Colleagues,
Join us on Monday, May 16 as we continue our discussion on partnering developmental education and adult education. Throughout the day, we will have questions and answers from our guest experts Russel Fraenkel and Lesley Blicker as we explore the Dev Ed/ABE Toolkit.
From the toolkit:
Nationwide, colleges are designing and piloting strategies to accelerate students’ progress through developmental education (Dev Ed, see Glossary) and into college-level coursework. And while many practices are gaining traction with practitioners and policymakers, there is still quite a ways to go to close the equity gap by supporting more institutions and individuals to adopt and utilize effective partnership practices that address persistent barriers.
Check out the toolkit and join in an engaging, thoughtful conversation.
Kathy
Comments
Good morning,
The Dev Ed / ABE toolkit is designed to provide programs with a structure and process to build partnerships between Developmental Education and Adult Basic Education. Can you share the genesis of this project and some of the successes you've seen?
For our program leaders and educators joining this conversation, how can you envision a partnership with your Developmental Education and Adult Education to benefit your students?
I'm looking forward to the discussion.
Kathy
The origination of the featured Developmental Education (Dev Ed) - Adult Basic Education (ABE) Partnership work began in the Northwest Transitions Region in Minnesota. The NW region is a geographically large rural area of the state bordering Canada and North Dakota. The area boasted of numerous Minnesota State College Dev Ed and ABE multi-campus partnerships throughout the past 7-8 years. Although there was qualitative and quantitative data providing evidence of high value to enrolled students and strong completion rates of value to the college campus, the partnerships were entirely dependent upon personally interested faculty members and hence, was an underutilized asset. ABE programs in the region desired to become more intentional and strategic with their campus partners to increase the number of classroom partnership instances on campuses involving existing partnerships, and desired to promote the value of the partnerships to non-partnering campuses and ABE consortia.
Coinciding with this desire, was the fact that a few years earlier, the Minnesota legislature passed legislation requiring the Minnesota State System to prepare a plan to reform developmental education at all their campuses aimed at reducing the number of students placed into developmental education and significantly improving Dev Ed’s low completion rates. Minnesota State is the third largest system of state colleges and universities in the United States and the largest in the state with 30 colleges, 7 state universities, and 54 total campuses.
Minnesota State’s response to the legislature was the Developmental Education Strategic Roadmap (DESR), outlining several strategies for “re-imagining and redesigning developmental education to significantly increase the success of all students in developmental education and college-level gateway courses towards an increase of overall college degree, certificate, or diploma completion.” The DESR made significant mention of ABE as a desired partner for achieving improved outcomes. Transitions leadership in the NW Region initiated contact with Minnesota State campuses in the region to discuss their DESR strategies and timelines, as well as an expressed interest to provide support for accomplishing some of the goals identified in the DESR. The offer was well received and became the impetus for the regional and statewide partnership effectiveness efforts that followed.
Year two of the NW region’s partnership work endeavored to identify effective partnerships elsewhere in the state, to ascertain the types of partnerships that existed, and to uncover and potentially replicate their effective partnership practices. This led to the desire to form a statewide Affinity Group comprised of existing collaborators who desired to improve their effectiveness as well as educators from both systems who possessed a desire to establish a successful partnership.
The first year the Affinity Group involving Dev Ed faculty and administrators as well as ABE teachers and administrators (and state level leaders) met virtually four times to share successes, and ways to hurdle barriers. Year two which ended in May 2022 involved five professional development/engagement sessions attended by may faithful practitioners who possess a sincere desire to work collaboratively to address the challenging and complex learning needs of Dev Ed students and to ensure that they advance to their credit bearing coursework in the most expeditious fashion possible.
As of today, there are 20 identified Dev Ed/ABE Partnerships in the state. Several of them have reported anecdotal data indicating where the partnership exists, students have been passing the Dev Ed/gateway courses at much higher rates. And beyond that they report that the students have increased confidence to navigate their program and persist beyond the Dev Ed or gateway course, being able to move into their credit-based courses at higher rates. We believe this is due to the willingness and attitudes of both instructors to plan, communicate, and work well together. We also believe this is due to the additional supports that Adult Educators bring to the partnership, such as digital literacy instruction/supports, help for English Language Learners, diagnostic tools (TABE and CASAS), extended 1:1 academic support, an emphasis on study skills, and support for navigation with online platforms (D2L) used for courses.
However, quantitative data is still lacking significantly and this project will attempt to gather as much data about the success of the partnerships as it can, albeit this is a difficult task. Still, solid data collected from the Minnesota NW Transition Region’s Dev Ed/ABE Partnerships include:
Thank you for that great synopsis of the genesis of this project. Chapter 1 (tlasabe.org/dev-ed-abe-toolkit-chapter-1/) from the toolkit features a discussion on the roles of various partners. How do you envision an equal partnership that benefits your students?
For our program leaders, using this toolkit, how do you envision your role in leading these partnerships?
I think we’d approach this more from the perspective of how to divide roles that best utilize the skills of both instructors and which will most benefit the students. Successful partnerships begin by selecting faculty from each program who are not only knowledgeable in the target content area, but also have a vested interest to collaborate. Ideally, the instructors who are selected to work together express a commitment to partner, demonstrate flexibility, and are team oriented. As the partnership grows and they gain experience working together, trust ensues.
