The project documented promising and best practices in
adult education and community college alignment in supporting low-skilled
students as they advance within community colleges. Four institutions were selected,
showing promise in four practice areas, contextualization, acceleration,
student support, and hybrid practices. This webinar will focus on contextualization,
presented by two experts, Amy Dalsimer, LaGuardia Community College,
and Michelle Van Noy, Rutgers University.
So the next slide is the agenda. Jeana, if you could please do the slides for me
because I don't seem to be able to do it. Okay, so this is our agenda today,
so we're going to be talking a little bit about kind of giving an overview of the
Supporting Student Success project, then we'll be covering what is
contextualization and some research supporting contextualized learning,
then we're going to be spotlighting LaGuardia Community College's
S.A.V.E. Program. We'll have some questions and answers and talk about
some of our future efforts. Okay, great. So just to tell you a little bit about
the project. So the project was created in response to the challenges that
Americans face in preparing themselves for the ever-evolving workforce. The US
Department of Education's Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education,
OCTAE, is committed to supporting community college students and
strengthening coordination between adult education and developmental education
programs in order to better prepare students for the 21st century job market.
This is a technical assistance effort aimed at identifying best practices at
community colleges across the United States in the areas of acceleration,
contextualization, student support, and hybrid efforts. These webinars are just
one of the products developed by our team in response to the concepts we learned
from featured programs. Some of the best practices were highlighted and the
webinars will highlight programs in the area of contextualization, acceleration,
student support, and hybrid efforts, and these practices will be shared through a
series of virtual webinars, this being the first of four webinars aimed at
disseminating promising practices to promote student completion and workforce
preparation, and you should stay tuned to hear more from some of our other amazing
practitioners. So, we're starting with Michelle Van Noy from Rutgers University,
and here's a quote from one of the texts that we used in the study,
What is contextualization? So, welcome, Michelle.
- [Michelle] Thanks so much, Sarah. It's great to be here today with
everyone and have this opportunity to participate in this webinar,
in this project. So, you know, my role here is hopefully just to provide a little
bit of context for our discussion about contextualization with a bit of background
on the research, and as Sarah said, just to start off with, we should spend some
time deciding what is contextualization, and this quotation from the MDRC report,
Unlocking the Gate, I think gives us a good starting point. So contextualized
instructional models seek to help academically under-prepared students
progress more quickly through the developmental skill building while
engaging directly with their academic or vocational field of interest.
So I think this is a very nice quote to give us a good starting point and I should
give some background also on that MDRC report. I think that is a great place to
to look for more strategies that I think will broadly inform this project as a very
comprehensive lit review, we're looking at interventions to improve skills of
under-prepared students, and contextualization is one of them, but that
report does get into a nice review of rigorous research on the topic and
identifies some studies that provide evidence for looking at contextualization
as a strong research-based approach. Okay, so on to the next slide. The features of
contextualization. So there are a few key factors that we look for when we think
about contextualization. Of course, the key idea here is really using career
concepts from whatever industry or occupation that you're focused on, whether
it'd be nursing or computer technology or whatever, to use those career concepts
during basic skills instruction and basic skills could be for reading, math,
writing, whatever is needed for the students, and to help them really gain the
skills that are needed in these basic areas to progress more quickly into
their career instruction, and again, with that goal in mind of preparing
students for careers is to think about how the curricula can be aligned with industry
standards or credentials that are existing that help define what some of those
outcomes are. And another feature that we typically see in contextualization is
co-teaching, where you have two instructors, one who has the career
concepts, and the other who has the basic skills instruction as their background,
and involves some working together among the two instructors.
