Developing Teacher Confidence in Transitions Instruction for all Levels

1. Developing Teacher Confidence in Transitions Instruction for all Levels Betsy Parrish Hamline University/ATLAS NCTN November 8, 2012

2. Objectives for Today Participants will… • Learn about the ACES initiative • Identify your own state’s PD needs regarding transitions at all levels of instruction • Experience sample activities from the initiative • Identify ways they can adopt portions of the program in your settings

3. What is ACES? • Academic • Career • Employability • Skills

4. The Goal of ACES: To ensure that ABE programs are providing effective contextualized instruction integrating post-secondary education and training readiness, employability skills and career readiness at all levels.

5. Think-Pair-Share Why teach transitions skills from the beginning?

6. It takes a long time! • Social language vs. academic language (Cummins, 2000) • 7-15 years with intensive instruction to master academic or specialized language (Collier, 1989) • Prior experience with formal schooling or work • Opportunities to use academic language outside of class

7. To be ready for… • Work • Education • Home • Community 7

8. Backwards Design Implementation of a plan for job-embedded Professional Development for a cohort of 30 practitioners. How do we get there?

9. We asked… what strategies, skills and standards are deemed essential. how to embed them at all levels.

10. ACES Activity One: Develop a Transitions Integration Framework Who.. Advisory group from ABE and community college; workforce development What… • Reviewed standards/frameworks • Identified essential skills • Shared wisdom and expertise

11. What we did NOT set out to do… • Provide practitioners with a new curriculum. • Provide them with a set of standards.

12. What we ARE doing… Providing a framework and strategies for integrating transitions at all levels…a transitions lens through which teachers can view all lesson plans.

13. ACES Professional Development An Overview of the Transitions Integrated Framework

14. Eight Original Categories • Career Literacy/Awareness • Critical Thinking • Effective Communication • Language and Learning Strategies • Navigating and Understanding One’s Environment • Numeracy • Self-Management • Technology

15. Current Proposed Categories • Developing Future Pathways • Critical Thinking • Effective Communication • Language and Learning Strategies • Understanding and Navigating Formal Systems • Numeracy • Self-Management • Digital Literacy

16. Example of Learning Objective This example is taken from the Career Literacy /Awareness category. Learning Objectives are stated as, “Students will be able to….” (SWBAT)

17. Sample Classroom Activities • Sample classroom activities are provided for each learning objective. • They are provided to help practitioners generate ideas as to how the objectives can be imbedded into lesson plans. • The sample classroom activities are provided at a variety of ABE / ESL levels to show how the learning objective can be imbedded at all levels.

18. Example of “Sample Classroom Activities” This example is taken from the Self-Management category.

19. We went with… • less detailed descriptions of tasks. • general recommendations. • possible objectives and activities, and not finite, prescribed examples.

20. Because…. • Applicable across settings: • use at a variety of levels, settings and for all three areas of ACES • Make sure users see these as possible objectives and activities • Beginning of a working document

21. Activity Two: ACES Professional Development Implementation of a plan for job-embedded Professional Development for a cohort of 24 practitioners. This plan was be informed and guided by the findings and recommendations of the ACES Advisory Group.

22. Who participated.. • 24 ABE teachers (Beginning- Advanced ESL; ABE-Basic skills to high-intermediate; GED; • Large urban programs • Rural “one-room school house” programs • Corrections All selected through an application process.

23. PD Components TIF self assessments: pre/post checklists Online Moodlecourse Video analysis task Lesson analysis task Readings and weekly discussion forums 2 peer observations; lesson plans Final PowerPoint presentations

24. Pre-Post Reflection Tasks

25. Video Observations View and identify examples of categories and learning objectives • New American Horizons • Reading and listening • MLOTS • Math and Literacy

26. Lesson Plans

27. Moodle Discussion Prompts Topic I Applying strategies from the videos in your classes by Betsy Parrish - Sunday, January 15, 2012, 11:42 AM • Choose one of the activities from the reading or math lesson you saw in the videos on Friday, Jan. 13, for example, the T-chart, jigsaw reading, line-ups, survey, grouping by common criteria such as birth order (there were others). • Describe how you could use the same type of activity in a lesson for a class you teach?  What level learners is this for? What might be the challenges for them?   What modifications would you need to make?

28. Goal Setting Sheet for Peer Observation

29. We are now deciding… • where to go from here. • what categories/objectives work. • what degree of leveling we need. • what degree of differentiation we need across strands: • Employability • Career Awareness • Post-secondary Readiness and Training • and more….

30. Look at ACES teacher participant “Take-aways” posters. • In looking at the posters, what appear to be the most significant developments in the teachers’ approach to integrating the ACES framework in their programs?

31. Create an Action Plan Review the activities that we used in the ACES initiative. Evaluate which you could adopt in your setting. What modifications would be needed? What would you need for these activities to be successful?

32. Questions??