Welcome and Please Introduce Yourself!

 

 

Greetings!

Welcome to the College and Career Standards group in the LINCS Community! 

Use this space to meet your colleagues and discuss, learn, and share with each other. Please post an introduction about yourself in response to this thread and let everyone know what you would like to gain from your experience in our group.  Also, feel free to post any questions or discussion topics you'd like to engage in exploring with your colleagues.  Remember to check out the redesigned LINCS website resources at http://lincs.ed.gov

Looking forward to the discussions...

Michelle Carson

Comments

Welcome to the College and Career Standards LINCS Community of Practice.  I hope that you will learn a lot from following the conversations and being part of the discussions.  Your question is a very good one.  I am going to repost your question as a brand new discussion.  I hope others will provide some feedback for you.  If you have any other thoughts you can always start a new discussion at any time.  I am glad that you are part of our group.

Meryl, SME

Good day everyone. It is great to connect with so many others working on adopting CCRS and sharing educational experiences! I have had experiences as a day school math teacher, computer programming teacher, community college technology instructor, technology integration specialist, teacher mentor, online mathematics tutor and have been working in adult education locally and at the statewide level in the state of Maine for the last 6 years. I am a passionate person with many traits similar to a 3 year old puppy (both the good and bad) and I try to bring positive energy to all those I work with in and out of education. 

I had the pleasure of participating as the Maine Mathematics specialist in the first round of CCRS trainings last year. Our state team returned with tons of energy that persisted throughout the year as we worked to get all of our programs introduced to the wonderful activities that have been prepared and shared nationally. We had a good deal of successes as well as some interesting challenges that helped us feel ready for our "next steps". We were approved for the phase two training and returned from DC last month with a much better set of ideas and goals we wanted to work on this year. There are so many great things going on all over the country and participating in communities like this allow us all to steal best practices and hear of all the creative ways states and programs have begun shifting instructional practices towards the CCRS. I look forward to the many communications that can be nurtured in this community. 

I still have a little less than a foot of snow pack all over my land with some flurries heading in this weekend, so I am still a bit skeptical with all these rumors that it might be spring in some places. The good news is that I hear summer is on a weekend up here this year 

Welcome, Edward! And thanks for sharing your energy and enthusiasm about working with the CCR math standards. We can sense your excitement about the potential effectiveness these standards bring to our work with adult learners. Could you tell us about a success you've already experienced with the standards and/or one of the challenges you want to work on.

This Community is indeed a place where we can share ideas and problem-solve together!

Cheers, Susan Finn Miller

Moderator College and Career Standards CoP

Because I work both in the classroom and around the state with staff I have had the pleasure of seeing many successes in both venues. 

With teachers, the excitement, discussion and even the arguments during the CCRS training activities have been wonderful to be a part of. Very often in education, and especially in adult education, energy will wane and many find it easy to simply dwell on all the challenges we face. If I just think about the first activity on Focus, I can think of many positives and challenges that have shown up in the 4 different facilitation of that session I have done. The design and content of the first session on Focus immediately gets the energy flowing around the room. Teachers dive right into discussion as they work together to sort and challenge each other's thoughts. Then, as the group shares their results, the energy continues to flow as many teachers scratch heads, smile, frown, and engage in spirited discussions. Facilitators do need to be aware that it is possible that people become a bit defensive as they try to process that their sacred cow lesson may no longer be a primary focus. The reality is that even if we were to just stick to the content of the standards, most of us will be challenged to really get all learners proficient given our limited time and persistence challenges our learners face.

So many of us get students into our programs at level B with learners expecting they can just jump right up to level E in the next 12 weeks. Although this time frame is often not possible, the coherence of the standards offer so many ways to individualize instruction and create different paths of study that can easily flow from semester to semester. I work in a program that has transitioned to all individualized education; we don't have traditional lecture courses. Our curriculum guides have been redesigned to be product based and aligned with the standards in such a way that I may have a couple dozen students in the room, each with their own learning paths and projects. The technology tools I have designed help make this a positive experience for teachers and learners. For example, it is much easier to track which standards are targets, what progress learners have had, and which standards have evidence if we have tools to store and record this information. I can't imagine trying to tackle this level of individualized and contextualized instruction without some of the tools we created and are using. 

