Professional Development

This practice guide provides community colleges with five specific recommendations for supporting occupational skills training through career pathways.

1. Intentionally design and structure career pathways to enable students to further their education, secure a job, and advance in employment.
2. Deliver contextualized or integrated basic skills instruction to accelerate students’ entry into and successful completion of career pathways.
3. Offer flexible instructional delivery schedules and models to improve credit accumulation and completion of non-degree credentials along career pathways.
4. Provide coordinated comprehensive student supports to improve credit accumulation and completion of non-degree credentials along career pathways.
5. Develop and continuously leverage partnerships to prepare students and advance their labor market success.

This compendium provides information about two types of practices: bridge programs and integrated education and training (IET) programs. Adult education bridge programs prepare adults to enroll in postsecondary education and training through occupationally contextualized literacy and numeracy instruction and career and college success activities. IET programs enable adult learners to develop their foundational skills and workforce preparation skills through occupational training that leads to educational and career advancement. A variety of stakeholders will find this information useful, including AE state staff; AE program administrators, instructors, and staff; workforce development staff; federal agency staff; and AE researchers. This compendium describes the project’s criteria for the selection of innovative practices, and provides context for the practices that were selected and profiles each of the innovative practices.

This IES snapshot, Adult Education Strategies: Identifying and Building Evidence of Effectiveness, summarizes a systematic review of existing, rigorous research on the effectiveness of categories of adult education strategies. Key findings include –

• There has been little rigorous research on whether particular strategies in adult education improve learner outcomes. 
• The rigorous research that has been conducted does not address the full set of outcome areas that federal policy emphasizes. Studies measuring basic skills such as literacy did not measure longer-term outcomes such as credential attainment and earnings. Studies that investigated longer-term outcomes did not measure basic skills.
• The available evidence provides limited support for the use of particular adult education strategies over others, although bridge classes and integrated education and training programs offer some promise.

This resource was designed for adult educators.  A comprehensive lesson plan is included for each of the 20 lessons with lesson objectives, assessments, activities, and more.  Lesson plans are written at both lower and higher educational functioning levels. These lessons can be used in subject matter classes or as part of an integrated education and training program. The "About" page of the website clearly states how adult educators can use the resource. The videos can be used to teach the first sections of each lesson: Warm-up, Presentation, Modeling, and Guided Practice.  Because the videos and student resources are all online, the resource can be used to support a flipped or blended class as well as for distance learning curriculum. Some of the lesson plans specifically suggest how to use the video. The videos are current and compelling, featuring adult learners from diverse backgrounds and experiences. The supplemental teacher resources are useful for new and seasoned educators. New educators might like the ability to have the concepts taught in the video and then reinforced in class. Seasoned teachers might get ideas for new approaches to teaching certain topics and skills. Limited preparation would be needed to use this resource effectively with adult learners.

The video shows many different types of people (men, women, younger people, older people, different races) being a DSP. The video has the DSPs speaking about the profession and also the individuals that are supported by DSPs. It shows the many different environments and situations that a DSP may encounter. The video gives very specific real-life examples of the challenges of the job. Being able to see and hear and pause the video and watch again can be very helpful for an adult learner to decide if they could handle those challenges.

The TBCAE Toolkit is beneficial to adult education staff because it provides: (1) a process for integrating text messaging into adult education programs’ services to support learners’ persistence and development of knowledge and skills, and (2) tools to plan the intentional use of individualized and personalized text messaging as proactive communication with learners that anticipates and addresses challenges that they may encounter. The toolkit comprises five sections:

• Introduction to Toolkit and Overview of TBCAE Project: Overview of the TBCAE project approach and implementation and an overview of the tools, checklists, forms, and resources referenced in the Toolkit.
• Planning Text Messaging in Adult Education Programs: Descriptions of the steps staff can take in planning the use of text messaging with adult education learners.
• Implementing Text Messaging in Adult Education Programs: Information to help adult education staff implement and track activities in using text messaging.
• Adult Education State Leadership Support for the Use of Text Messaging: Suggestions for state staff on how to support adult education program staff in using text messaging.