A Story

Kaylee, a first year college student, was almost ready to leave for class. As she entered the washroom to brush her teeth, she felt something cold beneath her feet. Looking down, she saw that the floor was covered with water. Her socks were soaked. Her eyes darted from side to side. Where was the water coming from?

Water was pouring from the toilet, which must have become plugged. Kaylee grabbed the nearest towel from the rack, and put it on the floor to soak up the water. The towel became saturated within seconds. The floor was still covered with water, and more water was cascading from the overflowing toilet bowl. The ever-growing puddle inched toward the hallway carpet.

Kaylee turned back toward the hallway, intending to run to her bedroom for another towel. Then she looked again at the toilet. More towels would not solve this – she had to stop the water from coming out of the toilet. How? For an instant, Kaylee was unsure what to do. Then she remembered: the valve. The toilet should have a shut off valve.

Quickly, Kaylee found a knob near the back of the toilet and turned it.  The toilet kept running. She turned the lever the other way, but after several rotations, she could not turn it any further, and the water was still coming. Frantically, Kaylee turned the handle in the other direction. As she rapidly twisted the knob, she realized that her knee was on the floor and her pants were now wet. When she had turned the lever as far as possible, the water finally stopped.

Kaylee ran to her bedroom and retrieved two large towels from the closet, depleting her supply of clean towels. As she raced back to the bathroom, she realized that her wet socks had left footprints in the hallway. Kaylee took off her socks and threw them to the floor, then used the towels to wipe up the water from the bathroom floor. The towels were completely saturated, and the floor was not even close to dry. Wringing the towels out into the bathtub, Kaylee wiped the floor again and again until most of the water was cleaned up.

Now what? Kaylee was not sure why the toilet had overflowed. She glanced at her watch. If she didn’t leave soon, she would miss the bus. The next bus would leave 20 minutes later, which would make Kaylee late for school. Throwing the wet towels into the tub, Kaylee decided to figure out the toilet issue later. She washed her hands and dried them on a wash cloth, then hurried to change into dry clothes before rushing out the door.

During the bus ride to school, Kaylee texted her roommates to let them know about the toilet. She apologized for the mess she had left and explained that she would clean up the pile of wet towels when she got home after class. Kaylee stared out the window, feeling overwhelmed. Rent was due soon, and she was not sure how she would manage to pay her share of the rent and have enough for groceries. She had a group project and several assignments coming up, and she was struggling to keep up with all of her courses, let alone study effectively for upcoming midterm tests. Kaylee didn’t consider herself much of a cook, and she was surviving mostly on microwave dinners. With all of the morning’s chaos, she had forgotten her lunch.

Kaylee’s mood brightened as her friend, Sofia, boarded the bus and took a seat next to her. Kaylee told her about the chaotic morning and her forgotten lunch. Sofia was sympathetic, and confided that she, too, had been feeling stressed lately. Finances were challenging, school was stressful, and there were so many little things that always seemed to be going wrong.

“I could barely figure out which way to turn the toilet shut-off valve,” Kaylee said.

“I wouldn’t have even known there was a valve at all,” Sofia admitted. “I would have had to call my dad.”

Kaylee nodded. “Adulting is hard.”

A woman sitting behind them made a scoffing sound. Kaylee and Sofia turned to look at her as the bus came to a stop.

“Young people today don’t know how to take care of themselves,” the woman said as she rose to her feet. “Our generation knew how to cook and fix things around the house.” The woman walked toward the exit and said over her shoulder, “Nobody learns how to do these things anymore. It’s a shame,” before getting off the bus.

Kaylee and Sofia sat in stunned silence. The woman had been so rude! But was she right? Kaylee felt even more incompetent than before. The bus arrived at their destination, and Kaylee and Sofia said goodbye as they went to their respective classes. As Kaylee settled into her seat in class, she wondered how she was ever going to be a successful adult.

Why Life Skills Training Modules?

I’m Candi Raudebaugh, and I am an occupational therapist and an instructor in a therapy assistant diploma program. My experiences working clinically as an occupational therapist and teaching therapy assistant students have made me aware of the importance of life skills.

When I started out as a student, I didn’t always figure things out as easily as I would have liked. Whether managing my own life skills (figuring out how to manage money, for example) or addressing life skills in a professional setting (helping a client with kitchen safety when I didn’t do much cooking myself at the time), it was hard!  I had to learn some life skills through trial and error.