Contextualization, of course, can occur in many different formats,
it can be credit or non-credit, so it really depends on the institution and the
goals of the program, but the ultimate goal is to promote students' ability
to enter into a career pathway, also while getting a high school credential, or to
move into college-level courses, so it really helps to move students along a
career pathway. So to dig a little bit more deeply into the idea of
contextualization and the research base for it as a strategy, there is literature
that suggests that there are certain underlying mechanisms that we think are
going on with contextualized instruction that promote learning, and so the first
that the learning literature shows us is the transfer of skills, and so we always
wonder and want to know how learning from the classroom is going to translate into
other contexts, other situations where we hope students will use that information,
and so the idea with contextualization is that by teaching student skills within the
focused area of interest of their career or industry, that this will help promote
the transferability of skills so that the skills they pick up in the classroom can
be used most directly in the real context that they will experience and that
are of value and of interest to them, which then leads to the other underlying
mechanisms that support the idea of contextualization, and that one is
engagement of students through hands-on learning, with the learning literature
showing that students learn most deeply when they're personally engaged with the
material, and so contextualization provides an opportunity to make that
information on basic skills very relevant and promote hands-on experiences for
students, which leads to the final mechanism I wanted to mention today,
which is the idea of intrinsic motivation, so that by contextualizing
the basic skills instruction and bringing that together, the two topics together,
it helps to make the subject personally meaningful to students and to promote
their intrinsic motivation, particularly among adult students who really need to
see the relevance of their studies to their lives and to their goals and their
hopes. So I want to spend a little bit of time today talking about some prior
research that I had been involved in that provides a research base for the topic of
contextualization, and that is the I-BEST Program in Washington State, I know
many people around the country have become familiar with the I-BEST model,
but I thought I would just provide a quick overview of what that is and talk a little
bit about the research base there and hopefully that will help set the stage for
some of the great work that Amy has been doing at LaGuardia. So with the Washington
State I-BEST model, the idea with the model was to combine basic skills and
professional technical instruction, and really in this case, the goal was so that
students could prepare to enter college- level coursework in a career pathway.
In this case, there were basic skills instructors and professional technical
faculty who worked together to design and to teach classes together.
They were intended to overlap in the classroom a certain amount of time
and work together to teach. The idea of course with these courses is that they
were intended to be a part of a coherent program of study that would be designed to
lead to a college credential, and also to jobs that were in need in the labor
market. And so the feature of this is really that the courses were part of a
structured pathway, and that was laid out for students to begin with, but I should
say, though, I talk about the I-BEST as a model and that there were variations and
actually how it ran it was not all exactly the same across the states. But one of the
outcomes of the work with I-BEST in Washington is some rigorous quantitative
research on the outcomes of I-BEST on students who went through the program,
and this is based on some research that we've done at the Community College
Research Center using state records data for all the students who went through
I-BEST over a course of several years, and controlling from many other different
factors, they found that students who went through I-BEST were much more likely
than similar students who did not take I-BEST to earn credits toward a college
credential and to complete occupational certificates. And they also found some
gains on basic skills tests. So overall, this is some very, very rigorous research
that provided some evidence that the strategy is indeed effective in helping
students to move towards their goals. Building on that research, we did some
additional fieldwork looking into the I-BEST model, and, you know, there were
some findings from that fieldwork, I alluded to that before on the initial
slide talking about I-BEST and that although there was a very coherent model
in place for how I-BEST should work or would work, there was a bit of variation
across the colleges in how they actually implemented it. Overall, the colleges use
highly structured pathways to help students to understand how their courses
would lead to further education and to work, but we did observe a fair amount
of variation in the degree of integrated instruction and team teaching, so it was
key that those instructors were working together, but the amount of time that they
actually had to spend together within the classroom varied, and so I think that
shows that there's quite a bit of variation in terms of how these programs
can actually run, and so really the key lesson was that the instructors working
together was important and certainly a lesson flowing off of that was the need
for flexibility for the instructors to work together in terms of having time to
plan and to have some overlap, certainly, in their instructional time.
One of the big questions I think everyone asks about I-BEST is sort of questions
about sustainability and scale and cost, would this work in a different context
outside of Washington, is the policy context very specific, the funding
context very specific in Washington that would make this possible in other places,
and I think that's a very interesting question that we've been looking to see
how that plays out, and I think that one of the lessons...certainly we've seen some
other models that have been very successful in trying to take this idea and
adapt it to other contexts, as I alluded to, the idea that even in Washington State
things were not all done exactly the same, and so there is some room for taking the
idea and the concepts and implementing them in other ways and other contexts
that distill some of the key ideas, but make it work given the local resources and
policy context. So with that, I will hand over the webinar to Amy to talk about all
the work that she's been doing with LaGuardia's program.
