by Velvet Silva As educators, we strive to give our pupils an environment where they feel confident and comfortable expressing themselves. We understand the importance of interpersonal skills, in and out of the classroom: In order to be successful, students must have good command of verbal and nonverbal communication, as well as the ability to analyze and problem-solve. These “soft skills” are easily transferable to the workplace or other systems. Engaging in collaborative activities and completing group projects gives students an opportunity to improve those skills. A multidisciplinary thematic unit that is aligned with the College and Career Readiness Standards for Adult Education (CCRSAE) allows students to improve and use transferable skills as they acquire knowledge. What a great way to make numerous academic content connections and strengthen “soft skills.” (Do your students struggle with these skills? Read about Executive Function and some classroom strategies.) For example, consider a multidisciplinary unit about the environment in which students:
After some further inquiry and reflection, students are prepared for teamwork, which may look like this:
Of course, this is just me brainstorming ideas. I’m sure you have many of your own. How awesome is it that when we provide rich, meaningful learning opportunities in a safe space, our students make connections and constructively converse about their ideas? They problem-solve and manage their time. They work together to accomplish a common objective. Each member is valued and is responsible for contributing to the group’s success. Completion of their final project and product demonstrates their ability to meet the CCRSAE and shows that they are capable of employing those valuable, transferable skills.
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I teach adults. My rooms are filled with students who juggle work, family, and sanity in order to come to my class three nights a week. They straggle in exhausted, hungry, harried, sometimes even despairing, but they come. They come to learn, to make their lives and those of their children better. They come to declare to themselves and the world that they can change their little bit of this earth. And I am their cheerleader. I am the one who whispers in their ears that they can do it and they will do it, we will do it together. I harass and cajole and bother and plead, till sometimes they disappear for a while just to be rid of this crazy teacher who is worse than a restless fly on a summer’s evening. But if I don’t, who will? At 6:00 I trudge up three flights to my classroom, but when I see my students I feel a surge of energy as class begins. We greet one another every evening like long-lost friends who are relieved to see that we’ve made it once more, despite everything that could keep us apart. Papers are shuffled, notebooks come out, pencils are sharpened, and we begin. When I began teaching adults over 10 years ago, I taught reading the way I used to teach high school kids. We struggled through that year, with me assigning readings and asking questions that never got the right answers. I couldn’t understand why my students couldn’t understand what they were reading, no matter what I tried. I was frustrated and almost in despair. What was I supposed to do? Then one morning at the yearly ACLS Directors meeting I saw a flyer about a thing called STAR. My eyes popped open. This was exactly what I needed. I convinced my boss that we needed to do this pilot and dragged him to the trainings. They were a revelation. I learned about using diagnostic tests to discover my students’ needs and strengths, and that not all students needed the same things at the same moment. I learned that there were four components of reading—alphabetics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension—that were all linked, and that each one affected the other; that a lack of fluency and vocabulary could affect comprehension; that you could read a word but not understand it; that reading aloud helped fluency; and that learning vocabulary using your own contexts was a lot more effective than looking it up in a dictionary and memorizing it. And that all of it was evidence-based, backed up by research done with adult readers. I was a sponge who couldn’t soak it up fast enough. I couldn’t wait to get back to my class to try it out. To my surprise, my students were just as excited as I was. They loved the one-on-one testing, where I learned more about them in an hour than I had in a year of classes. I learned that Diana needed comprehension strategies, Gino needed fluency, and they all needed vocabulary. I learned that they were all at various levels, depending on the component. And best of all I learned strategies for teaching it all, methodically, efficiently, and explicitly. My students were using the vocabulary every day in class, on their Facebook posts, in the streets. Their reading became fluent, their levels rose, and their understanding exploded. It seemed like a miracle. But it wasn’t. It was simply EBRI, evidence-based reading instruction—learning what they needed, teaching them based on their needs, and then practicing the strategies together before moving on. And so this is how we spend our nights together, this community of souls from all of Earth’s corners, teaching one another, questioning one another, supporting one another, and laughing at the long climb ahead because crying would only lead us nowhere. Teaching is connection, teaching is light, and however much I might complain and moan, this is where I belong. And that is why I teach.
by Rose Himber Howse This past year I was fortunate to participate in “Critical Friends,” a group of ELA teachers and coaches who met to give feedback on each other’s curriculum. After the first meeting, the name Critical Friends—which sounds oxymoronic—began to feel quite fitting. By critiquing each other’s curriculum through a student-centered lens, we improved the quality of each other’s assignments. It was so helpful to have six profoundly accomplished instructors suggest revisions for my unit plan that the most important question to emerge from the process was: why only now? Shouldn’t collaboration and mentorship in the adult education environment be the norm, not the exception? The usual answer to that is, "Where's the time?" and so I want to make a pragmatic case for the Critical Friends model. While the extra time it took to give, receive, and implement feedback on curriculum seemed like a lot at first, it’s worth re-framing that time as an investment, one with great returns both for student outcomes and for our time management in the long-run. At Critical Friends, I got feedback on a health unit for my ELA class. I’d designed it during a professional development training with Amy Trawick, who helped me use backwards design to envision the final product (a powerpoint presentation) and create a rubric and daily lesson plans aligned to the College and Career Readiness Standards for Adult Education. I was quite pleased with the unit... until I actually taught it, at which time many elements didn’t go as planned. The other members of Critical Friends considered several samples of my students’ work in conjunction with the assignment and helped me to parse some of the problems. I’d been so focused on research skills that I hadn’t provided enough scaffolding for the reading comprehension involved in the research materials. I hadn’t supported students who were unfamiliar with the technology involved in the project enough to ensure that typing and formatting did not overtake the harder skills involved in the assignment. My actual lesson plans didn’t reflect the balance I’d struck in the rubric between writing content, grammar, punctuation, and mechanics. The shortcomings of the assignment go on, but the takeaway here is that when there were six talented educators eager to help improve my assignment, based on the evidence of related student work, it only took about forty-five minutes for me to learn how to do radically better next time. Getting feedback on my unit plan not only allowed me to revise it, but it saved me a tremendous amount of time when I sat down to my next planning session, armed against making the same mistakes I’d made in the past. It’s also worth mentioning that while backwards design takes more time at the beginning, it gets quicker the more you do it, and it is actually as efficient as it is effective once you’re used to it. Add up all the times that you’ve asked yourself, "What am I going to do in class tomorrow?" and then headed off on a wild goose chase through Google or the stacks of old papers in your desk or bag. By comparison, consider an extra few hours on a Saturday spent mapping out a unit plan based on the the desired final product. But even knowing all of this, I slip sometimes during the most stressful periods of the year. While my colleagues and I have always been open to the idea of collaboration, in practice it can easily drop far down the priority list. It always comes back to time and resources; we have so many tasks to complete in order to serve our students in the way that they deserve, and so little time and funding with which to accomplish them. Participating in Critical Friends reminded me of what teachers are missing when they insist on forging ahead alone. Having the Critical Friends structure not only improved the quality of my assignments, it also provided accountability for me to design assignments in the way that facilitates student outcomes, as opposed to the way that’s easiest for me in a given moment. That’s a secondary, and equally important, rationale for bringing curriculum collaboration into our programs and routines. Teachers are some of the busiest people on earth. If we can think of collaboration not as one more thing on our plates but as a way to become more effective in less time, we can all be better for our students. And, in opening ourselves up to feedback on our work, we’re modeling the kind of curiosity, perseverance, and growth-mindedness we ask our students for each and every day.
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