Sharing the Love

I've written before about my fascination with--and questions for--cradle-to-career programs like the Strive Partnership in Cincinnati.  Education Sector just put out a report on Strive, a collaborative effort by countless schools, nonprofits, and businesses to support positive academic achievement for children along a continuum from birth to college completion.

There's a lot that's promising and new about Strive.  To name just a few elements: First, from a partnerships standpoint, universities have taken the lead in new ways.  Strive emerged, six years ago, out of conversations among more than 200 education and nonprofit and community leaders.  Who convened them?  Then-University of Cincinnati President Nancy Zimpher.  It's refreshing to witness the active role of local universities not just in supporting these initiatives, but finding ways to measure their own success in relation to K-12 work.  Second, from a policy standpoint, there is a long-overdue focus on early childhood education--often the forgotten stepchild of ed funding.  Third, from a jurisdictional standpoint, Strive is not just Cincinnati: it also involves the smaller Kentucky cities of Newport and Covington, just across the Ohio River.  And the efforts don't just comprise public schools--multiple parochial schools are actively included in the partnership.

The report covers a lot of the same ground dealt with elsewhere, but here are some nuggets I haven't seen in other reports:

• Strive's shared accountability is both in line with the edzeitgeist in its focus on data, and cuts against it by moving the focus beyond individual teachers or schools
• The Feds' Promise Neighborhoods Initiative, which echoes Strive and is centered on schooling, nevertheless requires that the lead partners of each PNI be a nonprofit or institution of higher education: this "serves to broaden the range of desired outcomes beyond the purely academic to include the developmental needs of student"  
• Sharing data is really, really hard--many partners at Strive "often collect, store, and analyze data in incompatible and disconnected way"; but they're working on improving the scene

The whole report is short, to the point, and free, so it's worth a complete look.

Next Steps for Adult Learners: Collaboration

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?

Next Steps for Adult Learners: A Sequence of Possible Classroom Activities

Last week, I laid out a concern facing many adult language learners: when you've maxed out the course offerings at one site, how do you find the next class?  Especially in a climate of long waitlists at the publicly- or grant-funded programs sought out by many low-income immigrants?  At my former small agency, where we could only support a five-month beginning-level ESOL course, the issue of connecting students to "next steps" became so paramount that one of the most important parts of the program became what students would get to do after the program.

Because all of my students wanted so badly to keep studying English once they'd gotten an initial taste, I developed, through trial and error, a series of activities designed to help them do just that.  I had a few guiding principles.  First, I wanted to elicit students' interest in next steps.  I had my own theoretical bases for why it was desirable for students to keep their language-acquisition momentum, and was happy enough to share it, but I tried to maximize their own urgency.  Second, it's a big, bad (well, at least long-waitlisted) world.  The Boston area, like many metropolitan regions, is replete with agencies, course offerings, and levels of study.  Negotiating these thickets in English is hard enough; harder still if one is learning English.  I was there to support students.  Finally, I made the process iterative.  This might be nice: write down three program phone numbers; add water; enroll in intermediate English.  But it's unrealistic.  The issued needed to be visited, then revisited.

So here's the rough sequence of activities to help students explore--and secure--"next steps":

Pose the Problem: Using the "problem-posing" methods derived from the revolutionary Brazilian educator Paolo Freire, I introduce a "codification" of the problem of continuing English.  Usually I show students a picture of a few adults sitting at home, looking downbeat (thanks, Google Docs), with a couple lines of dialogue from each I've typed on the paper: "I used to study English at X location.  I called Y program.  I'm waiting."  I lead students through a five-stage process to uncover the dilemma, make meaning of it, and develop an action plan for the characters.  At the end, I ask: What would you do in this situation?  And it turns into an action plan for themselves.

Write a Script: Students brainstorm questions to ask a program when they call it, e.g., Is there a cost?  What levels do you have?  When does class meet?  What's your address?  Students can usually hit the main ones themselves.  Teachers can suggest others they might have missed.  I help them collectively edit the quesitons, then pass out a "next-steps" form.  They write down the questions, and the form goes in a sacred spot in their binders.