- [Amy] Thank you Michelle, thank you Sarah, thank you everyone for joining,
what a great and large group. I see some colleagues and friends that I know and
also happy to make the acquaintance of new people across the country.
For those of you who don't know, just some background. LaGuardia is part of the City
University of New York, we're a very large urban community college, we have almost
20,000 degree-seeking students on our campus and 26,000 non-credit workforce
training, ESOL, high school equivalency, and adult basic ed students.
Our campus is located in Queens, New York, which is the most diverse county,
we think, in the world. We have students from 160 countries speaking 125 different
languages. The majority of our students are black and Latino. 40% of our students
are immigrant and first-generation Americans, and 70% of our students report
annual family incomes of less than $25,000, so we're serving a very
low-income population of students who range in age from 19 through 60 and come
from very diverse households. To serve this large number of low-skilled basic ed
and ESOL students, LaGuardia has developed two types of contextualized career pathway
program models that we started piloting back in 2007. As Michelle said,
contextualization, broadly defined for us here at Laguardia, is a strategy that we
use to develop students' basic reading, writing, math, and critical thinking
skills in the context of a career sector or a specific workforce training.
We do believe that contextualized basic skills does increase student motivation
and persistence in our classes because students are able to see the explicit
connection between the schoolwork they're doing and their own career interests and
future goals, which are often economic and often the reasons why they come to school,
to get a better job to increase their economic prospects. Contextualized
instruction we also see here at LaGuardia can accelerate a student's progress
through what could be a long chain of remedial classes and steps along the way
to their training or to their college major. So the first model that you see
here are our Bridge models. Bridge models are essentially
sector-focused high school equivalency, ESOL, and basic ed classes, so we have a
Bridge to Health Care Career, Bridge to Business, Bridge to STEM. These classes
help students develop academic skills in preparation for a transition to advance
professional training or degree so they're really contextualized springboards.
Contextualized coursework at LaGuardia is generally sector- or disciplinary-focused
and seeks to expose basic skills students at the earliest point to sector-specific
content, knowledge, and professional practices, vocabulary, while
simultaneously developing their academic, reading, writing, math, and critical
thinking skills. The second type of training contextualized model we've
developed here is LaGuardia's NY-BEST model, our New York Basic Education Skills
Training Model, which was definitely inspired by the innovative practices that
Washington State developed, but has really been customized to our specific
institutional structure. The resources and funding available to us here in New York
and at Laguardia and to the particular needs of our students in our community,
so we took a lot of inspiration and learned a lot about what Washington was
doing, but had to develop our own model that would work in our own context.
We piloted our first NY-BEST model in 2007, and since then we've developed
10 NY-BEST health care career training programs, including community health care
worker, medical assistant, patient care tech, NY-BEST training for foreign-trained
nurses, and the program that I'm going to share more information about with you,
which is our S.A.V.E. EMT program. Essentially, these integrated programs
help under-served populations develop their basic educational and vocational
skills simultaneously, so they can advance in health care careers and increase
their earning potential right away. All of the NY-BEST models employ a
developmental model instruction that includes a pretraining vestibule, academic
support services, job placement, and exposure to didactic and student-centered
teaching strategies. The training and curriculum is designed and taught
collaboratively by an experienced vocational instructor and a basic skills
educator who's been trained in contextualized developmental coursework.
So what I want to do is tell you a little bit more about how the model works, and
I'm going to do that by digging into the S.A.V.E EMT Program a little bit, which is
an example of one of our most longstanding NY-BEST programs, but can serve as an
example of how we've designed our NY-BEST model on the campus across those 10
different training tracks. So the S.A.V.E EMT Program prepares students to become
certified EMTs and to work in the MT field here in New York. We have a lot of
EMTs here in New York, we have a lot of hospitals and it's certainly an in-demand
occupation. The course includes lectures, labs, two basic life support clinical
rotations on 911 ambulances here, and because it's an NY-BEST model, also has
the academic integrated component that's focused on contextualized critical
thinking, reading, and writing skills. We piloted the S.A.V.E EMT program in 2003
and since then we've run 10 grant-funded cohorts using a variety of funding from
federal, state, and city sources. At the start of the program, we had several
goals, and we actually ask ourselves these goals every time we move to
create a new NY-BEST program. The first is that we want to make sure we're
picking a certification program that's actually preparing students for a viable
workforce credential, so something that's a recognized credential that has local
labor market demand and opportunity for immediate employment, so we first want to
make sure that here in New York, that whatever we're preparing students for
there are jobs and there are good jobs for them when they complete.
