Effective Instruction for All Adult Education
Students Including Those with Special Learning Needs:
Update on the Special Learning Needs Initiative
by Tracy Hendrix, Texas LEARNS
Success for Adult Education teachers is often defined in the small victories and moments of a concept understood, a barrier overcome, a life changed by a teacher who took the time to care. For the past two years, the buzz of excited teachers and adult educators has permeated the Special Learning Needs Training sessions. Through this training teachers are able to learn strategies, go back to their classrooms to practice the strategies and then come back to share the outcomes while gaining needed feedback from national experts in the field of special learning needs, Neil Sturomski and Nancie Payne.
Adult Education in Texas now has eighty-three Special Learning Needs Resource Specialists and nine certified State Trainers for Effective Instruction. The nine certified State Trainers are currently available to conduct local trainings through the GREAT Centers upon request by a local program. National trainers, Neil Sturomski and Nancie Payne will train for one more year with a large group of teachers and more Train-the-Trainers in Houston. After this year of training, all the training for Special Learning Needs Resource Specialists will be localized and available through the GREAT Centers. Upon a random review of teacher performance in our statewide database, many of the teachers who have gone through this training now have higher performance measures than they did prior to attending the training.
What better way to share how well this initiative is going than to share impact statements from adult education teachers now certified as Special Learning Needs Resource Specialists who are using their newfound knowledge in their classrooms to help students? This Special Learning Needs Training called Effective Instruction for All Adult Education Students including Those with Special Learning Needs is a training you will not want to miss. Here’s why -
Excellent! Excellent! Excellent! – Cohort 1 teacher
This has helped change my focus from just teaching to pass the GED Test to being an ABE/ASE teacher teaching skills for life. I am teaching to help students discover and achieve life goals (long term and short term goals), not just skills to pass a test.
Krista Young, Abilene ISD
I was working with a new student and after just a short time I began to recognize his strengths and weaknesses. As I continued working with him, I started using some of the methods and techniques to address his learning styles. He did not realize I was doing that but he began to understand a lot better, and said, ‘You are a good teacher.’ I then told him about some of the things I had recognized in his learning and he said ‘you are so right!!!’ I am a better teacher now because of the vast information and practice I gained through these past months of intense learning and hands on experience. It was so rewarding to me to realize I could now identify and address needs so quickly. The information and knowledge presented was huge and I know I would not have been able to really understand it, much less use it, if we had not been given so much opportunity to apply it, both in small groups as well as the homework. Man, I must be getting ‘nerdy’ to appreciate homework, ha. Thank you for all your hard work in bringing such a great opportunity to Texas. Thank you, and other staff, for all the extras you provided to make us comfortable and well fed!
Becky Baer, Diboll Family Education Center
I think it may be the dream of every teacher to be trained by masterful, invigorating, and in-touch trainers. Nancie Payne and Neil Sturomski fit into all of these categories. I know my supervisors have always looked for the elusive key to retaining our students. I believe I have found an important component of this key in the Special Learning Needs Training. I am so ready to use the training I received in my classrooms and help the students in our local program to discover their learning strengths. Thank you for providing this opportunity to the teachers in the great state of Texas. I have created a list of strategies to help teachers understand the importance of using learning strategies with our students.
Cindy Fox, Region 17
This training is very valuable and has already made a difference in my class. The most rewarding part has been the student’s comments that this is the first time an instructor has shown so much interest in them and their learning. It seems to have made a difference in self-esteem and effort in the classroom.
Cohort 2 teacher
The best training I have ever had!
Cohort 2 teacher
I have used many of the ideas in my classroom, they work! You both have showed me that there is so much in Adult Education that I was not aware of - Thank You!
Cohort 2 teacher
Effective Instruction Cohort 2
  
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