Kate, I appreciate your description of transitioning into content-based instruction at CUNY. I remember traveling along similar paths starting with the 80's forward, using best practices from interdisciplinary, intradisciplinary, theme-based (legacy from K-12), and content-based approaches. In fact, two college colleagues and I created ESL texts at different levels that used content-based instruction connecting language skills with math, social studies, and science. Students loved the materials, and we had a ball creating them!

In my view, the contextualized and integrated approaches currently emphasized by WIOA are really content-based, with the content relating to occupational preparation. All of those useful terms and practices, of course, support what Knowles told us long ago: adults learn to the extent that instruction relates to their interests, needs, experiences, and goals. That's why they work! Thanks for sharing. Leecy

Leecy Wise
Moderator
LINCSReading and Writing  CoP

That's a great question, Susan.  At first, creating content-based lessons for students who have adult interests but lower reading levels can seem very daunting.  Where can we find the texts that are an appropriate reading level, but teach the content in a way that will engage adults? Before the internet, I used to look in the children’s library; now I have found quite a few websites that have great content-based reading materials for adults.

Finding reading material isn’t the only challenge, though:  teachers have to think about what information to present in the beginning to build a foundation for understanding, what information should come next, etc.  And of course, skills appropriate to the texts being introduced must be practiced as well.  

Many CUNY teachers have risen to this complex challenge.  As a result, the CUNY Adult Literacy program has a rich collection of content-based curricula that have been developed by teachers for both ESL and BE/HSE students.  These are lessons that have been carefully designed to teach skills and content in a way that builds from basic to advanced, using engaging materials and effective learning activities. 

Of course each class and set of teaching circumstances are slightly different, so while teachers may draw from existing curricula, they also tend to design new lessons.  Here are some key principles I believe are important to keep in mind when planning content-based learning for adult students: 

--Choose content that is directly applicable to students’ needs.  Pretty much any content can be contextualized to foster skill development as long as students are reading and writing; however, most students enter our classrooms with the goal of taking and passing one of the HSE exams.  There is plenty of content to choose from on these exams, as they represent an entire high-school curriculum.  Students are motivated when they know that what they are learning is “on the test.” 

--Once they have chosen a content area, teachers should study it.  They should start with what they know, read deeply, ask themselves questions, look for answers, and review their understandings. This will help them build expertise in the content and also allow them to sample the experience their students will have as learners.  What questions are they asking and how are they finding answers?  What seems confusing?  What knowledge or concepts seem to be foundational?  

--Think about the building blocks of the content area.   What do you need to understand the Civil War?  For many adult students, it may require starting with the map. We all know that northern and southern states were fighting, but our students may have a very hazy concept of what this means.  Looking at a map will give students a mental representation of the United States—a big picture understanding.  They can locate themselves on the map by finding New York and other northeastern states they may know, then expand their knowledge by learning about the directions north and south before applying this to a historical map that shows slave and free states.  Likewise, for students learning about genetics and heredity, the first step would be understanding cells. We hear talk of DNA, chromosomes, and genes.  How are these similar and different?  Where are they located in the cell? 

--In the excitement of teaching a content, teachers must not let go of the need to teach skills in a way that allows students to practice developmentally appropriate skills multiple times over the course of the semester.  This is a challenging part of content-based teaching: there is a tendency to get caught up in the content, but teachers must always think about the skills students need too, and must provide opportunity for repetition and development. When teaching a class of pre-HSE students, what skills should be prioritized?  How and when will they be introduced, and how can the lessons provide for repeated practice with less and less support as the semester goes on? How will teachers make students conscious of the skills they are working on and how they are advancing?

--Finally, even with content that is very engaging, it’s essential to design instruction that requires students to be active learners.  Activities like map-reading, writing true statements about graphs, sorting vocabulary words into categories, writing, filling in graphic organizers, and quizzes should be built into lesson plans so that students know they are responsible for their own learning and have the chance to hone their skills.  

The truth is, even though the process of creating rich content-based curricula is challenging, it's also a lot of fun!

Hi,Susan, thanks for that question.

In my mind, reading is really the foundation of all of my content-based curricula.  Put simply, we have questions in our minds, and we read to find the answers.  One way I make the complex task of creating content-based lessons a little easier for myself is that I think of each lesson in terms of pre-reading, during-reading and post-reading activities.  Pre-reading activities are designed to build and activate student background knowledge.  They start with what students most likely know and pose questions, giving students a purpose for reading.  Post-reading activities give students a chance to reread and process the text, and in some cases apply what they have learned in a different format, such as filling in a chart, creating a class presentation, or writing.

An example would be in Lesson Four, Activity 7 of the Social Studies/ELA Curriculum Framework.  When I taught this lesson, I wanted to introduce students to the concept of federalism, a concept they need for the TASC test (and also a good concept for any informed citizen to have under his or her belt!).  Students were asked what politicians they could name, and received pictures of president-at-the-time Obama as well as the New York governor and NYC mayor along with a sheet listing governmental powers.  They worked together in pairs to predict which powers belonged to local, state and federal governments; then once they read a connected text that outlined these powers, they re-sorted the powers based on evidence from the text.  The pre-reading activity gave them a question to read for, and the post-reading activity gave them a chance to revisit the text, correct any misunderstandings, and reinforce the learning. 

