Strengthen ABE Language Acquisition through Project Based Learning

By Diana McIntyre, Nevada State Leadership-Professional Development Coordinator

Project Based Learning (PBL) is a powerful strategy for classroom activity that allows students to meet standards while collaboratively focusing on relevant student-centered projects.  Project Based Learning allows student learning to go beyond the classroom and address real world issues while using unlimited imagination and working together to answer a driving question that they themselves generate.  Moreover, Project Based Learning prepares students for the workplace as they work together to achieve shared goals.

For example, students might elect to examine how to save a local lake:  What is the best way to reduce the nitrogen in Virginia Lake?  A real-world problem that captured student interest would involve meaningful tasks, thinking like a scientist, knowledge acquisition, deep discussion with peers, and ongoing assessment of student learning experiences.

Importantly, the PBL teacher serves as coach and facilitator, often involving community, experts and colleagues to make the most of learning experiences.  Subjects are seamlessly integrated and lead students to naturally apply knowledge of more than one content area.  What is more, students naturally welcome the challenge of embedded 21st century competencies: critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, communication, and creativity to name a few.  Academically rigorous PBL involves students becoming fully engrossed in their work as they investigate and develop arguments for the question(s) they are seeking to answer.  For instance, interdisciplinary skills of literacy, thinking, numeracy, geography, and research is integrated in the common theme of how to save Virginia Lake. 

Literacy is taught through close reading of complex text and its embedded academic vocabulary (at or just above the students’ reading level); reading, writing, speaking and listening are naturally grounded in evidence in text (including local newspaper articles), journaling, research, defending responses, and argumentative writing; knowledge is expanded through informational and non-fiction reading.  Math could be imparted through focused research, data collection, graphing, challenging problem solving skills, math talks, and coherence to the theme.  Science is conveyed through geography and climate studies, bird studies, water study, research, journaling, collaborative problem solving, and critical thinking.

Nevada Adult Basic Education (ABE) programs should take advantage of PBL and support students in their quest for delving deeper into a chosen topic of interest.  Furthermore, PBL appeals to all learning styles and actively involves the learner in purposeful academic tasks.  As a result, students will be more engaged, better remember the content, and more well-prepared for the workforce.      

Academic Vocabulary and English Language Learners?

Summarize, interpret, and infer are just a few words that students need to know to be college and career ready.  What does this look like in the classroom if you are teaching how to converse with a medical professional or fill out a job application?  I'm going to share advice from a few national experts.

Let's start with what words to teach.  Basically, words are grouped into three tiers:

• Tier I -- words that commonly appear in spoken language and rarely require explicit instruction (i.e. book, sad, today)
• Tier II -- high frequency words for mature language users that are encountered across content areas.  Students may first encounter these words in print and are tricky to learn because they generally do not appear in spoken language (i.e. consist, establish, indicate, sufficient)
• Tier III -- content specific words like simile in English Language Arts and biosphere in science.

If you are in need of a website to support Tier II vocabulary encountered during classroom text activities, try VocabAhead.  You can select Tier II words from a word bank in the column to the right, sort words by grade level, click on the word to see a visual interpretation of the meaning, listen to the pronunciation and the word in a sentence, and follow along by reading the spoken text below the picture.  It's a one-stop shop for vocabulary building.  Visual learners will really appreciate the pictures associated with the word.

For a more authentic approach to vocabulary building, I highly recommend this article from ReadingRockets by Beck, McKeown, and Kucan that will help you select Tier II words from a text.  It may be tempting to focus on all unfamiliar words in a text, but we should be more specific now as we transition to the CCRS.  Think about a text with the word petticoat and the word emerge.  Both are unfamiliar, but where is our time better spent?  Forgo the petticoat and work on emerge.  I know students will want to reach for their pocket translators to look up every unknown word, so it's your job to help them sort through the vocabulary.  Beck and her co-authors suggest choosing high frequency words that your learners will be able to explain using words they already know and will encounter across subject areas.  Let's try it out.

This is a sample text from the Beck, McKeown, and Kucan article.  Which words would you focus on in your classroom?

Johnny Harrington was a kind master who treated his servants fairly. He was also a successful wool merchant, and his business required that he travel often. In his absence, his servants would tend to the fields and cattle and maintain the upkeep of his mansion. They performed their duties happily, for they felt fortunate to have such a benevolent and trusting master.

Did you choose the words below?

Tier Two words	Students' likely expressions
merchant	salesperson or clerk
required	have to
tend	take care of
maintain	keep going
performed	did
fortunate	lucky
benevolent	kind

This is brilliant.  Our students know 'have to', so just guide them to 'required'.  Your students already have a sense of the word, now they can simply replace it with a more academic term.

So now you're looking at a word wall or a list of academic vocabulary from a specific text.  Now what?  Again, let's turn to the experts.

