Thursday COABE Presentations Related to D&L

As promised, following is a list of COABE sessions that are likely to meet your interest in implementing best practices to engage diverse adult learners in literacy acquisition. These are my choices for Thursday. Please note that some sessions show a crossover into technology, ESL, workforce, or testing concerns, but I only  included those that also support Reading and Writing interests among ABE/ASE learners and those of us who attempt to instruct them!

You may find the whole schedule posted at http://www.coabe.org/conference2015schedule.html. Hope to see you in Denver.

Thursday, 4/23 9:15am-10:30am- L3 Centennial Ballroom F    
App Chat with Johan and Cheryl: COABE is pleased to bring you the first ever “App Chat” using COABE’s App! Join us in-person for this follow-up session to Acting Assistant Secretary Johan Uvin’s keynote address. Dr. Uvin will be joined by Cheryl Keenan, Director of Adult Education and Literacy, to discuss the federal policy and legislative initiatives that impact the adult education-eligible population (the federal skills agenda, the Upskill America initiative, WIOA, etc.) and answer questions. This is a unique opportunity to have your questions answered, and to participate with all COABE members joining us virtually through the App. #AppChat

Thursday, 4/23 9:15am-10:30am-    L3 Mineral Hall G
Building Bridges to Higher Learning: Metacognitive Skills for Low-Level Learners: Metacognitive skills such as goal setting, self-assessment, learning strategies, and study skills are proven to increase students' effectiveness in learning, and yet they are often reserved for high-level classes. In this hands-on session, the presenter will share ways to develop "learning to learn" skills at even the beginning levels.
     
Thursday, 4/23 9:15am-10:30am-L3 Mineral Hall D
Preparing the L2 Learner to Write Across Genres and Technological Platforms: Adult learners, and ELL learners in particular, are confronted with a variety of challenges when faced with the array of writing genres and technological platforms required by the 21st-century workplace in the U.S. Using a task-based approach (TBLT), this workshop focuses on providing learners with challenging real-world-based activities that make use of technology to develop their writing skills.
          
Thursday, 4/23 9:15am-10:30am-L4 Capitol Ballroom 5    
Positive Behavior Support in Adult Education: Positive Behavior Support (PBS) is an internationally recognized program in the K-12 educational system. We revised the program to fit the needs of adult education students, and successfully piloted a program, with a focus on retention, in one of our schools for adult high school, adult basic education, GED®, and ESL classes.
                    
Thursday, 4/23 9:15am-10:30am-L3 Granite B    
Teaching Adults with Learning Disabilities—and Amazing Apps to Help!: This interactive session begins with an introduction to instructional strategies to use with adult students who have learning disabilities. Participants will have the opportunity to practice each strategy during the session, and it includes both individual and small group strategies. The instructional strategy practice is followed by an overview of new and amazing free/cheap apps that adult students with learning disabilities can use to improve their learning, practice basic skills, improve organization, and provide access to alternative methods of information processing.
     
Thursday, 4/23 9:15am-10:30am-L4 Capitol Ballroom 7    
21st-Century Demands on Adult Education: Gaining Perspective on the Role of Adult Educators: In the past decade, adult educators have been inundated with increasing pressure to prepare students solely for the workforce, indicating current market demands for adult education outweigh the social demands. This panel discusses current conflicting ideologies and raises the question: Do adult educators have a responsibility to be agents for social change?
     
 Thursday, 4/23 9:15am-10:30am-L3 Granite A
The Use of Online Learning to Support Literacy and Math Skill Development for Low-Skilled Adults: Thirty-six million U.S. adults do not have the basic skills required to qualify for many future entry-level jobs. To address this issue, the Joyce Foundation funded SRI International, to study the role of new online technologies in improving the literacy and math skills for low-skilled adults in ABE programs. This workshop will present early findings from this project along with recommendations to improve product and evaluation research to support these adult learners.
          
Thursday, 4/23 9:15am-10:30am-  L4 Capitol Ballroom 3
Techniques for Assisting Adults with Learning Disabilities: Explicit Instruction for Strategy Learning: In this workshop, participants will identify and learn how to use explicit instruction to help adults with learning disabilities develop strategies to learn. Participants will explore the following questions: (1) What is a strategy? and (2) What is explicit instruction?
               
Thursday, 4/23 10:45am-12:00pm-L4 Capitol Ballroom 6    
Implementing Culturally Responsive Teaching for Adults with Low Literacy: The presenter will demonstrate how to address the needs of adult learners using a culturally responsive teaching model, the Mutually Adaptive Learning Paradigm®, which accommodates the different values and expectations that students from collectivistic cultures bring to the classroom, and scaffolds learning for students with limited or interrupted formal education. In this research project, learners created their own curriculum on scrolls, produced useful artifacts, engaged in academic tasks and new ways of thinking, and used their life experience and home cultures to further language acquisition, develop learning strategies, and become more active participants in the classroom.

Thursday, 4/23 10:45am-12:00pm-L3 Agate B    
Critical Thinking Is the New Black—How to Help Your Students Dress for Success: Critical thinking and cognitive rigor are two sides of the same coin. Instructors must encourage critical thinking in order to help students tackle more cognitively complex tasks and content in order to succeed on both the new HSEs and in the real world. This session will explore the concept of cognitive rigor, explore critical thinking strategies, and share techniques for embedding critical thinking tasks into instruction—with a lens focused on 21st-century skills.
           
