National CASAS Consortium
Content Standards Implementation Training Rolled Out in Iowa

On October 5 –6, 2004 Adult Education State Director John Hartwig invited a broad constituency of representatives from Iowa’s community colleges to participate in a two-day training to explore the current national movement toward developing content standards for adult education. CASAS, on behalf of the National CASAS Consortium, has been working with representatives from 13 states to develop draft content standards in ABE, ESL, and adult secondary programs on the behalf of the approximately 25 CASAS National Consortium states to adopt or adapt for their adult education agencies. The purpose of the training was to familiarize Iowa adult educators with the basic skills content standards project and how these draft standards are aligned to the CASAS system. An additional goal was to seek guidance from Iowa adult education professionals (instructors, coordinators, and administrators) about how to plan a successful implementation training model for national dissemination. In addition to Iowa, representatives from the U.S. Department of Education, Connecticut and Minnesota also attended.

The training, conducted by the Iowa Department of Education’s Sally Schroeder and CASAS’s Jim Harrison, focused on developing competency-based lesson plans to encourage the integration of basic skills content standards and CASAS competencies. While overall evaluations of the training are promising, participants made a number of constructive suggestions for improvement. Generally, participants feel that content standards make teachers more aware of the basic skills embedded in CASAS competencies, providing additional detail and flexibility. Participants also reported that content standards keep the focus on what teachers are trying to teach. The format of the lesson plan templates help to connect basic skills content standards to CASAS competencies and will be very useful for training new adult education teachers. A training activity using CASAS TOPSpro class performance records is a useful tool for prioritizing instruction.

Participants feel that content standards need to be organized in a more useful, “teacher friendly” way. They also believe that the format and coding of the draft basic skills content standards should be improved. Additional suggestions include the provision of a content standards/CASAS competencies cross-referencing index system to facilitate teacher use. While lesson plan templates should be streamlined, space should be included for recording instructional grouping (small, large, individual, etc.) strategies.

A follow-up videoconference with the Iowa participants is planned for December to elicit suggestions for further refinement of content standards and to determine what kinds of support and technical assistance adult education agencies will require to implement content standards successfully. The input received from the Iowa pilot test will form the basis for a discussion of content standards at the CASAS Winter Consortium meeting scheduled for January 27-29, 2005 in San Diego.

For further information, please contact John Hartwig (john.hartwig@iowa.gov), Sally Schroeder (sally.schroeder@iowa.gov) or Jim Harrison (jharrison@casas.org).