Not all job training can happen on the job. Many of the students we work with do best when we provide them with repeated opportunities to practice new job skills. We like to set up Vocation Stations around the classroom to help students develop skills that can be used at different job sites.
Activities at Vocation Stations can help students uncover strengths and interests to help them explore other job interests.
Quick Question – Are we taking it too far if we call it “Vocation Station Rotations”?
We like to use these activities as rotations. Students working on job skills might rotate through a few different stations three or four times in an hour. Introduce activities into your Vocation Stations by teaching the student the process for completing a specific activity and then add it to his/her rotation.
In addition to developing a new job skill, our students also work on really important companion skills:
- Completing various job tasks fluently
- Recognizing when their work is done
- Notifying a supervisor when they are finished
- Increasing speed of task completion
- Resetting materials and keeping an organized work space
- Problem solving when something goes wrong
- Yes, sometimes we slightly sabotage an activity to help our students learn to troubleshoot.
Important Components of Each Vocation Station Activity
- Station label
- Station materials
- Varied levels of materials for each student rotating through that station.
- Instructions for completing the task
- Picture, Video (QR Code), Written Instructions
- Timer
- Dry erase board & marker
- Communication picture board
- “Help,” “I’m finished,” “Something is missing”
Where do we find the activities and materials?
It takes some creativity, resourcefulness, and money (if you have it) to get some really good Vocation Stations set up. We make a lot of our materials when we can or modify readily available activities to meet the needs of our students. Usually, we can look at a job skill we want to add to our rotations and create materials or re-purpose things we have laying around. Sometimes, we can use connections within our community to ask for donations. Many of our community connections have been made by reaching out to local businesses for Community-Based Instruction (CBI) trips.
Here are some activities we use in Vocation Stations:
Our banking and personal finance station holds tasks that includes rolling coins, counting money in a cash drawer, writing deposit & withdraw slips, wrapping bills, verifying cash amounts, writing checks, and completing a cash drawer record.
There are tons of quick tasks related to job skills in a restaurant. A few great tasks for this station include sorting silverware, rolling silverware, filling salt & pepper shakers, organizing and stocking sugar, and stocking the prep stations.
Using tools is a life long skill that easily contributes to job skills. Set up a station with nuts, bolts, and related tools to teach your students how to match a tool with a nut, bolt, or screw. Teach your students to follow diagrams to assemble a product. Incorporate IT skills by using tools to fix computer screens, keyboards, or replacing toy batteries.
Filing is a great vocation station to use to continue teaching early literacy skills. Once your students can sort by letters, numbers, words, and addresses, they can learn to sort different types of documents, like bills, insurance information, receipts, and other important paperwork. This may also be a great place to keep envelopes, stamps, and other mail materials to teach students how to fill out, seal, and send an envelope. Think of all the companion skills in the areas of reading and writing you can add to this activity!
We do a lot of communicating through texts and email. Set up a station to help your students to use these popular methods of communicating, too! Students can answer questions by snapping a picture and texting the correct answer to their teacher. Use this station to teach students to access and compose email.
Letter boards and marquee signs are just inherently fun. We like this activity in our Vocation Stations because it does double duty as a job skill and provides a great chance for our students to continuing to work on reading and spelling.
One of our favorite class activities has to be gardening. We love to visit the garden center on CBI trips and pick produce from our garden to make healthy meals. We built the beds together as a class with lumber we purchased on a CBI trip to Home Depot. Within our Vocation Stations, gardening-related activities include sorting seeds and garden labels, planting seeds in starter planters, filling florist orders, and filling seed orders.
Wrap Up & ABA Insights
Hopefully, it is apparent that we have several learning environments and teaching modalities for all of our themed instructional units. Vocation Stations are where we practice independence, CBI trips are where we generalize mastered skills, Small Group activities are where we initiate most new learning, and one-on-one instruction is where we introduce new vocabulary associated with each unit. We teach with realistic materials, within mock activities, using digital interactive lessons, with traditional teaching materials, and within real world settings.
Each lesson we create combines these core components to provide well rounded and meaningful learning opportunities for our students. Our strategies always come back to the science of Applied Behavior Analysis. Here specifically, we like to site a classic article by Stokes and Baer (1977) An Implicit Technology of Generalization. We plan for generalization from the beginning of each new unit we create. Without successful generalization to real settings, the skills we teach in school mean nothing when our students leave us. This guides every decision we make. How can this little bit of time we have with our students make the biggest impact on the quality of their lives as adults? Without a good answer to this question, I lose my “why” as an educator and a related service provider.