These three articles from TeachingChannel.org are MUST READS for ESL/ELL instructors (if you haven't signed up to access Teaching Channel videos and information, do it.  Do it now.). The first article, by Lily Jones, summarizes a series of four videos that will teach you how to involve ELL's in academic conversations.  Topics include talk moves, adapting Socratic seminars, participation protocol, and reflecting on discussions.  The second, by Nicole Knight, provides the why and how of academic discussions and links to useful resources.  The third, by Jeff Zwiers will give you specific strategies for developing oral language.  I particularly like his Opinion Continuum activity:

Opinion Continuum: Students share where they fall on the continuum of a two-sided issue and why. At the end, they share if they shifted at all along the continuum based on their conversations with partners.

I would even consider bringing two political cartoons into class -- one from each side of a controversial issue.  You could introduce the opinion continuum with visuals and then transition to a short text when the students are familiar with the task and your expectations.

If you have attended any of our CCRS trainings, you know that we love to say, "evidence, evidence, evidence" as we describe the English Language Arts shifts.  Zwiers writes that if we assign a task to locate evidence in a text, students can find 'evidence-y' things and stop there.  He posits that if we push our learners towards evaluation by supporting/defending an opinion or placing ideas or evidence along a continuum, our learners will provide stronger and clearer answers (learning!) and become better prepared for the communication demands of college and career.  For example, in Nevada, you may be following the Tesla news and could read a newspaper article on Tesla's new billion-dollar plant.  You may be tempted to ask, "How does the new Tesla plant affect the average Nevadan?"  Zwiers suggests simply adding, "most affect" to the question and watching your students' minds shift into learning-mode.

For those over-achieving instructors out there, you can evaluate your discussion practice using the Academic Discussion Continuum of Teacher Practice rubric and scroll down to find five activities for more effective interaction on the last page.

Zwiers and Crawford (2011) discovered seven features of effective discussion tasks.  I'll close with three of them, in the form of questions, to ask yourself about your classroom practice:

1.  Do you require both partners to talk?
2.  Do you require critical and creative thinking?
3.  Do you take advantage of controversies and conflict?

If you answered no to any of the questions above, you may want to start there.

Let us know if you try any of the academic discussion strategies by posting below.

Don't Miss Out!

So, you've browsed the College and Career Readiness Standards, scratched your head, and are now wondering what to do with the information.  We can help!

The Nevada ABE state professional development team is offering two CCRS trainings as a follow-up to our recent Webinar.

Northern Nevada
Friday, October 24 at WNC, 2201 West College Parkway in Carson City, Cedar Bldg. 108 from 3-6 pm (RSVP by Oct. 17).

Southern Nevada
Friday, November 7 at CCSD Adult Education Complex in Las Vegas, 2071 E. St. Louis, from 3-6 pm (RSVP by Oct. 30).

To RSVP, email Claudia Bianca at cbiancanv@gmail.com with training location (Carson or Las Vegas), your name, institution, and the level and subject you teach (ELL, ABE, HSE, Adult Ed HS).  It's that simple.

We'll see you there!

Gearing up for the Key ELA Shifts

What’s the Significance of Gearing up for the Key ELA Instructional Shifts in the College and Career Readiness Standards?

By Diana McIntyre, Nevada State Leadership Professional Development Coordinator

By now, instructional leaders are aware of the shift in what students, teachers and educational facilities are expected to accomplish in the near future with the implementation of the College and Career Readiness Standards (CCRS).  The road ahead will dictate the necessitation for acquiring challenging curriculum, providing quality teacher professional development, and refining instructional practices to integrate more rigorous student expectations, higher-level questioning and opportunities to learn.

The American College Testing (ACT), ACT INC., produced a study in 2006 that pointed out that a student’s greatest predictor of success and careers is the ability to read complex text.  The most important implication of the study involves what students could read, in terms of its complexity, proved at least as important as what they could do with what they read.

Shift 1-Text Complexity: Regular practice with complex text and its academic language.

All students must be exposed to complex text and its academic language regardless of their reading ability.  This can be achieved through close reading of a passage, read aloud, shared reading, independent reading, multiple exposures to text, providing sequences of text, reading for a variety of purposes, as well as reading both fiction and informational text.

Significantly, student instructional support is now provided while students read, from context, rather than the previous way of providing pre-teaching before reading.  Students learn to become autonomous text users with regular practice with complex text.  There’s something to be said for the vocabulary acquisition that transpires from within exposure to the text as opposed to simply pre-teaching vocabulary that leads into a text.

Effective methods to scaffold complex text include reading the text aloud, providing opportunities for rereading text through small collaborative group discussion, chunking portions of text to support comprehension, use of graphic organizers and visuals.  Some students will require timely one-on-one teacher interventions depending on their individual needs.  As well, differentiating instruction offers students a choice with which to demonstrate their knowledge.

Shift 2-Evidence:  Reading, writing, speaking (and listening) grounded in evidence from text, both literary and informational.

Text based activities require teachers to engage students with focused, open ended, higher-order questions that require learners to return to text to carefully gather evidence for the answer.  The text or passage is now the main focus of a close read.  Moreover, when text dependent questions are used to drive a close read, numerous standards are activated.  Previous practices involved asking surface comprehension questions that students answered individually, mostly from memory or opinion.      

With the CCRS priority of getting students to learn to read complex text independently and proficiently, together, teachers and learners dissect the distinctive complexity of a passage through questioning and deep discussion.  For successful collaborative discussion, students must understand expectations that include employing accountable talk-language stems. 