Thursday, 4/23 10:45am-12:00pm- L3 Granite C    
The New Three Rs: Reading, wRiting, and Readiness? One Adult Basic Education Classroom's Integration of Workforce Readiness and Literacy Learning:  This presentation will present preliminary findings from my doctoral dissertation, The New Three Rs: Reading, wRiting, and Readiness: One adult basic education classroom's integration of workforce readiness and literacy learning. The research was guided by the following question: What are the implications of educational policy discourses that focus on workforce development for the literacy learning of low-level participants in one adult basic education classroom? This qualitative research project used ethnographically-informed critical discourse analysis to examine how policies, program, teacher, and learners co-constructed literacy learning in one publicly-funded classroom serving adults reading at a 5th-grade level equivalent or below, as determined by state-approved assessment tests.
     
Thursday, 4/23 10:45am-12:00pm-L4 Capitol Ballroom 2    
GRIT and Adult Learner Persistence: This session will explore the notion of grit and what connections exist between grit and adult learner persistence in adult education programs. Participants will be able to describe grit, discuss the data collected and analyzed in this incentive grant, and suggest ways to develop grit through program interventions.
     
Thursday, 4/23 10:45am-12:00pm- L3 Agate C    
Participatory Learning—Innovative Methodology Techniques to Engage All Students and Train Essential Social Capital Skills: Computers and workbooks don't create learners who know how to work with others. When the emphasis is on academic skills and career pathways, we can add simple non-cognitive skills to the mix. Teaching these new skills do not come naturally to many good teachers, so we will explore how to address this.
     
Thursday, 4/23 10:45am-12:00pm- L3 Agate A    
Adult Health: How Is It Related to Literacy, Numeracy, Technological Problem-Solving Skills, and Adult Learning?     This presentation uses data from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) to discuss how U.S. adults’ health status is related to (1) basic skills in literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving in technology-rich environments and (2) adult formal and non-formal education. The presentation highlights findings, practical implications, and participant discussion.
          
Thursday, 4/23 10:45am-12:00pm- L3 Mineral Hall A    
Teaching in a Digital Context: As more and more people are becoming accustomed to being online with social media, incorporating digital resources into our classrooms is becoming imperative. The class doesn't have to end when the bell rings. This session will introduce various tools that teachers can use to engage their students with out-of-class digital activities to enhance and expedite learning.
     
Thursday, 4/23 10:45am-12:00pm- L3 Quartz A    
Digital Stories for Transformative Learning and Student Achievement: Come to this showcase of student work in digital storytelling and hear about the lasting benefits to students and their communities. Digital stories are a powerful tool for technological literacy and writing skills, as well as a catalyst for social change. Participants will learn how students take ownership of their learning and develop higher level thinking and skills for success in adult education and in the transition to college and careers.
           
Thursday, 4/23 1:45pm-3:00pm- L4 Capitol Ballroom 3    
Connecting the Past to the Present: Decoding Our Nation's Founding Documents: This workshop will model a lesson that targets the deconstruction of founding documents. Emphasis is placed on strategies to build academic vocabulary, enhance comprehension, and activate prior knowledge to create relevancy with the subject matter.
               
Thursday, 4/23 1:45pm-3:00pm- L3 Mineral Hall G    
Emerging Technologies in the Adult Education Classroom: This session explores the availability and use of emerging technologies in the adult education classroom. The session highlights digital literacy assessments, computer skill building tools, instructional websites, and common social media tools.

Thursday, 4/23 1:45pm-3:00pm- L3 Mineral Hall A    
The Digital Promise Beacon Project: Shining a Light on 21st-Century Adult Education: In 2013, a large-scale survey of adult education in the U.S. (the PIAAC report) found that there were over 36 million Americans who lacked basic math and language skills. In order to get at some solutions to this problem, we need to close not only the digital divide, but also an empathy gap. Who is the adult learner in the 21st-century and how can we help them? That's the question that participants will take up in this lively discussion with three educators whose programs are breaking the mold. Each of them, in very different ways, are helping underserved, under-skilled, and under-credentialed adults learn how to harness technology and gain skills that will ready them for the 21st-century workplace. Even more exciting, they are looking for ways to scale their best practices. Come and be part of this process.
     
Thursday, 4/23 1:45pm-3:00pm- L3 Agate C    
SOAR: Upping the Game of Academic Rigor in ABE and ASE: In 2010, Fremont Union High School District Adult School reinvented its ABE program to increase academic readiness and rigor. This involved creating a new ABE program and radically changing the model used in the ASE classrooms. Learn about the goal setting and academic results of this initiative.
     
Thursday, 4/23 3:45pm-5:00pm- L3 Granite B    
Practical Decoding Strategies and Multi-Sensory Activities for Struggling Readers and English Language Learners: Students with low reading abilities benefit from explicit phonetic decoding strategies. But how do we teach those skills in a real world setting? Practical, hands-on classroom activities that equip struggling readers with research-based strategies to improve their spelling, reading fluency, and literacy will be demonstrated.
               
Thursday, 4/23 3:45pm-5:00pm- L3 Agate B
What's in Your OER Toolkit? Open educational resources (OER) are free materials for teaching, learning, and research that are widely available on the web and can be adapted or repurposed without restriction to fit your lessons and your professional development needs. Learn more in this session.
     
Enjoy! Leecy

Leecy Wise
LINCS Moderator
Writing and Literacy Community
Diversity and Learning Community