Practice Phone Calls: This is your classic practice asking and answering the questions students have devised.  Student A is potential program registrant; Student B is a staff member at the agency being called.  It's more fun when students pull out their cells.  For those who are ready, it's most fun (and realistic, and challenging) when one student goes into another room, actually calls the other, then holds the conversation.

Bring in a Guest Speaker: In the past, I'd invite an adult-ed mentor of mine, whom I'll call Tim, a highly-respected program director at another program, to visit my class to talk about next steps.  He'd talk about "confidence," answer students' many questions (in English!), and recommend programs to look at.  Students already have an intrinsic drive for next steps, but this exposes them to another voice to reinforce the message and motivate them.  And, it provides them with a connection to a program.  I used Tim's visit as a placeholder the rest of my course to connect back to the next steps concept.

Find Programs: I provide students with directories of local English classes, divided by neighborhood.  Sometimes this means packets printed from the state Department of Education Web site, or Boston's English for New Bostonians Web site.  Sometimes this means directing students to those Web sites, with guidance on how to navigate the search functions.  Students fill out a preset worksheet with contact information for four to six programs.

Call Programs: A nice weekend homework assignment: between Friday and Tuesday, call two programs, ask the questions you brainstormed earlier, and write down the answers.  Now, some programs' outreach officers speak languages common to Boston immigrants, like Spanish or Haitian Creole.  But not always.  And few programs have staff who speak languages like Mai Mai or Somalian that other students of mine have spoken.  So while students may find they can simply speak their native language when calling certain programs, they'll have to ask the questions in English sometimes.

Share Back: After the first homework assignment, I have students share with each other the information they've heard from other programs.  If one student calls a program in Jamaica Plain and there are no intermediate classes, another student can cross that program off her list, and add in a different program that might make more sense.  We also discuss how it's going: Are there other questions students should be asking?  Did somebody's aunt just get in a program nobody knew about? Do they have more spaces?  Often this informal networking is just as important to getting students in continuing education.

Repeat, Repeat, Repeat: The next week or weekend's homework is to call three or four more programs.

Celebrate Successes: One morning last spring, a student came into my class early: "I have news," she said, "I have a class for August!"  Chances were, she had already told classmates the good tidings, but I asked her if I could put her on the agenda to make sure everyone heard, and celebrated, her news.

Hit the Pavement: I take my students to visit one other program, which in the past has been a well-respected site, located downtown off several bus or train lines, with multiple ESOL levels.  Such a visit, at which the program's outreach coordinator presented the course offerings and registration process, gave the concept of "next steps" yet another friendly face, provided a practical option for many students, and gave them practice getting there on public transit.  A visit to a local literacy center got at the issue from the other end: most public libraries are hubs for education and job-placement resources.

Discuss Plan B: After a few weeks of this process, I often raise the qustion: what happens if you're put on waitlists everywhere you call?  We brainstorm steps: read books, go to the literacy center, take a lighter-level conversation class at the library; call me for more ideas.  I make sure everyone has my cell phone number (though not every teacher would be comfortable with this) and office number to call me for more support should they still be exploring classes after graduating my course.

Follow Up Individually: Over the last few weeks of class, in one-on-one conferences with students, I check in with students about their progress finding classes.  As important as whole-class activities are to investigate next steps, individual check-ins can uncover particular difficulties or be a space to comfortably suggest new pathways or ideas.

Connect to Curriculum: I haven't done this in every class, but in one course our next steps explorations coincided with a unit on Following Directions (turn left, turn right, where's the restaurant? and so on).  I created mock conversation between a student and program staff involving directions from the train to a downtown program.  I built it into a Jazz Chant, which students practiced over multiple classes, both to reinforce in a high-energy way what they were learning grammatically as well as to suggest language useful for phone calls.  Ultimately, we turned it into a role-play, again with cell phones.

