A New Resource to Share: World Education’s Guide to ELA Classroom Activities
January 16th, 2015 | Blogs
World Education, Inc. has felt the need to provide teachers with classroom-ready activities that apply standards rather than providing only lists of standards around which teachers then have to create activities. Our new Guide to ELA Classroom Activities That Promote Life Skills, College, and Career Readiness provides a large number of suggested classroom tasks that combine the academic knowledge and skills described by the College and Career Readiness Standards for Adult Education (hereafter referred to as “CCRS”) with behaviors and composite skills needed to succeed in college, workplace, and civic life, expressed in the Guide as Essential Competencies. These seven Competencies—e.g., “Collect, organize, and interpret information”–are drivers for the suggested tasks, with the CCRS applied wherever logical and reasonable, including standards from across CCRS strands–e.g., a task requiring both reading comprehension of a text and a written summary.
The Guide is divided into two tiers of suggested tasks: Tier One tasks are for learners at 0-8 GLE and Tier Two for learners at 9-12 GLE. Tier One tasks require that students apply several CCRS to achieve a focused, short-term outcome, such as a set of notes or a one-paragraph summary of an at-level text. Some of these tasks might also require real-world applications, such as actually entering work places or college campuses to observe classes, conduct interviews, or shadow jobs. In contrast to the Tier One tasks, Tier Two tasks are project-based and designed to culminate in sophisticated products, such as argumentative essays, reports, and/or slide presentations. As such, each task is designed to cover all of the Essential Competencies and a full range of CCRS, much as would be required of a college research paper or a full-out job search.
Teachers will agree that there is a whole range of substrate skills that students must acquire if they are to effectively perform challenging classrooms tasks. These skills include the ability to scan a text, paraphrase a statement from text, or take effective notes. Therefore, we have also provided a Baseline Skills Index, a collection of 20 substrate skills that students must acquire in order to perform well on any of the suggested tasks. Teachers can use this Index to assess students’ current baseline skills and plan to address gaps, either in discrete lessons or as parts of larger tasks.
The Guide also includes a set of lesson plans illustrating how a Tier One task was facilitated across several class sessions as well as a sample Tier Two project that culminated in short essays and class presentations. If you have questions or comments, please contact Carey Reid at creid@worlded.org. We hope the Guide will prove useful to you!
Download World Education’s Guide to ELA Classroom Activities That Promote Life Skills, College, and Career Readiness
