California Adult Literacy Professional Development Project

Facilitator: Marie Doerner, Learning Disability Specialist, San Diego Community College District Continuing Education

Auditory processing disorder, dyscalculia, dyslexia: what does it all mean? Students with learning disabilities have average or above average intelligence, but some area of their learning has major deficits. This webinar reviews the most common forms of learning disabilities and suggests strategies for supporting and instructing students.

Facilitator: Marie Doerner, Learning Disability Specialist, San Diego Community College District Continuing Education

This webinar provides adult education instructors with an overview of learning disabilities and then offers practical strategies for the classroom that will meet the needs of all learners as well as specifically addressing those with learning disabilities.

Presenters: Susie Passeggi, Assistant Director, and Dodi Brown, Instructor, Mt. Diablo Adult Education

In this third Webinar of the Instructors Forum, presenters Passeggi and Brown provided information about Learning to Achieve, a research-based approach to serving adults with learning disabilities that was developed by the National Institute for Literacy, and discussed how Mt. Diablo implemented this approach. Objectives included the following: 1) identify research-based tools and techniques used to teach adults with Specific Learning Disabilities (SLD) effectively; and 2) identify and implement instructional approaches that help ALL adults, particularly adults with learning disabilities, learn content from written materials.

Course Description:
This self-paced course supports independent professional development; there is no facilitator nor other participants. Sign up now and access the class for 3 months. There is no official start or end date to worry about.

This is the first of two online courses from the California Adult Literacy Professional Development Project (CALPRO) on designing literacy programs to be responsive to the needs of adults with learning disabilities. This first session is an awareness session that will help adult educators understand what learning disabilities are and recognize the characteristics and consequences of those disabilities in the learning environment, whether classroom-based, tutor-led, or technology-based distance learning. This CALPRO online course provides an overview of the assessment process (diagnostic testing versus screening) and outlines the legal rights and responsibilities of the learner and the literacy program. The estimated course completion time is 14 hours.

The second CALPRO course in this series addresses instructional strategies appropriate for teaching adults with learning disabilities. Completion of Session 1 is a prerequisite for Session 2.

Enrollment verification with Moodle login information will be sent to registrants within one business day of registration.

Goals:
Identify a working definition of learning disabilities (LD); recognize common characteristics of adults with LD and their effect on learning; distinguish between screening and diagnostic testing and the uses of each; identify the importance of self-determination, self-advocacy, and disclosure to successful learners and workers; recognize the rights and responsibilities of learners with LD as well as of literacy providers; and begin the process of identifying and bringing about necessary changes to make programs more responsive to adults with LD.

Registration Information:
This course is free of charge to all California adult education programs.

Contact Information:
Please contact CALPRO at calprohelp@air.org or at 916-286-8803 for more information.

Author: Amy R. Trawick
Produced by the American Institutes for Research through a contract with the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) of the U.S. Department of Education, May 2018.

This 2018 report supplements the previously published Using the PIACC Literacy Framework to Guide Instruction: An Introduction for Adult Educators and provides literacy instructors ways to implement contextualized reading instruction to a population with varied needs and educational backgrounds. By connecting real-world reading tasks and standards-based instruction, this report provides resources for teachers to consider when planning a contextualized reading curriculum. The supplemental report is based on data originally released by the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIACC) in September 2016 and was produced by the American Institutes for Research through a contract with the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) of the U.S. Department of Education.