The second is that it has the potential to be a stackable credential or pathway so
that they may be starting as EMTs, but they can move then to paramedic and from
paramedic to physician assistant or the variety of other health care tracks, so
here at LaGuardia, for example, you can earn your EMT certification and then
transition to our paramedic associates degree program. The third goal of all of
our NY-BEST trainings, and in particular, the S.A.V.E EMT Training, was to increase
access to this career pathway. So we've had an EMT program on campus for many,
many years, but historically only students reading at close to the 11th grade level
were admitted, and what we were finding is many, many of our adult basic ed, basic
skills, and ESOL students were not able to even be admitted to the program, so one of
the big goals here for us in New York is to try toopen access to these training
programs so that folks can accelerate their pathway to their new career.
The fourth goal around this training and all of our NY-BEST trainings is to
increase the overall retention and completion rates in these in-demand
trainings. So with S.A.V.E EMT, even those students in the traditional program
were entering with higher reading scores and supposedly higher academic levels than
they do now in our NY-BEST S.A.V.E model, only 50% of students were actually
completing the course, because it was so rigorous and it was difficult for many of
our students, let alone the students who were not at that secondary threshold of
academic performance. So there are several key features in our program redesign and
turning it into a NY-BEST S.A.V.E EMT model that we feel have contributed to the
success of the program. The first is that we now do a very robust intake. Students
interested in applying to the EMT program participate in a three-day process that
happens over the course of several weeks. The three-day intake helps them determine
first if it's a good career choice for them, if they have an interest and if it
makes sense, and also it gives us here at LaGuardia a chance to assess candidates'
eligibility, suitability, and aptitude for that career, that particular training
program as well. Over the course of three days students have an orientation to the
profession, they are tested on their reading levels, they complete a career
interest inventory, they complete a number of contextualized work-based scenario
written questions that help us see their writing but also to get a sense of how
they would critically think and respond in an EMT or in a medical situation, and they
also submit whatever their requirement documents are that are important, so for
EMTs they have to have a legitimate driver's license, and so that's something
we have to ask for up front. And during intake all of our students complete an
interview with staff. Once students are conditionally accepted into the program,
they start with what we call the vestibule, some of you may have heard
about this. And essentially the vestibule for the EMT is a three-week long
contextualized course that's taught mainly by our basic skills teacher at this point,
although the vocational teacher does come in and do some lectures and play some role
at that point. The vestibule is really a chance for students to be be re-introduced
to the classroom and to academic life, and for them to have a lower-stakes
environment to begin to take on some of the difficult technical content that
they'll encounter during their training. In this transitional space,
they're developing habits and routines that they need for success in school, like
being on time, participating in group work, doing homework, as well as being
introduced to critical content and vocabulary that's oftentimes very
new. The vestibule is very rigorous, but it does provide a developmental and
supportive environment for our non-traditional students to transition
back to school, to be introduced to the EMT course content, and to also kind of
work out the kinks of returning to school, so students at that point might
still be trying to settle their schedules, put their childcare in place,
figure out how to work homework back in, and the nice thing about the vestibule is
it gives them a chance to do that before the actual training begins and the stakes
are too high. Then once the training starts we do have a co-teaching model like
Michelle described. We have an EMT technical instructor and a
contextualized basic skills teacher. They, in the EMT class, share the classroom
approximately 30% of the time, but there are also separate hours for the basic
skills teacher, where the basic skills teacher is doing a variety of things,
either previewing coursework that's to come, reviewing what happened in the
coursework that might be difficult, and the teacher's really trained to provide
multiple learning approaches and strategy to the difficult course content.
