem solving. For example, what do you do if you don’t have the exact items you need? What about if you can’t find the item?
You may feel like adulthood may be miles away for your younger students, but it is never too early to start thinking about the skills they need. Teaching students to work independently, focusing on soft skills, and utilizing the community are just some of the ways you can start preparing your special education students for transition.
Although adulthood and vocational settings may feel far off for younger students, the path to independence and success starts with the skills taught today. By introducing pre-vocational work tasks to build independence, fostering soft skills that support workplace communication and adaptability, and incorporating community-based instruction to practice real-world problem-solving, you are laying a solid foundation for their future.
Preparing students early not only equips them for vocational opportunities but also empowers them to face challenges with resilience and confidence. As educators, it’s our responsibility to help them take those first steps toward a successful transition to adulthood, ensuring they are ready for whatever lies ahead.
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