My approach to reading instruction is strategic in that strategies for comprehending different kinds of texts for a variety of purposes are highlighted.  I preview the texts my students are to read, asking myself what strategies most fit those texts, and what I myself am doing as a reader to understand them, so that I can demonstrate this for students.  Because I am working with developing readers, I need to think about the kinds of scaffolding they need, and what strategies I want to model.  For nonfiction text, I want students to pay attention to subheads that help them preview and subsequently locate information in a text, and I want them to be able to identify the most important information, through underlining or note-taking. I will do a think aloud while I underline or take notes, then ask them to try it.  This is a really essential skill—you can’t learn from text if you can’t identify what’s most important; otherwise you will feel you have to remember everything.  Adult students often struggle to separate “big” or “main” ideas from details, so the curriculum will be designed to allow us to work on this skill again and again throughout the semester with different nonfiction texts.

 By contrast, if my students are reading a map, I would model how I use the key to identify what various markings mean.  For memoir, fiction, and poetry, I might model the process of making inferences about a character based on his/her actions or statements, or I might demonstrate how I make sense of a metaphor or an allusion. 

                --Choosing texts is key.  Texts need to be an appropriate level; otherwise students will get bored and give up.  They must also be highly engaging, teach the content very clearly, and include essential information needed to understand concepts.  Not any text that teaches the content will do; I often find that test prep books either contain too much complex vocabulary or skip over parts of an idea that are necessary to understand the whole.  The same is true for many internet texts.  The other thing I look for in a text is teachability—what strategies does it lend itself to practicing? 

It’s also important to vary texts so that students are exposed to, and have a chance to practice with, a variety of text types.  Graphs, charts, maps, primary source texts, political cartoons, poetry, memoir, and nonfiction articles all appear on HSE tests.  Students need exposure to these as well as support in comprehending them.  One of the advantages of a content-based approach is that students have built up knowledge in a particular content area that they can draw on when tackling new text types.  Political cartoons, in particular, are an example of texts that rely heavily on background knowledge.

                Finally, even though the focus is on content, there needs to be a balance between acquiring and retaining academic knowledge and awareness of skills.  Now that you have understood a graph about growth in the number of Native Americans with college degrees, let’s look at how we transfer that knowledge to a line graph about the build-up of munitions during World War II.  And on a more personal level, what have you noticed about your own ability to read more, summarize, and paraphrase what you have read? 

Hi, Susan,

I'm glad you asked about writing, which is so fundamental to students' literacy development.  The Framework reflects CUNY’s approach to writing instruction, which emphasizes the writing process and the long-term goal of helping students express themselves clearly and confidently in writing.  Students write often and in response to a variety of prompt-types. They may be asked to free-write, to write in response to a text, to write a persuasive essay or a summary.   No matter what type of writing they are doing, the emphasis is on learning how to articulate their ideas, and convey them clearly to a reader.  The goal is for students to enjoy writing and understand that they have something to say.    By focusing on a certain content, students develop expertise in it, and can write better essays on questions related to that content, either informational or argumentative.  Although they may encounter almost any topic on the HSE test, the fact that they have written a successful essay on a topic they know well gives them a mental model of how an effective essay is constructed which they can then apply to other topics. 

Just as with reading, writing instruction is scaffolded, with more support in the beginning of the semester and less as time goes on.  At the beginning, brainstorming activities, graphic organizers, and models are key pieces of the approach.  Models help students understand what is expected of them, and provide the opportunity to deconstruct the type of thinking (big idea? Detail?) that is appropriate at various parts in an essay.  Models created by professional writers can work, but it’s often helpful to have a teacher or student-written model that represents an essay that is within students’ reach.  Giving students a chance to look at the anchor essays and scoring rubric for the test they are going to take, and working with them to analyze the characteristics and components of essays that received various scores, helps concretize the writing task they face.  When they write their own essays, graphic organizers help students transfer their own ideas into an organized format or outline.  

Constructive feedback is absolutely essential in helping students develop as readers—both over-the-shoulder conferences while students write in the classroom, and written feedback when they have turned in an assignment. Students need to know what they have done well in responding to a prompt, organizing their thoughts, and developing ideas, and should be encouraged to fill in missing information through questions that express curiosity about what they are trying to say.  Most students lack confidence in their own writing and think that good writing is writing that is grammatically correct.  Constructive feedback helps students understand which of their ideas resonate and how they might express their ideas more effectively.

