The Texas Adult Education Content Standards & Benchmarks

Effective Standards-Based Education for Adults:
The Standards-in-Action Pilot in Texas

“The last time you were here, you sounded like Charlie Brown’s teacher, but today I got it. I really am starting to understand these standards,” commented one the participants in the second workshop of the Standards-in-Action (SIA) pilot program, a federally supported project designed to help adult education teachers better understand and implement the newly launched Texas Adult Education Content Standards and Benchmarks. This teacher’s reaction shows that the process of using content standards and benchmarks can be filled with a lot of initial misunderstanding, confusion, and that it takes sustained engagement with the standards to really unleash their potential as guides to better instruction and student performance.

Texas was chosen with five other states to be part of this nationwide initiative to “develop leadership training and materials to help state and local program staff acquire the knowledge and skill to implement effective standards-based education” (U.S. Department of Education, 2006). Ten teachers in Socorro ISD and 15 teachers in Harris County Department of Education participated in a year-long effort to implement the new Texas content standards by using several “tools” provided by the SIA national consultants. The philosophy of this pilot is that teachers must first work collaboratively within their programs to understand what the new standards and benchmarks actually require students to know and do and then, determine how to teach from those benchmarks. The goal of the pilot is to provide adult education programs in Texas with ideas on how to deepen teachers’ understanding of the new standards.

The tools used by teachers in this pilot are simple but effective. Participants working in teams are first asked to “unpack the cognitive demands of standards.” Although this may sound daunting, it is basically an outlining technique in which teachers identify the key concepts (nouns such as “complex sentences” or “vocabulary”) and skills (active verbs such as “use” or “respond”) within a benchmark. After stripping the benchmark to its essence, teachers determine the level of thinking required by the benchmark based on the revised Bloom’s taxonomy (Forehand, 2005). By “unpacking” the benchmark in this manner, teachers are ready to develop sample classroom activities that illustrate the requirement of the standard and are appropriate for students in a particular level. Continuing their work in teams, both pilot sites will eventually “unpack” all of the ESL benchmarks and provide sample activities for at least half of these benchmarks. Eventually, the pilot teachers will also work on aligning test items on the Basic English Skills Test (BEST) with the Texas standards, and make recommendations for revising and improving the standards and benchmarks.

If your program is wondering how to get teachers really engaged with the new Texas content standards, the SIA model offers a very worthwhile alternative. Although it requires a significant time commitment for professional development, the rewards in terms of teacher understanding of the standards and willingness to use them are likely to be great. Please feel free to contact me for more information on how to use this approach to implementing standards in your program.

Forehand, M. (2005). Bloom’s taxonomy: Original and revised. In M. Orey (Ed.), Emerging perspectives on learning, teaching, and technology. Retrieved July 25, 2007, from http://projects.coe.uga.edu/epltt

U.S. Department of Education, Office of Vocational and Adult Education (2006). Support for state implementation of standards-based education. Fact Sheet Series, Adult Basic and Literacy Education. Retrieved on August 7, 2007 from www.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/sectech/factsheet/support.html

Young, S. & Smith, C. (2006). Understanding Adult ESL content standards. CAELA Briefs. 4, 1-6. Retrieved August 7, 2007 from www.cal.org/caela/esl%5Fresources/briefs/contentstandards.html

Eduardo Honold has been the coordinator of the Far West Project GREAT since 2004 and the state liaison for the Standards-in-Action for the past year. He previously taught ESL in a family literacy program in El Paso for five years and political science at the college-level for eleven years.