So finally the last piece of the features of the NY-BEST model are these
integrated job readiness activities and the employment piece, so during the whole
course of the training there is an hour a week set aside for students to do hands-on
job readiness activities like their resumes, practice interviewing, so that
when they graduate they're really poised to get that job right away, since the main
goal of all these trainings is employment. Employers are a big piece of our model,
they offer the internships and they also come to our job clubs at the end of each
cohort graduation to screen our new candidates and to hopefully offer
them jobs. All of this re-design and all of these features we feel have really
resulted in tremendously improved outcomes for all our training programs. So the
S.A.V.E program, just to give you a snapshot of our outcomes, of the last five
cohorts that we've served through grant-funding, 85% of them have finished
the coursework, and if you recall, only 50% of EMT students were finishing
beforehand, so we've managed to open access to lower-level students through
the redesign, but many more of them are being successful in finishing this
rigorous course. 88...actually closer to 90 have passed the state EMT licensing
exam and 77% were hired within three months in their field and most of them,
because they were unemployed or very underemployed, working in service, have
had a big jump in their hourly and now have access to jobs with full and good
benefits. I see there's a lot of questions but let me just give you two more minutes,
and then we'll move to those questions. Because this is focused on contextualized
instruction I just wanted to give you guys a little bit of sense of how that
curriculum process happens, because we did develop the curriculum here at LaGuardia.
It is a collaborative process between oftentimes feedback from the employers
first, and certainly between our professional and vocational departments
and our basic skills department. When you get started the first thing that you need
to do is sort of determine your co-teaching model. So there's a lot of
good information which I can share with you about co-teaching and the different
types of models. I think they've identified seven. Some are traditional,
which is that you're together all the time, others are more complimentary
or supportive, but it's important for the teachers to understand how they're going
to be working together and what their roles and responsibilities are in the
classroom. Co-teaching for us is essentially two or more teachers
working together to plan, conduct, and evaluate the integrated outcomes,
curriculum, learning activities, and assessments for the same group of
students. And the instructors who are teaching have equal levels of
responsibilities. So that's kind of important, the basic skills staff are
professionals in developmental education and contextualizing curriculum, and the
technical staff, obviously, the professional staff, have absolute
knowledge over the content, in this case of being an EMT. The other big piece of
developing curriculum is identifying the difficult parts in the curriculum, so part
of the job of the basic skills instructor is to say, you know, where do students
struggle, where do we need to deepen and add multiple learning activities so
students can really conquer this curriculum, and for EMT a lot of that work
happens around anatomy and physiology and body systems because that's very dense,
and many of our students have not had exposure to science and working with the
body and snatomy and physiology at that level before. The other thing that we do
here at LaGuardia that I just want to share with you is when we develop
a curriculum we're essentially looking at developing four sets of skills or
developing students' abilities in four areas. So one is just being able to
identify the academic skills, reading, writing, math skills, some of...you know,
what are the things we want students to be able to know and do,
writing case notes, summarizing, reading charts and graphs. The second is the
technical skills and content and that's obviously determined by what EMTs need to
learn and know how to do in their field. The third category is what we call
routines and habits for success, that's more like...I guess you'd call them the
soft skills like being on time either for class and/or for work, learning how to
study, test-taking strategies, and the fourth are really also again those soft
skills, the professional and the affective skills that are so needed in the
workplace, especially as EMTs, like working with a partner,working in pairs,
presentation skills, ethics, how to treat patients, that kind of work. Those are
also the learning objectives of the curriculum. Another big piece is talking
with your co-teacher about how to assess students, and one thing we've found as we
try to integrate more and more of our trainings is that a lot of the trainings
use very high-stakes testing and formal assessment, but there weren't...before we
integrated the curriculum there weren't many opportunities for informal assessment
and so part of the job of the basic skills teacher has been to try to build that in
as a way of monitoring students' learning and progress so that we can make sure
they're ready and staged for those high-stakes, more formal tests that they
have to take. We ask instructors to not just share the syllabi but to really
integrate not only their assessments but their grading systems, so that they're
speaking in one voice, rather than having two separate syllabi,
two separate grading systems, and finally a big piece is just the communication
around integrating the work and co-teaching so that our teachers meet
weekly, they have a scheduled planning and meeting weekend and that's really
important, to talk about students and to preview what's coming. So, finally,
and I want to move to the questions, the lessons that we've learned here, we feel
that our intake and our vestibule has been really key as a piece of the model to
student success, so giving students the supported and contextualized transition
back to school, having a more comprehensive assessment, again, so not
just those high-stakes tests or exams, but looking at student performance in a number
of ways, in an ongoing way, to respond to what they need. Certainly the co-teaching
and bringing the expertise of the professional along with the expertise
of our basic skills instructor together has really been a powerhouse for the
students in terms of getting the content and also the scaffolding they need to
master the curriculum. We have local employer involvement, which has really
helped us with our own placements in terms of our job outcomes, and finally this idea
that it's part of a pathway and students could go on. Professional development has
also been a huge piece of the work we've done here, so we've been doing NY-BEST
since 2007 and learned a lot from it. We've made a lot of mistakes but we have
invested a lot in the professional development of our NY-BEST teams and our
instructors and that's made a huge difference. So I'm going to stop there
and turn it back over to Sarah.