The authors of the Toolkit suggest that a light or lower level of integration may be the best choice at the beginning stage of a partnership. Then once both instructors clearly see what each brings to the table, and once trust and confidence is built in the partnership, taking steps towards deeper integration will increasingly become more beneficial for students. The five levels of integration are discussed in Chapter 3 of the Toolkit.
The Dev Ed/ABE partnership, regardless of the level of ABE integration in courses, requires a unique distribution of roles and responsibilities among the partners. When being approached at the prospect of partnering, some faculty may be concerned about what seems like overlapping or duplicative roles. Making a clear distinction about how each person contributes to the class and to the teaching and learning process will help remedy these concerns.
Certainly, college instructors are the content experts for their classes, and they often take the leading role in both instruction and design of college courses, whereas ABE instructors will often participate in class to monitor students for understanding, direct questions or provide answers, and establish opportunities for just-in-time support for the instruction taking place in class.
No matter, it is important that all team members come together in the planning process to establish a clear delineation of the roles and expectations for each person. This work often is done at the early stages of course design, however, there are many instances where the course has already been offered in a more traditional model, and integration requires some minor tweaking of the design and delivery of the course to align it to a truly integrated model of instruction. In all cases, it is important that both instructors work together to come up with a plan before entering the classroom together.
Tweaking and revising will naturally occur. Partnerships gain the advantage of perspectives and content-specific talents which lead to a desired rhythm and tempo over time. College and ABE instructors get to know each other and learn to respect each other’s differences as much as their similarities.
Lastly, don’t panic! Finding a rhythm takes time. Give it a semester or two before coming to any hard conclusions, or worse, giving up on it. Remember, your organizations have created the space and time for you to experiment and to try to find innovative ways to improve student success.
Your comments are so helpful. Let's move into Chapter 3 of the toolkit https://atlasabe.org/dev-ed-abe-toolkit-chapter-3/ which dives into different models of partnerships. There are five levels of integration. Can you speak about this section and the effectiveness of different models?
Thank you!
Kathy
To understand the many ways Dev Ed/ABE Partnerships can be implemented, we can think about it along a continuum of light integration to full integration, which refers to integrated education or instruction. This is defined as “an education model that combines occupational skills training and basic or academic skills instruction to increase and expedite the educational and career advancement of participants.” [Research Brief No. 14, “Integrated Education and Training (IET),” Department of Education, State of California, 2017, p. 1.]
How a partnership decides on which level of integrated instruction to use involving the ABE and college instructor is something to be determined in the up-front planning stage, discussed in Chapter 2 of the Toolkit. What you will see below is our homegrown “five-level framework” for describing how integrated instruction can work, beginning with a light or lower level of integrated teaching to a higher or deeper level.
Additional descriptions of each as well as examples of how or when to use the various levels can be found in Chapter 3.
The authors of the Toolkit suggest that a light or lower level of integration may be the best choice at the beginning stage of a partnership. However, it all depends on the course being taught, which level the instructors think is best suited to begin with and/or best suits the course objectives. Then once both instructors clearly see what each brings to the table, and once trust and confidence is built in the partnership, taking steps towards deeper integration will increasingly become more beneficial for students.
Successful Minnesota partnerships have reported and demonstrated that when ABE is more deeply integrated in the Dev Ed program, results are more keenly evident. Nevertheless, regardless of size and scope of the integration, Minnesota partnership data to date demonstrates increased student success rates including dev ed pass rates, shortening of time in developmental education resulting in expeditious student progression into their program of study, and increased student confidence leading to persistence.
Lesley and Russell, I'd like to thank you for all the information and sharing of this toolkit. I'd like to close with the final chapter and the successes. What are you seeing as successes and final challenges.
Thank you!
Kathy
Thank you for asking this question. We’re delighted to inform the LINCS audience that this smaller scale project originating in the Northwest corner of the state has fully evolved to become a statewide effort being financially supported in 2022-23 academic year by the Minnesota State and Adult Basic Education systems. The system leaders desire to support the efforts of the Affinity Group and all practitioners involved in addressing the needs of Dev Ed students to build sustainable and effective partnerships.
Locally, we’re seeing increasing interest to form partnerships where they didn’t exist previously or had languished and now there is a renewed interest to begin again…this time with guidance (toolkit) and the support of colleagues who have enjoyed partnership success. We’re also learning of numerous existing partners who desire to increase the level of classroom integration of Dev Ed - ABE instruction and preparation.
The funding being provided at the state level intends to fulfill many goals and tasks that were initially conceived when the vision of the partnership was first imagined as well as evolved strategies that have arisen as the body of work has matured.
This is a topic of high interest for me. My primary job *has been* to provide academic support for students at thecommunity college in developmental education courses. We have historically done much better than national averages regarding success rates... but still not good!
The current trend has been very disturbing to me, especially in how it's been manifest here. The "solution" is to make it easier for folks to get into the gateway courses but the support has been being cut discreetly but systematically over the past 7-8 years, calling it "revitalization" and "right-sizing." The emphasis has been, instead, to try do get students into less demanding, shorter certificate programs with grant funding.
I deeply appreciate the "start small" approach because yes, this *depends* on "personally invested faculty members." (Many of them here have left, but we've still got many who are invested in teaching the learners in the community, not marketing an educational product.)
I'm going to read more, but I see a *lot* of potential here for providing accessible pathways to higher achievement in spite of the "co-reqs!!! They're the answer" short circuit replies. ( I've blogged about the history of so-called "successful" reforms https://wordpress.com/post/resourceroomblog.wordpress.com/15258 has some of 'em, but more recently others have noted it, even w/ English .