**

As I look at these activities, carried out in this fashion, a few things stand out.  First, it takes a lot of time and effort.  Not that that's a bad thing, but it's striking how prominent a role this has played in my classroom.  Second, there are obvious connections to students' self-advocacy for other resources.  The most obvious parallel is to securing free or affordable childcare, a common issue for so many of my past students: just as with ESOL programs, there are eligibility requirements, many suppliers, a variety of ways in which the service is offered, and variation in quality.  It might make sense to frame "searching for English classes" more explicitly as "searching for resources in general."  Third, the process assumes the need for next steps is universal, and lays out the activities accordingly.  In my experience, the need has been universal, but what about when several students have already discovered their next class.  Does it make sense to continue to use everyone's classroom time to address the remaining needs of a few students?  What would it look like to do some next-steps activities on a voluntary, out-of-class-time basis?

My dear Blog Visitors--what stands out to you?  What sounds good?  What's missing here?  What could be done differently?

Next Steps for Adult Learners: What's the Problem?

This past April, I had the good fortune to spend a week in Montreal, bumming around la belle ville, barely missing the chance to use Bixi bike-sharing, and everywhere I went trying to pull together the bits and scraps of French I'd learned in the U.S. (and was learning there): at my hostel, at the grocery store, on the street.  I had enough grammar to purchase my share of wine, if too little vocabulary to discuss whether it was any good, to say nothing of follow the conversations that pinballed around my hostel's rather cramped and enlivened dining room once that first (second, or third) bottle had been uncorked.

I got by--indeed without having to fall back on English too often.  And I got better.  But eight months later, grad school has intervened and made those bits and scraps suddenly seem all the more infinitesimal.  It's a situation any of us who has labored through the beginnings of a foreign language as an adult can attest to: three steps forward, a few months off, two steps backward.  Language "attrition," as it's known, is only one of a murderer's row of hurdles facing adult language learners.  For adult ESOL learners, whose language acquisition is quite a bit more high-stakes than anything I've experienced, it's a big concern.  And an issue that raises important questions about helping adult ESOL learners access their "next steps"--how to help them keep studying English once they've maxed out the opportunities within a single program.  

Given the demand for ESOL in Massachusetts, it has been heartening to see how many small programs exist in all imaginable corners of the city: in the pocket-sized human-services agency where I used to work, in school-based community centers, housing projects, daycare centers, churches, prisons.  There are still the established, state-funded, multi-level programs, but who's kidding themselves?  The state can't or won't fund all the demand.

The challenge with storefront programs like the one I worked at is that they may not have the multiple levels provided by the state-funded bulwarks.  Students put 6 or 9 months in, then what happens?  In my five-month program, students did a number of things to prepare for graduation and the inevitable search for a next course.  For more on that, stay tuned.  But after a few months, either through the grapevine or formal follow-up, I would tally up the progress of my alumni.  The result was usually this: about half were studying English elsewhere, another quarter were looking or were on a waitlist, and the rest I either couldn't get in touch with or had ceased looking for more English.

I wasn't concerned about the 50 percent still studying.  These students were the obvious successes of our next-steps preparations.  It was the other 50  percent that got me thinking.  I hardly expected every student to keep studying English.  Life happens, especially for the low-income immigrant folks who came through our doors.  In one of many such examples, a student once had to drop my class right after starting because her daughter had a baby.  She was now a rather heavily-involved grandmother; English could wait.

I was curious about those three, four, or five who wanted to continue but didn't have the relatively immediate opportunity to.  Like virtually all my students, they had entered my program with clear goals for learning English: To defend myself in everyday situations.  To help my daughter with her homework.  To get a job (or a better one).  By the same token, I cannot remember a single student who didn't want to keep studying English once she got a taste of a class.  In following up months after graduation, I found that many were waiting for a call back, and many were on a waitlist--often at multiple programs.

