California Adult Literacy Professional Development Project

Presenter: Dr. Mary Ann Corley, American Institutes for Research

This session briefly reviewed findings from current research on effective writing instruction and discussed how these findings can apply to the adult education classroom. It covered practical strategies such as sentence combining and summarization. Sentence combining is a skill that allows students to write more complex, sophisticated sentences, thus giving their final written products a polished look and feel. Similarly, summarization, a skill required for success both in postsecondary education and the world of work, provides students with tools for identifying and understanding important concepts of the subject they reading and learning about. Combining sentences and writing coherent and correctly developed summaries are two of the most powerful skills that students can cultivate.

Presenter: Mary Ann Corley, Ph.D., Principal Research Analyst, American Institutes for Research (AIR)

This session briefly reviewed findings from current research on effective writing instruction and discussed how these findings can apply to classroom instruction. It covered practical instructional strategies such as reducing students� reluctance to write, helping students with pre-writing, and using frames as an aid. It also briefly discussed writing skills required for success in postsecondary education and the workplace.

Facilitator: Guillermo Verdin, ABE Instructor, Los Angeles Unified School District Division of Adult and Career Education

Do your learners struggle with writing assignments? Not sure how to engage them in the writing process? Wondering how to integrate direct, explicit instruction into your writing lessons? This webinar reviews the practice of direct, explicit instruction and then models teaching a lesson using that approach to teach a writing lesson using writing frames.

Presenter: J. Adelson-Goldstein, CALPRO Facilitator

In this session, participants looked at the research supporting the use of the writing process in second language writing instruction, in order to explore activities and tasks that guide learners through that process. The webinar focused on the pre-writing tasks to help learners delve into the writing topic and organize their thinking; writing models and prompts that are meaningful for adults; and editing exercises and instructor feedback that help learners polish their work. Ways to celebrate successful learning outcomes through publishing learners work were also addressed.

This research forum webinar explores ways to foster a positive math identity and embrace productive struggle in adult education classrooms. This webinar focuses on promoting math identity in adult learners and embracing productive struggle in mathematics. Research shows that students who lack confidence in math often give up when faced with challenges, mistakenly thinking that struggling indicates a lack of intelligence. Although struggle can conflict with educators’ notions of successful teaching, struggle, and mistakes are the best times for brain growth and are a necessary component of learning and understanding. Teaching that embraces and uses productive struggle helps students apply their learning to new problems and situations.