This is a follow-up message to a previous ESL and EFF posting, [NIFL-4EFF:1390]
Real World Learning Projects
In Washington state we have been working on a performance-based assessment system aligned with the EFF Framework, encompassing our state ESL and ABE core competencies. The core competencies are assessed by performance tasks scored by rubrics, all of which we have created. This is an emerging system; one that we are using as we are creating it. Sort of like living in the house you are building, having to move the table saw so you can unroll the futon to get some sleep, and waking up covered in residual sawdust.
I teach at a community college with an open or rolling admissions policy. On any given day I may have twenty-three or eight students in class. I teach four hours per day, have two weekly hours for CALL lab, and access to a language lab. I base my quarter's work on student- expressed goals and objectives, and embed the instruction of the WA State competencies in the employment of one or two EFF standards.
For example, last quarter we, the class, which turned into "the team," chose to work on the project of negotiating admission to academic ESL as a precursor to application to degree programs, navigating the financial aid system, checking out possible work study jobs for the next quarter, and making sure that team members were prepared to pass entrance tests. This was what the students asked to do. I chose to use and assess the Cooperate With Others standard.
In the first weeks of the quarter, after explicitly articulating goals and objectives, we worked on each COP (of the standard) eventually reaching the point where all were able to refer purposefully to the COPs, and assess personal behavior and that of others in these terms. I spent two to three hours daily on the teaching of structure, vocabulary, and strategies for speaking, listening, reading and writing using our WA State competencies.
Each week we devoted at least five hours to the aforementioned project. At first, daily check-ins round-table style were awkward, as were brainstorming, team-building, and team research activities. By the second month of the quarter, however, I no longer automatically was given the role of facilitator; the team members took turns. Spontaneous speech ceased to be an issue, instead it was time to work on active listening, turn taking and dialog skills. My class became known as loud, independent, prone to laughter, and as polite "questioners of authority." It was true, there wasn't really any traditional "authority figure" left in the classroom. We were a team whose members possessed different talents and roles in the larger project. Team members shared work - going to various buildings and departments to gather information, find the answers to questions, have personnel help with forms - the steps necessary to take in order to get where they wanted to go. When I taught structure, all questions, disagreements, and challenges were welcomed. (More on this in "The Great Comma Debate.")
While EFF concerns itself with constructivist, contexualized learning, teaching, and assessing, and does not necessarily include success in meeting goals as the primary part of the process, I have to say that our entire class, our team, met personal and group goals. This made team members not just happy, but ready for more challenges, feeling they could handle whatever came. I was additionally pleased that we had managed to meet program and state goals.
Basing the quarter's content on a real world project allowed us to contextualize work with the standard, while at the same time working with the standard provided an excitement and reality when working on speaking, listening, reading and writing.
I now know that the Framework and our WA State competencies, tasks and rubrics fit. The alignment is a mutually serving one. This anchors my practice. Next quarter we will focus on the Speak standard. I will be working with an NRS Level 1-2 class. The class described was a Level 2-3 when we began.
Susan Rowley