That wasn't surprising, given demand in our area.  The main adult-education program in Cambridge has a waitlist of 439, a smaller program, 128.  In Somerville, the waitlist for the program run through the public schools currently stands at 1011.  In Boston, an organization in Chinatown runs to 296, another in South Boston to 211.  It was an accomplishment that my students had the motivation and wherewithal to get on those waitlists in the first place.  That can't be overlooked.  But the waits that inevitably ensued--three, four, five months or more--were a frustration to my old students.  And the likelihood that they were squandering to attrition some of their hardwon language skills ought to be a concern to all of us in the field.

Many a student--current or former--complained to me about this situation.  Nearing the closure of one cycle I taught, my beginner-level crew teamed up with an offer I wish I hadn't had to refuse: Would I make my next class intermediate-level, and keep them all on board for the next six months?  I couldn't, but it only reinforced my efforts to prepare students for what could come next.  Still, the mixed results of future groups suggests new ways to think about next steps.  Indeed, not every program has the bloated waitlists of the ones I mentioned above.  But how do we go about finding out what's available, and where?  And how do we get students into those spaces?

Cultural Issues: Don't Accuse and Blame, Understand and Respond

On the political right, it's often popular to chalk up the inequalities of the world to poor people's “cultural factors” or “cultural reasons."  Culture of poverty, the culture in schools today, and so on.  The left runs from this sort of thing like Herman Cain from a Libya question ("just want to be sure, we're talking about ... culture here?").  But culture does affect folks in poverty, including adult learners, and that has to be kept in mind.

Toward the end of my first, six-month adult ESOL class an interesting phenomenon occurred.  Several students had managed to graduate from our English for Employment program without completing resumes.  They'd done all the career-awareness exercises in class, but when it came to meeting with my colleague caseworker to write resumes, no dice.  

What happened?  All of the students had made appointments with our caseworker, but had no-showed.  Some no-showed twice.  I hadn't tracked this, and had no idea until it was too late.  I was confused: my students could arrive bright and early every day for my morning class, but couldn’t get themselves to a single afternoon appointment with my colleague over the course of six months?  I had taken the time to sit down with the student, find a convenient time on my appointment software, seen her write the date and time in her calendar?  Given her a confirmation card?  And she’d gotten a reminder phone call from the receptionist?  And still, no-shows?

What's more, these were the best possible students from the 80 who had applied for the class.  They emerged from our screening process as the most reliable, most persistent, most able to succeed.  And they couldn’t come to a meeting they had no reason to forget, for a purpose—to help find a job—they all swore they cared about.  

If this had been just a couple no-shows--the occasional emergency with a student's kid cropping up--I wouldn't have been too worried.  But it was a consistent problem of no-showing.  Why?  Was it a different meaning to "signing up" for things in my students' native countries?  Was it the fact that most of my students were used to systems and institutions that don't expect much from them: the public-housing office, the welfare department, immigration?  Hard to say, but it seemed there were certain attitudes or approaches among students that deemphasized the caseworker meetings that were the lifeblood of our agency--and, for our clients, the ticket to completing a resume.

I'll admit to a flash of frustration that day as I reviewed all the missed appointments in our appointment log.  But most of the frustration was at myself, for (a) not anticipating this might be a problem, and (b) not having a system in place to check that our students were actually following through on their appointments.  Rather than point the finger at students and say, "It's a culture problem," I tried to understand and respond.  For our next cycle, we tied attendance of caseworker meetings to class attendance.  When I made an appointment for a student to see a colleague of mine, I emphasized that it was as important as showing up to class.  Every couple days, I checked the appointment log to make sure students were following through on seeing our caseworkers, and if there was a no-show, I checked in with the student to figure out what happened.  Every two weeks, I met with my career-services colleague to check on student progress--and we even created individual strategies for each student.

Culture matters.  People carry culture with them from their families, their communities, their home countries.  They develop cultural responses to the things they deal with every day.  As I learned, even if "culture" seems to a be a problem, as educators, rather than accuse or blame, we should understand and respond.

