This is a response from Phil Anderson, Florida DOE Adult Education
Program Specialist to the questions posed by Allan French, ESL
Instructor, Assessment Coordinator, Norming Project Coordinator at South
Seattle Community College:

 

This statement made by Allan resonates strongly:  "The new state
standards were brought into the project to inform and suggest
(especially in terms of language), not to limit and control."  This is
the intention of Florida's standards as well.

 

Allan's questions:  "I see standards as not just a guideline for a
lesson, but a destination (after all, they define what we expect our
students to know and be able to do as they exit a particular level).  I
am concerned with how we get to that destination, especially given the
multitude of standards and indicators, the need for multiple types of
assessment, and the time limitations.  So I would like to ask all of you
out there who have worked some time with standards, (1) how do you
determine that a student is ready for the next level of an integrated
ESL class, using standards? 

 

Florida has several adult ESOL courses that are funded only with state
dollars, and are not reported to the NRS.  Literacy Skills for the Adult
ESOL Learner is one of these. In 1999-2000, this course was developed by
a group of adult ESOL experts that included a University of Florida
researcher in adult ESOL literacy, Dr. Edwidge Crevecoeur-Bryant,
consultants with years of adult education experience in Florida,
teachers, and Dr. Edwina Hoffman, a Miami-Dade program administrator of
refugee programs.  This course is designed for students that have low
levels of education and literacy in their home language(s).  Most
students are Haitian, or from various language groups in Mexico and
Central America, such as Mixteco, Tarasco, Quechua, and Kanjobal.  This
course has been put through implementation and revision stages in
several schools around the state, and it has been tweaked almost yearly
since its inception.  It has a set of benchmarks that are divided into
three levels, A, B, C.  Last year, the state database shows that 13,794
students were enrolled in this course.  We developed a "User Guide" for
this course to explain to teachers how it is used and suggestions on how
to teach the course.  Documents related to this course can be found on
the Florida Adult Education website,
http://www.fldoe.org/workforce/adult_ed.asp. 

 

(2) How do you determine what constitutes satisfactory performance of
any one standard/indicator, and that such performance has in fact been
achieved? 

For the present, the only method the state prescribes is that the
teacher of the course and the program administrator must sign off on a
state-created "Progress Report" that indicates the student has
"satisfactorily" mastered the benchmarks shown in the Progress in the
standards.  What is deemed "satisfactory" is left up to those two
persons, the teacher and the program administrator.  The state expects
local programs to establish a written procedure for how the teachers
will determine progress, i.e., portfolio, teacher-designed tests,
textbook tests, worksheet samples, documentation of group projects, etc.
After the teacher and administrator sign off on the student's Progress
Report, the program sends notification to the state that the student
mastered the standards.  The state then records this in its database and
assigns payment to the program accordingly.  The local program is
required to retain the records showing documentation of the progress
report for auditing purposes.  The state sends out monitors to all
programs to check on the documentation of the progress reports.  Since
the Florida legislature funds this course through its adult education
funding, the FL DOE, for now, uses this method of holding the program to
a certain level of accountability.  

 

(3) How do you create the assessment tools to evaluate said performance?

The state is in the process of exploring the development of a
standardized procedure/assessment that can give us a reliable and valid
way of measuring progress on the course standards.  Hopefully within the
next two years, this standardized procedure/assessment will be ready for
use. 

 

(4) Can you cover all standards/indicators for the level in a single
quarter or how much time is needed?  Another way of asking this is how
do you grapple with the, at times, mind-boggling complexity of all that
we are endeavoring to do.

Since the standards are "to inform and to suggest," teachers are not
expected to cover 100% of the standards within an instructional period
of time, but to judiciously select those that are relevant.  Maxine
McCormick, a Florida trainer, often exhorts us, "Take your students to
MMU!  Teach them what is meaningful, memorable and useful!"   Several
Florida programs are piloting short terms of 8 weeks in a "managed
enrollment" system with some of their classes.  In these classes,
students are assigned to a class by level, the class is "closed" after
the second week, and kept at 25 students maximum.  The first week is
assigned to orientation topics (how to study, what the students want to
cover in the course from a list of suggested topics from the standards,
the teacher's methods), and the last week is assigned to testing.  No
teacher can teach all the benchmarks in 8 weeks, but the intention of
the "managed enrollment" classes is to meet the needs of students who
desire to achieve competency in work and life skill areas more
efficiently and effectively that in the "open entry - open exit"
classes.  So far, evaluations of these classes is showing that students
and teachers are satisfied with the results.  The project in Miami Dade
School District is called "Intensive English Academies" and can be
reviewed at the Florida Adult ESOL task force website,
www.floridaadultesol.org <http://www.floridaadultesol.org/> .  Look for
the pencil under "New Initiatives."

 

 

CONTACT INFORMATION

Philip Anderson

Adult ESOL Program Specialist

Division of Workforce Education

Florida Department of Education

325 W. Gaines Street, Room 644

Tallahassee, FL  32399

Tel (850) 245-9450

Fax (850) 245-0995
 

Please take a few minutes to provide feedback on the quality of service you received from our staff. The Department of Education values your feedback as a customer. Commissioner of Education Dr. Eric J. Smith is committed to continuously assessing and improving the level and quality of services provided to you.Simply use the link below.  Thank you in advance for completing the survey.
 

http://data.fldoe.org/cs/default.cfm?staff=Philip.Anderson@fldoe.org|12:37:22%20Thu%2019%20Jun%202008
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