- Yes. Thank you so much, both Michelle and Amy. This was such a wonderful
presentation and we have so many questions that I've been keeping track of. So one of
the things that was asked was that research suggested skills don't
automatically transfer unless we also build students thinking about transferring
meta-cognitions, would either one of you like to respond to that?
- Yeah, I mean, I can respond that, I think that certainly makes sense.
I mean, I will say from looking at the literature on transfer that it's one of
those puzzles that's not completely well understood, but that it's a difficult
challenge to make sure that information does transfer and it's conveyed in a way
that it does transfer, and certainly there are many different aspects to that, and I
think that that question raises another interesting angle here as well, to help
the students think about how to take the skills from the classroom and bring them
to bear in other contexts. So certainly working with the students to think about
how to do that, it's certainly important, and I think teaching in a contextualized
way is sort of the first step towards that goal.
- Another question is, and I think a couple of people asked that, so do
students have to have a high school equivalency credential
prior to starting the training?
- For the EMT, the S.A.V.E EMT, they do. They don't have to in all of our
NY-BEST programs and I'll explain that. So in New York City all of the EMT employers
require a high school diploma, even for students who have passed the state EMT
exam. So we learned the hard way that if students didn't have that they couldn't
get a job. That said, we have lots of students here in New York who are reading
between the 5th and the 10th grade, 11th grade level, who had high school
completion, either an HSC or a high school, but as you know, when they left
high school weren't necessarily prepared at the level for academics to
be reading and writing at the levels that were required of our EMT program
admissions. So we accept students... now I see one of the questions,
is what's the level, so you have to have a high school diploma or a high school
credential, and you have to be reading at the 8th grade level and above
to be admitted to S.A.V.E, so the issue for us here was to make sure people were
going to be able to get jobs, but also to open access for people who were being
precluded from admission because they were reading at lower levels.
- A couple other questions that are really interesting and important.
So were there particular strategies that you used to increase retention and
completion rates, and also were there separate times set aside for resume
writing and interviewing skills?
- So, yeah, the easy one is there's an hour set aside every
week or integrated into the program hours for what we call job readiness, explicit
job readiness activities. So that by the time they graduate they have EMT resumes
and they have had practice interviews and they've done a series of job readiness
activities, so they're poised to go on to the job market and be in good shape.
The retention and engagement strategies is a great question, it's a very big
question, that's a whole day's workshop about how we do that in the program.
It's a combination of things, it's the contextualized curriculum which
allows students to engage in the content in a way that they develop mastery and
they're working with their peers and they're engaged in the classroom as
opposed to just the didactic or lecture model, so the curriculum is very hands-on
and students are very engaged with it. We also have a very robust educational case
management and attendance and student support activities that are going on,
so if somebody loses their childcare, or somebody doesn't have enough money
to take the Metro to school, there's an educational case manager who's assisting
kind of with all those life barriers.
- We have a couple of other wonderful questions here. So what other fields
besides EMT were considered, and what suggestions do you have for programs that
don't have access to instructors or materials directly related
to a career path?
- So we have 10 different NY-BEST programs running. We have medical assisting,
community health worker, the NCLEX prep, which is sort of nursing for
foreign-trained professionals. There's a lot of them and I would like to share
my website with you guys so that you can go on and see, we have a ton of
information about the programs. We have data there and we also have a bunch of
curriculum samples and resources. I see there are some questions about
curriculum, so our website is really the best place to go to get more detail.
