Helping connect students to next steps, so they can avoid language attrition, is an important consideration for adult ESOL learners. Especially if they're studying in one of the many small programs cropping up in urban areas, which may be nimble but don't always offer a full continuum of classes. In my former one-level ESOL program, students undertook a sequence of activities to seek out and get enrolled in their next class.
That's all well and good. But how can different programs collaborate to help learners at one connect to classes offered at another?
As I discussed in my first piece in this sequence (linked above), mammoth waitlists await many adult ESOL learners in my state (Massachusetts), and others. Thus, the best way to assure a student moves on to intermediate English after finishing beginning level would be to increase funding--but this isn't the place to discuss that. Just because most programs are filled to capacity, and have four, five, or six months' worth of names waiting to join, doesn't mean there aren't gaps in enrollment that could be filled by students, if only they knew about them. For instance, every year there are numerous classes at numerous sites find themselves in August looking for students to fill their remaining spaces for class in September.
"Collaboration" is a watchword in the nonprofit and human-services sectors, but how is it converted from platitude to practice? It seems worthwhile to point out that collaboration is not a mere parntership, but the actual pooling of labor--co-laboring--or a joint effort to achieve a unified end. In putting collaboration into authentic practice, a promising model is the Strive Partnership, which is a cradle-to-career educational initiative in the Cincinnati area.
Strive has advanced a model of "collective impact" built on five key principles (as wonderfully detailed here):
(1) a common agenda built on shared understandings of the problem and of actions to solve it;
(2) shared measurement systems to assess and report effectiveness, arrived at by a consensus that ensures continued alignment, accountability between organizations, and the opportunity for participants to learn from each other;
(3) undertaking of mutually reinforcing activities in which each agency focuses on activities it can do well in coordination with other agencies' actions;
(4) continuous communication in which leaders must meet regularly and over the long term to build trust, develop a common language for their work, and keep open channels for communication; and
(5) a backbone support organization to provide a range of supports for the initiative, from staff time to help with technology and data.
There are many challenges to implementing such a system, but Cincinnati educators believe they are seeing some results, five years into Strive. What could be applied to the adult-education sphere to ensure students successfully move from one program to another without seeing their language gains slide backwards?
Here are a few ideas. It's a brainstorm: doubtless I'm leaving things out, and doubtless some of these have been tried already:
1) Draft a vision for ESOL students: What does the field hope to impart to students? What different types of students are there, and how should their needs be met? What do students themselves want?
2) Define success: In a given urban area, leaders could get together and outline what success might look like for different types of learners. They could decide when to revisit these goals, how to assess their progress, and how to make corrections if students aren't benefiting from the collaborative work.
3) Communicate through Twitter: 160 characters is enough to say where a program's located, say how many spaces it has for its next classes, and link to its Web site. Educators who may not have the time to wade through dozens of emails about job postings, professional development, and the like on adult-education listservs could get feeds of tweets targeted to issues of outreach. This could also be done on modified listservs set up just for outreach coordinators, through Facebook pages, or the like.
4) Make the most of literacy collectives: In many areas of Boston, literacy collectives meet every month or few months. Representatives at these meetings could bring and share lists of students who are about to leave one program and need a class at another, and actively follow up with them. Rather than opening doors to whoever walks through, the process would guide those students already in the pipeline.
5) Use funding to incentivize collaboration: Money could reward and follow programs, or collectives of programs, that demonstrate a commitment to helping students connect to continued language support.
Just a few ideas.
What are yours?
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