In addition to practice with essay writing, students need instruction in the grammatical structures tested on whichever HSE test they will take.  The TASC test, unfortunately, emphasizes grammar over the essay.  In teaching the grammar students need for the test, I try to teach in increments, emphasizing basic knowledge such as what constitutes a sentence, before moving on to increasingly more complex grammatical structures, such as compound and complex sentences and passive voice.  If you’ve had the chance to review the lessons in the Framework, you’ll see that different grammar structures are introduced incrementally from lesson to lesson, and also that grammar is mainly taught through sentence-combining, so that students are active.  By using sentence stems that are about the content students have learned, sentence-combining provides a way to review that content while also giving them practice with the grammatical structure that has been introduced.  

Hi, Susan,

That is a great question, since obviously teaching in this way requires a lot of resources.  

I would like to mention here that the Curriculum Framework was made possible through support from both the New York Department of Labor and the New York State Education Department (NYSED).  NYSED in particular has been pivotal in supporting CUNY’s content-based work in two important ways: (1) through funding the NYSED Teacher Leader Institutes, through which a cadre of adult education teachers from every region of New York State have learned to use the Framework to prepare HSE students for the TASC and to provide turnkey training in their regions; and (2) through support for CollectEdNY.org, the CUNY-administered website that provides reviews of quality teaching resources found on the internet that have been vetted by adult education instructors. CollectEdNY launched in 2014.   

In looking for websites to review, we’ve discovered some great materials for teaching the content needed for HSE tests.  A few I would mention in the area of social studies include Word Generation (wordgen.sermedia.org) social studies units such as What are Governments Good For, Who Gets to Say What I Need to Know, What is the Value of Your Citizenship, and How do we Right the Wrongs of the Past?  I like these units because they are short, highly engaging, and focus on contemporary issues while exposing students to key foundational knowledge.  In addition, students learn a set of important academic vocabulary words from each unit, with the words reused in every text they read in the unit.  Another go-to resource for me is HERB: Social History for Every Student.  (herb.ashp.cuny.edu).  Here, teachers will find great collections of propaganda posters, primary source materials, political cartoons and more categorized by era.  I also like Annenberg’s “America’s History in the Making” series (learner.org) for its classroom materials and descriptions of some of the important themes in each time period—these historical summaries are very helpful for deepening teachers’ knowledge about particular time periods. For reading materials, I especially like New York Times Upfront, a high school newsmagazine available on many public library databases, for its articles that are short and connect history to the present, and for their pro/con series which provide great source texts for argumentative essays.  

Probably my main go-to resource for readings is Newsela.  If you are not familiar with this website, become so. There are articles on many of the aspects of social studies students need to know for HSE tests, and the articles have several advantages: (1) they are available at a variety of reading levels; and (2) the quizzes that accompany the articles use questions that are very similar to the question types on the TABE and TASC tests.  For this reason, students get a real bang for their buck: learning the content through a text that is readable for them, and also getting the test practice.

CollectEd now offers, in addition to reviews of online teaching resources, a set of resources called Framework Posts, that extend the work begun by the existing Curriculum Frameworks.  Framework Posts run the gamut from math to reading, grammar, and science and social studies topics emphasized on the TASC test.  They include lessons, student readings, problems and content guides organized by TASC domains and sub-domains. I would encourage any teacher interested in this approach and in the Framework to peruse the Framework Posts on CollectEdNY.org.  You had asked about resources for teachers interested in subjects other than social studies.  Framework Posts include resources for teaching all of the subjects.  And I’ll just add here: for any teachers looking for additional materials for math, the Math Memos section is an excellent resource where adult educators share non-routine math problems, samples of student work, and practical suggestions for bringing the problems to life in your classroom.  Another section of CollectEDNY, entitled Career Posts, offers supplementary materials and activities for the NYSED/CUNY Career Kits.

In an earlier post, I emphasized the importance of an overarching organizational structure for teaching content.  One of the resources I developed after the Framework was a lesson and materials that can be used by students to create a class timeline of key events in U.S. history.  Students work in groups or pairs to read about different events, then summarize the event for a class timeline that is hung on the wall for the semester.  I do this because it’s impossible to “cover” all of U.S. history during a semester, but also because I feel it’s so important for students to have an overall picture in their heads so that they can fit what they learn into that larger frame.  The timeline can be used for a variety of extension activities, such as studying key vocabulary, looking at images and political cartoons, and taking quizzes using test practice questions related to particular events.  Anyone who would like to receive those materials can email me at Kate.Brandt@cuny.edu.  

In addition, I’ve developed two curricula with other CUNY teachers that focus on high emphasis topics for the social studies TASC: the Reconstruction era and the Great Depression.  Teachers who would like to sample those can email me at the address above.  

In closing, I’d just like to thank you, Susan, for giving me the opportunity to share some of CUNYs work on LINCs.  Both you and Leecy have asked such great questions and added insightful comments to the discussion.  I hope that this has been helpful for any adult education teachers interested in trying out a content-based approach. 

Susan, thank you for the opportunity to share the work we have been doing here at CUNY.  I appreciate your kind words about the Framework.  It's my pleasure to share with other practitioners.

Kate