 This link on the left has an example of a student profile tool I created, if I have Suzzie Samples in my class I simply pull up her profile to get a summary of all of the intake information we have gathered on her during the intake process. During intake, the administrative secretary helps to guide the new learner through over 10 forms. As the learner completes each form, relevant information is automatically generated in the student profile shown. This takes 30 seconds of processing on the secretary's part to set this up and ensure it is shared with all teachers that work with this student. As a teacher, this tool gives me insight on what strengths and weaknesses Suzzie may have as well as some of her past history and self perception of her challenges.  When I combine this with the College and Career tracking tool we have, it is very easy for me to create a contextualized activity or project with her that meets the standards indicated by our diagnostics and aligns well with her career goals. 

One of the biggest challenges with the CCRS is that so few learning resources exist right now for any program to purchase or adopt that are really aligned well with the suggestions laid out in the standards. Additionally, so many of our diagnostics and standardized tests that surround the industry are not aligned with CCRS yet either. I have been working on creating and collaborating on designing diagnostics and aligning current diagnostics to the standards. There are some lesson repositories in some states and even nation wide that are starting to collect some great lessons and activities that offer best practice that is much more aligned with the CCRS. Sadly, these resources are all over the place in different formats with no easy indexing to specific standards. I have started creating an indexing tool that will allow all of us to quickly and easily index and find these wonderful lessons that are out there so a teacher can quickly and easily find them and track student progress within any standard. Of course any efforts to meet everyone's needs will come up short here or there, but the prototype has been received well so far in a trial here in Maine. I am hopeful to have the system much more complete and bullet proof this fall. 

Sorry my internal puppy started jumping around so much here. I will leash him up for now so as to not throw out too much at once. I will end this with one major challenge that many of us face around the country:

With so many staff in Adult Ed being part time workers, often only working 3-6 hours a week with the program, how can programs or states best support (fund) training in such a way as to get those part time people into these wonderful CCRS experiences? Can we collectively make some sort of blended experience that helps us bridge the financial and coordination nightmares that exist with our part time adult ed instructors? We are playing with the concept here in Maine with the hopes of blending online videos, forums and activities in Schoolology (an LMS), together with maybe a quick initial face to face meeting. We all know that such a blended experience really is a shadow of the full face to face experience, but with the reality that we can't get some instructors to the table, such an experience may at least help those people participate in the major shifts we aim to implement? 

My name is Mary Babcock, and I live in Bend, Oregon. I've been a member of the LINCS community for awhile, bu I just joined the CCS group. I am teaching a GED(r) preparation course for La Pine Park and Recreation. La Pine is a rural town in Central Oregon. The local community college use to provide adult literacy classes, but its program was discontinued a few years ago. After the closure of the program, a group of local citizens began the search for funds to begin a GED(r) preparation program, and I am their first instructor/program coordinator. Many of my students plan to attend the local community college, so the Standards are integral to my program. 

Hi Mary, Thanks for introducing yourself to the CCR Community! Welcome!

Have you taught GED® classes before or is this your first time? In what ways have you been working to integrate the CCR standards into your practice as a GED® teacher? If you've taught before, how have the standards influenced your approach to teaching the GED®?

It would be great to hear from others in the community about how the standards are influencing their teaching!

Cheers, Susan

Moderator, CCRS CoP

My name is Mary Babcock, and I live in Bend, Oregon. I've been a member of the LINCS community for awhile, but I just joined the CCS group. I am teaching a GED(r) preparation course for La Pine Park and Recreation. La Pine is a rural town in Central Oregon. The local community college use to provide adult literacy classes, but its program was discontinued a few years ago. After the closure of the program, a group of local citizens began the search for funds to begin a GED(r) preparation program, and I am their first instructor/program coordinator. 

Good afternoon,

It is a pleasure to be a new member to the LINCS community. I am the curriculum specialist for the Department of Labor Grant at Amarillo College. We work with 10 programs to ensure program alignment (industry standards, competencies, learning outcomes, etc.). I look forward reading more about everyone's work.

Regards,

Marissa

My name is Karen Hamilton and I teach Vocational ESL (VESL) at Glendale Community College in the Los Angeles area. I'm currently creating new VESL curriculum within our current noncredit ESL program. We find that students have a high interest in getting job skills while they learn English. As most of our students are refugees or very recent immigrants, anything we can do to shorten those pathways and get them on a path toward their career (or academic) goals is a plus.

Hi Karen, Welcome to the College and Career Standards Community of Practice. I know all of our members can relate to what you are saying about wanting to accelerate students' progress toward their goals. As you note, using content that is meaningful to adult learners is the most effective approach.

We will all look forward to hearing more about your work in Los Angeles.

Cheers, Susan Finn Miller

Moderator, College and Career Standards CoP