Accountable talk guides students in the entire discussion, supports students in connecting their ideas to the preceding speaker’s ideas, helps students elaborate and build on ideas and each other’s contributions, produces talk that remains related to text, avoids multiple conversations, is focused on issues rather than participants, assists students in summarizing and paraphrasing each other’s arguments, and ensures students understand one another.        

Each time students return to text to discuss and gather evidence, they are automatically rereading which inevitably increases their fluency.                                                   

                                                     

The College and Career Readiness Standards writing asks the learner to produce effective argumentative and informative writing, is routine and goes hand-in-hand with reading.  The CCRS expect a learner to draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research compared to previous forms of writing that mostly asked students to write opinion pieces.  Previous methods were not preparing students for the demands of college and career because students were not making the connection in how to transfer their understanding of opinion writing to other forms of writing. 

Shift 3-Knowledge:  Building knowledge through content-rich nonfiction.

The vast majority of required reading for college and career is non-fiction.  The CCRS support learners in becoming acquainted with reading different types of informational text across the curriculum:  history, social studies, science, technical subjects, and the arts.  Generally, informational text is more challenging for students to read than narrative text, and Adult Basic Education (ABE) students should be reading much more informational text than fiction in their classrooms. 

Literacy blocks that promote fictional stories and squeeze out content based reading are a thing of the past.  The CCRS ensure integrated subjects to furnish students with skills needed to acquire information from content-specific nonfiction texts.  Nonfiction texts become a steadfast vehicle for absorbing and comprehending content as students construct knowledge through the close reading of a variety of text materials.     

Without doubt, the CCRS English Language Arts (ELA) key shifts are today’s priority in the ABE classroom in preparing students to become college and career ready. 

What?! It’s Week Four and I’ve Already Lost 30% of my Students?

I recently attended the continuation of our Leadership Excellence Academies (LEA) training with my ABE colleagues in Nevada.  As part of our two-year program improvement training, we examined learner persistence and discussed how we can incorporate some persistence strategies into our program improvement plan.  While this may not sound very exciting to an instructor, what is exciting are the strategies that YOU can implement in your own classrooms to address learner persistence.

If you are a fan of research, you can read the detailed findings from the study involving 18 persistence action research projects involving 755 adult learners in five New England states here.  If you just want the basics, go to World Education’s Adult Learner Persistence website.  From there, begin by selecting “Program Self-Assessment” and, if you are an instructor, scroll down to the “Instruction” section (p. 4).  Complete the assessment by substituting “I” instead of “We” using the Likert-like scale across the top.

Next, click on the ‘Instruction’ tab to the left on the Adult Learner Persistence homepage and then select ‘Read more about specific strategies’ at the bottom of the page to locate strategies that correspond with your self-assessment.   You will find a plethora of evidence-based strategies to choose from.  Bonanza!  Consider conducting an action research project and looking at before-and-after attendance hours/completion rates or comparing two of your classes (one using a persistence strategy and one as a control – for one session).  Let us know what you discover.

What the New England Learner Persistence Project researchers found was that, after instructors implemented persistence strategies, attendance increased by 16% and completion rates increased by 22%.  Wow!  You can create this magic in your own classrooms with just a few modifications.

I am a huge fan of 'Strategy e'  Continually build community and sense of belonging in the class among students.'  A colleague introduced me to an activity that would fit nicely into this category:  “Fear in a Hat,”  

We both have used it on the first day class with great success.  Students complete the phrase, “In this program, I am [most] afraid that..." or "In this program, the worst thing that could happen to me would be..." on 3” x 5” cards and place the cards in a hat.  I prefer a goofy hat like a Viking helmet or magician’s hat.  Directions from the link:  Collect the pieces of paper, mix them around, then invite each person to a piece of paper and read about someone's fear.  One by one, each group member reads out the fear of another group member and elaborates and what he/she feels that person is most afraid of in this group/situation.  No one is to comment on what the person says, just listen and move on to the next person.

We have found that this activity breaks down barriers on the first day and leads to a profound discussion of fear and obstacles and, ultimately, how to overcome one's fears to succeed in the program.

If you are one of those instructors who love ice breakers, expect a great deal of student participation, and often receive hugs as the end of your session, you will love this resource for community building.  If you don't do or expect any of the above, your class would probably benefit from a few community building activities.  The training is called TRIBES.  You can search for a local training, or you can just purchase the book at places like Amazon.  It is chocked full of pages and pages of community building activities.   The authors note age appropriateness for each activity, so you won’t accidentally insult your adult learners’ intelligence and maturity by selecting an activity geared toward K-6 students.

Additionally, Alisa Beltzar (1998) indicates that leavers from your classes don’t consider themselves ‘drop-outs’.  They stop attending but plan on returning later.  These students see their departure from a program as a ‘temporary hiatus’ rather than a ‘negative’ or ‘failure’.  We have all probably felt frustration over our students’ excuses, right?  Perhaps, armed with this information, we can feel less frustration as we shift our discussion from repeated transportation problem-solving strategies to a student’s impending hiatus and the procedure for returning to the program before they actually drop out.