Riding the Waves of Success
Adult Level Workshop to Address College, Career Readiness
An Interview With the Experts
By Jayme Adelson-Goldstein
Adult Level Chair
T
his year, CATESOL’s Adult Level is honored to have two of its most inspired and inspiring professional-development leaders, Lori
Howard and Sylvia Ramirez, conducting the
annual Adult Level workshop at 1 p.m. Saturday, October 26, at the CATESOL Annual ConJayme
ference in San Diego. Their workshop, “Build- Adelson-Goldstein
ing College and Career Readiness ... From the
Start!,” was developed in direct response to our membership survey in March—in which 73 of 79 respondents (a 92.4% rating!)
rated this topic as the one they’d be most interested in exploring.
For this newsletter edition of the Adult Level column, Lori and
Sylvia kindly agreed to discuss the concepts behind their upcoming workshop.
Jayme Adelson-Goldstein: Let me start off by asking you both—
what drew you to this topic?
Sylvia Ramirez: For the last three or four years I have been really
interested in how students transitioned from our noncredit ESL
program to credit. I was struck by the disparity between how we thought they were prepared
and the remediation they needed. There was
also a lack of consensus on what they needed. I
struggled with those issues as transitioning became such a big issue on the federal level. When
the Common Core State Standards (CCSS)
were released in 2010, they made a lot of sense
to me. It was clear that we were starting to see
Sylvia Ramirez
the beginning of a consensus among career and
college experts on what it would take to help
K-12 students become ready in a global economy. This was exciting, but it was still for kids.
Then, in April of this year, when ovae [Office of Vocational
and Adult Education] released the College and Career Readiness
Standards [CCRS] for Adult Education based on the CCSS College and Career Anchor Standards, I felt strongly we were moving
in the right direction. So, it’s really my experience in the classroom
that drove me to look more closely at the standards to promote
student success.
Lori Howard: I’ve also been aware of the topic for some time. I
have been working with the CASAS Content Standards for Reading and Listening for a number of years and the federal government has been pointing adult education toward utilizing content
standards for more than a decade. When the College and Career
Readiness Standards came out I could see that it would be relatively easy to relate those to ESL, although, frankly, it was disappointing that these standards were developed only for ABE/ASE
and not ESL. It became clear that an ESL crosswalk to those stan-
dards was something we, in the adult ESL community, would have
to develop ourselves. This spring, when we were invited to give
the workshop, Sylvia and I thought we could use this opportunity
to examine and interpret the CCR standards from the OVAE document in a way that adult ESL teachers could relate to.
JAG: So, do ESL instructors need to be familiar with Common
Core State Standards and OVAE’s College and Career Readiness
Standards?
SR/LH: When OVAE hired Susan Pimentel, the same author who
worked on the English Language Arts (ELA) Common Core State
Standards, to lead the College and Career Readiness Standards for Adult Education project,
it was a great move. It meant that rather than
inventing a new set of standards, the OVAE
team could look at the existing Common Core
anchor standards and say, “Okay, what of this
works for adults? We don’t have our students
for 12 years; they come into school with a great
deal of life experience and varying degrees of
Lori Howard
education.” While everyone agreed the anchor
skills that help learners transition successfully
to higher ed and career training are the same for all learners, they
also agreed that there are differences between the adult education
and K-12 populations. In response to these differences, OVAE kept
the anchor standards, but grouped them differently and developed
level descriptors based on NRS ABE levels instead of K-12 levels.
The descriptors became leaner and more relevant for adult basic
education. As a result of the NRS leveling, we are able to make
the crosswalk to NRS ESL levels [see example at top of page 12].
Some ESL teachers have been confused and think that they
have to work with two different documents (CCSS and CCRS),
but that’s not true. What is true is that ESL teachers need to apply
the anchor standards to their instruction and use the level descriptors to assist them in their instructional planning. In our upcoming
workshop we plan to help instructors see how much they are already doing to teach the standards and how readily they can make
changes to their instruction to match the standards even more.
JAG: How do you respond to concerns about the role of learners’
life-skill needs in a class focused on academic skill development?
SR: We always have to be sensitive to our learners’ needs, but we
can look at the task area that students need to do, as opposed to the
specific competency. For example, in reading, what is their ability
to read charts and graphs? That translates to life-skill needs (reading a utility usage chart) and it translates to academic needs. We
don’t have to put a stopper on learners—if they come into the program with life-skill needs, you can show them h