As an instructor in a therapy assistant program, I noticed that life skills were often challenging for students, and then on top of that, students were expected to work with clients on life skills. For me, it would have been easier both personally and professionally if I had the opportunity to learn more about life skills when I was a student. My experience and research suggest that this is true for others, as well. Both the literature and qualitative data from my own research confirm that life skills training can be helpful for college and university students personally – and for therapy assistant students both personally and professionally because of the nature of their work in rehabilitation.

When my students struggled with daily living tasks (such as coping with stress, managing time, money management, and meal preparation), practicum preceptors, college instructors, and others sometimes made comments that were similar those of the woman on the bus in the story above. I wondered if it was true that young people do not learn the skills they need to manage as adults, and if young people in earlier generations were more prepared for adult life. Through my doctoral research, I learned that the attitude that young adults today are less competent than young adults of previous generations is not new. In fact, I discovered that these same biases against young adults were expressed more 140 years ago (Raudebaugh, 2021).

Based on my literature review and initial research findings, I concluded that learning life skills can be hard. We do not automatically know how to prepare meals, manage finances, handle stress, and do all of the complex things that can be part of adulthood – not to mention the skills specifically related to being a college student, like study skills, learning strategies, time management, and more. We must learn how to do these things.

College students commonly struggle with meeting the demands of being an adult and student, especially in their first year of post-secondary studies. I thought, wouldn’t it be helpful to have a resource to help with learning life skills? My research project focused on finding the answer to this question, and that is why and how these modules came about. Life skills training modules allow therapy assistant students to access information about life skills that can help them personally and professionally.

The fictitious student, Kaylee, from the story above, may benefit from resources to help with common challenges college students face. Knowing which way things turn to get tighter or looser could be useful for situations like the overflowing toilet. Kaylee might also appreciate information on money management, coping with stress, time management, study skills, meal preparation, and other areas pertaining to succeeding in college and managing adult life.

About These Modules

Here you will find a diverse array of information related to sleep, study skills, money management, and more! There are three modules: Performance Management, Money Management, and Manual Skills. Each module has slides, videos, and other resources. When there are slides, you may want to read through them and then follow along with the slides as you watch the videos. Videos will go into detail about the content in the slides.

To go through all the materials in all three modules is expected to take a total of 13 – 23 hours, plus about 7 hours of practical application where you can reflect on the information and apply it to real life.

You will probably find that some of the content is familiar to you already, while other topics might be new. Perhaps you have a variety of life experiences that have effectively prepared you for managing student (and adult) life, or, like Kaylee, you might be a new college student and are feeling overwhelmed.

Feel free to browse through and access the content that is most relevant and helpful for you. There are many ways to do daily tasks, and while these modules contain tips and ideas, it is okay to do things differently! I hope that you find some useful ideas that you can adapt to suit you and apply to your own life. I also hope that these modules can help with the process of navigating life as a college student successfully and becoming increasingly confident in adult life.

Life Skills Research

These modules were developed as part of my doctoral studies at Queen’s University. You can read more about my research in the article: Life Skill Needs of Occupational Therapy Assistant Students: Perceptions of Instructors, Preceptors, Graduates and Current Students. The article describes part of the module development process in which TA students, preceptors, instructors, and graduates participated in interviews and focus groups about TA students’ life skill needs. My doctoral dissertation describes the three phases of my research project, including a needs analysis, module development, and module deployment and evaluation. 

Please feel free to share these Life Skills Training modules with students, colleagues, and anyone else you believe may benefit from the content. An easy way to share the modules is by providing this link: https://openeducationalberta.ca/life-skills/. I would be happy to answer any questions you may have about my work, and you can contact me here: https://rdpolytech.ca/programs/health-sciences/faculty-and-staff/candi-raudebaugh.

How to reference these modules

When providing attribution for this work, you may use whichever referencing format you choose. This Open Educational Resource would be referenced as a website. An APA reference is below as an example.

Raudebaugh, C. L., Norman, K., & Finlayson, M. L. (2023). Life skills training modules. Open Education Alberta. https://openeducationalberta.ca/life-skills/

References

Raudebaugh, C., Finlayson, M., Norman, K., & Stewart, S. (2022). Life Skill Needs of Occupational Therapy Assistant Students: Perceptions of Instructors, Preceptors, Graduates and Current Students. Journal of Occupational Therapy Education, 6(3). https://encompass.eku.edu/jote/vol6/iss3/3/

Are you ready to begin?

If you are ready to explore the life skills training modules, I invite you to get started here with the Performance Management Module. You can progress through the module topics in order, or choose the ones most relevant to you.