What advice do I have for people who don't have access? That's a really good
question. I would love to talk to you, maybe offline, about what your
thinking is. We have, like I said, several models here, so we have the integrated
training models, we also have the contextualized basic skills models, which
are essentially high school equivalency, basic ed, and ESOL classes that have been
contextualized around career sectors. And those are also very effective, and so
I'm happy to talk to whomever offline about the work that we do here and
how it might be helpful to your own goals.
- Another question was what method did you use to determine what careers are
in demand in your area?
- Yeah, that's a really good question. We have access to a bunch of local labor
market tools, and I'm sure Michelle can speak more about this, but we have,
you know...I'm not sure if any of you use...there's a Burning Glass technology
that you could look at which kind of aggregates information on available
careers. There is obviously information about local careers that's published by
the Department of Labor that you can break down through the occupational
outlook, that kind of breaks it down by region so you can see where the growth is.
And then I think, you know, you could probably start just by asking your local
state Department of Labor, but Michelle may have other ideas.
- And I think, Amy, you hit on some of the main ones, and I think those are all very
good suggestions. I mean, looking at the state data gives you some big-picture
projections and then Burning Glass also helps to zero in on some more local and
more, kind of, current trends, so those are very good places to start. And then
also doing direct outreach to employers through advisory boards, just contacts
that you have with employers that might be affiliated with your program is also a
very good strategy, so I think a multi- pronged strategy is always a very good
one, because there's lots of angles on bringing together labor market data.
- So, someone was asking a question about the ESL students and if you have anyone on
staff with extensive ESL teaching experience or language advocates to look
at your materials. I think they really wanted to know what is your strategy for
working with ESOL students.
- Right. So we have a big, as I said in the beginning, 40% of our students here at
LaGuardia are immigrants and first- generation Americans, and we have a very
large ESL population here. Half of our NY-BEST programs are ESL-focused, and
they're run through CIET, my partners and colleagues at the CIET,
which is the Center for Immigrant Education and Training, so we have a lot
of expertise around designing integrated training programs for ESOL students and I
think one of the lessons learned is in the planning phase, is not just about what are
the sectors that are growth sectors, where are the in-demand opportunities, but also
who are our student population and how are we going to customize the training for the
need and the population that exists, and so while we have these key design elements
like intake and the vestibule and integrated job readiness and co-teaching
that run through all 10 of our programs, each of the 10 programs is designed
slightly differently in terms of the length of the vestibule, the amount of
overlap of co-teaching, according to oftentimes the needs of the student
population. So some programs admit students at lower levels than others, so
it's a balancing act between saying how much access can we offer,
can we admit people at the fifth grade level and still get them through this
community health worker training, where the readings are at the 12th level
and 13th grade reading level, how can we do that? Can we do that at the fifth grade
and still get that done in a year, or do we need to admit people at slightly higher
level, let's say the seventh grade, and accomplish those goals. So ESL students
are similar in that it's a population that we're looking to serve, and when we design
the program, the curriculum, we have their particular learning needs in mind.
- Okay, great.
- Okay, I think that's all the time that we have and I want to just get into some
of the future efforts that we will be going to do. We're going to have another
webinar that's focusing on the student success projects. Acceleration will be on
February 2nd at 1:00 p.m. Student support will be...and that will feature Gateway
Community College. The student support webinar will be on March 1st at 2:00 p.m.
Eastern Time, and that will feature Amarillo College. We have the hybrid
practices on April 13th at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time and it will feature
St. Louis Community College. We're also developing some webinars, sorry,
some videos that will focus in on very particular strategies that came out of our
study. One will be on managing change, another will be on integrating adult
education and developmental education and the other video will be supporting student
success via professional development, so you should keep an eye out for some of
that material. So I want to thank everyone for your participation in today's webinar.
I want to in particular thank our two presenters, Amy and Michelle,
a wonderful, very informative webinar. So if you...on our last slide, if you have
any...if you need any additional information, you will see Gina Davis from
Manhattan Strategy, LaGuardia Community College, and also Michelle Van Noy's email
address. So again, I want to thank everyone for your participation and I want
to wish everyone a wonderful day. Thanks so much.
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