ConStrived?

I had a fascinating conversation Friday with a self-described "instigator" who's helping lead a replication of the STRIVE Together program of the Cincinnati area elsewhere in the Midwest.

Such organizations are modeled loosely off the Harlem Children's Zone and attempt to create cradle-to-career pathways for kids in disadvantaged areas.  These Midwestern models differ from HCZ in that they are larger than 100 square blocks and promote collaboration among existing agencies.  And their funding is different--I mean, not everyone can be hand-in-glove with Wall Street, right?

Here's what else the Other Midwest Plan has going for it: business, community, and school-district buy-in.  Focus on STEM subjects: science, technology, math.  Accountability measures from top-to-bottom, including managed instruction and continuous improvement plans.  Use of great practices from across the country.  Assurance of on-the-ground quality, through plenty of support and professional development for teachers, out-of-school time programs for kids, inclusion of volunteer labor.  Emphasis on kindergarten readiness.  I took the devil's-advocate pose over and over, and got pretty satisfying answers back.

When what started as a 20-minute call ended at an hour, I thought: Wow, this Other Midwest Plan sounds great!  ...

... But is it too good to be true? 

The rapid dissemination of the cradle-to-career idea (which I've written about before) is encouraging, insofar as I think it's a good way to frame the movement to achieve legitimate outcomes for kids from tough backgrounds.  But it's also a new path full of booby-traps. 

A few questions that I think must be addressed:

• How does the laudable focus on educational achievement not get narrowed to outcomes in math and English (or, in a better world, math, English, and science)?  
• How do you avoid imposing so much quantitatively-based accountability that you create (unfortunate but plausible) incentives to "teach to the test," or worse, manipulate data?  How do you create broad, fair evaluations?
• We know that quality of teaching and adult-child interaction are so important in both K-12 classrooms and daycare.  How do C2C programs assure that the consensual, progress-oriented message from movement leaders is not diluted at the grassroots level?  More to the point, how do they plan to increase the supply of effective front-line practitioners, especially in an era of fiscal retrenchment?
• The C2C approach is warm, fuzzy, and consensus-oriented.  It sometimes seems everybody's determinedly on the same page--or at least trying to get there.  What if the consensus is wrong?
• How do you make room for (Business-Speak Alert) "process correction" or continuous reflection, when you're keeping a good face up to secure grant money and political will?  
• Many of the major social advances in American history grew out of mobilization and politicization of people at the grassroots.  People spoke up and got angry, and things changed (see Civil Rights, women's rights, the Voting Rights Act).  Can a movement that is so--in some ways--bloodless have long-term impact?
• How do you keep funders and agencies working together?  If funding pulled back at some point, or results were uneven between agencies, wouldn't agencies be tempted to steer their own ship again?
• Isn't this an idea from Rich White Men for poor people of color?

Out Standing in the Field?

Took a lot of field trips today:

11:15: Interview at an organization that facilitates policy-changes to strengthen community-college outcomes

1:00: Met with the co-director of an upstart parenting program that is explicitly trying to be small and focus only on early-parenting--while linking with other resources to help low-income parents give their kids a successful life

3:30: Met with a social-entrepreneur/student who's poised to launch an organization that would connect poor schoolchildren with wraparound services for their families, to help remove barriers to learning and change the "conversation" about how schools operate

It's a good thing at my age you don't need to fill out permission slips!  

By my count, that's 1 existing "linkage" program that's very big and supports front-line work, 1 new front-line program that supports linkages but wants to remain small, and 1 new linkage program that works at the front lines and wants to be big.

If you followed that, I bet you can tell me where the pea is!

Two lines of argument I'm constantly thinking about (in a very, very reduced form):

1) We have enough organizations and enough services.  To help disadvantaged folks, we just need to connect them better from one program to another.
2) Poor people shouldn't have to run from program to program to meet their needs.  Give them one-stop shops with all services under a single roof.  Found a new org that does it all.  Or add another program to round out your org.

What do you think?