On the Road: Supporting College-and-Career-Ready Adult Learners

Peggy will be “hitting the road” next week to represent EFF and CLEE at a national conference on effective transitions in adult education.

Peggy McGuire,
EFF Writing Content Expert

Peggy McGuire will be in Providence, RI for “Promoting College and Career Readiness for Adults”, an annual event sponsored by the National College Transition Network, on November 7 through 9.

Peggy will present 2 sessions during the conference focusing on the writing knowledge, skills and strategies that participants in adult education programs need for successful transition to postsecondary education and training. One session will share effective instructional practices and the second will focus on developing an adult education research agenda around writing  and college and career readiness.

Peggy is also looking forward to networking with and learning from other practitioners from all over the country – practitioners who share her strong interest in supporting adult learners in their efforts to access, persist in and complete postsecondary programs of study (a bunch of them – the organizers say the conference is “sold out”!).

She promises to report back on the highlights of her conference experience when she returns.

Here are some sights to look out for Peggy!

Space   spas

Helping Writers Develop Their Own Ideas: Revising the Content of Writing

Peggy McGuire
EFF Writing Content Expert

As mentioned in a previous post,  I presented ‘Writing the Book’ on Writing for Postsecondary Transition at COABE in April this past year. One thing that stood out for me was a lively conversation by the participants around the ‘revision’ component of the Convery Ideas in Writing  process.*

When you think of “revising” a draft piece of writing, what activity comes to mind?

When you ask students to “revise” their first draft of a written text, what are you actually asking them to do?

For many of us, revision of writing immediately brings to mind the act of “correcting” – correcting mistakes in spelling, punctuation, grammar, etc. – that might also be called proofreading. There is no doubt that it is important to learn how to correct mistakes like these in writings. Otherwise, errors could get in the way of a reader’s ability to understand what we are trying to say in our writing. Further, if our students can fix mistakes of these kinds, they are providing evidence that they know about, and can correctly use, common writing conventions.

There is, however, another meaning for revision. This meaning, while sometimes overlooked, is important for our students to be aware of and understand: revision of the actual content of their writing. If our goal is to Convey Ideas in Writing, then content revision is the strategy for making sure that we are conveying our intended ideas to our targeted audience via our written text. And of course, content revision is a process that we can teach our students to employ for all types of writing tasks at ANY functional level (not just for those transitioning into postsecondary settings).

Do you currently ask your students to engage in content revision of their writing drafts? If so, what activities or strategies do you use to support them in the content revision process?

Here are a couple of ideas for helping your students learn how to revise the content of their writing:

Idea #1: Compare Your Draft to Planned Ideas

So much of successful, effective writing comes back to what we do (or don’t do!) during the planning stages – affecting all other components of the writing process, even content revision.  Once your students have produced a first draft, encourage them to compare it to the information and ideas they generated during their planning, and then to decide if they have said everything that they planned to say about the topic. To come up with ideas for ‘what to write about,’ did the student:

• Brainstorm a list of terms/key points on the topic?
• Make a mind map?
• Freewrite on the topic?
• Develop an outline?
• Keep a writing journal?
• Highlight important information in a text they were reading?

Whatever kind of planning was done to generate and organize ideas to use in writing, at the content revision stage, encourage your students to:

1. Look at the results of their planning,
2. Reread their drafts,
3. Reflect, and decide:
   • Did I incorporate all the ideas I wanted to into my draft?
   • Did I miss anything important?
   • Did I include anything that doesn’t really seem to belong there now?
   • Did I come up with new ideas that I hadn’t thought about when I was planning?
   • And in the end, is my point clear and am I saying what I want to say about my topic?

 Idea #2: Seek Feedback on Your Writing

Revising writing content becomes much easier when a writer can get direct and constructive feedback from an external audience. This can give writers an immediate sense of whether or not they are in fact conveying the ideas they want to convey. So – encourage your students to find an audience!

Your student-authors can ask someone they trust to read what they have written (or listen to them read it aloud – remember, the focus is on content, not writing mechanics at this point). Authors can then prompt the readers/listeners to:

• Tell the authors what they ‘heard’ in the piece of writing – basically “reflecting the piece back” to the writers.
• Ask questions and/or clear up any confusion about specific points, asking the authors what they meant to convey.
• Describe to the author specifically what they liked about the piece. This gives authors information about what’s working well in their writing.
• Describe the words or images that stood out for them as they read/listened to the piece of writing.
• (If needed) Ask the authors, “What’s hard/easy about writing this piece?” This gives the writers a chance to talk about what’s blocking them, and to find their own ways ‘through’ the block.

As you may have noticed, this idea can also assist students to be effective peer reviewers/editors as well!

The above activites are designed to provide feedback focused on helping writers develop their own ideas. Note, however, that your student-authors may need a bit of practice before they feel comfortable performing these tasks. It may be a good idea to model these strategies with your students, and provide supported practice opportunities before asking them to use them on their own. They will find, however, that the payoff can be considerable. Such strategies for content revision empower students to really think about the substance of their writing and to revise their drafts (as needed) to meet their own communication goals.

What is your experience with teaching content revision to adult literacy (or ESL) learners? Please post a comment to share your ideas, thoughts, and insights. Here are a couple of questions to get you started:

• Have you ever taught your students strategies like these? How did it go?
  
• Have you used other effective strategies for helping your students revise the content of their writing? If so, please share!

We look forward to hearing from you!

*Note that effective revision of writing is also a  Writing Anchor Standard of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and as such appears at every grade level of these Standards.

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For more ideas, take a look at how these two writing lesson examples from the EFF Teaching Learning Toolkit  address content revision:
Heritage Books: Family Literacy    Preparing for Release: Corrections

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Post Contributor:

Peggy McGuire, EFF Trainer & Content Expert, Center for Literacy Studies

In the News: Engaging Beginning Writers

Here’s something we found online that seems like a good resource for adult education practitioners:

Aaron Kohring
Manager, EFF Project

I recently read an Education Week Teacher article, Motivating Reluctant Writers With Journals. The author, Laurie Wasserman, offers suggestions for supporting “…students who are hesitant to share their thoughts in writing.”

Although drawn from her experiences with K-12 students, I saw in her article many applications for our adult education learners. She recommends  journaling — which I have used many times with my hesitant adult education writers, as well as the use of peers/teachers as scribes for individuals with more severe writing barriers (including learning disabilities) to help get them started in the writing process. She makes several other suggestions including ‘relatable topics’ – relating writing to the real-world (or contextualized instruction).

This article also reminded me of how useful the Language Experience Approach (LEA) can be in supporting hesitant writers, as well as in providing both reading and writing practice.  All of which then (of course), leads me to wonder about your own experiences in motivating hesitant writers:

What are your experiences with journal writing? Do you have other ways in which you engage learners to start writing?

Have you used the Language Experience Approach with Adult Learners?  What tips might you share with peers about this strategy?

 

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Have you recently found something interesting ‘in the news’? If so – let us know at eff@utk.edu.

“Writing the Book” at COABE 2012: An Interview with Peggy McGuire

On Thursday, April 12, 2012, writing content expert Peggy McGuire lead a discussion at the National COABE Conference exploring how to support adult students in writing effectively for postsecondary transition.

As a follow up to our post earlier this month, we interviewed Peggy about her session at COABE, and have posted her responses here for our readers. If you attended her session, please be sure to chime in and add your view point.  If you weren’t able to attend, please don’t hesitate to post any questions or idea you have for Peggy on this topic – she’d love to hear from you all!

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Thanks, Peggy, for taking the time to share with us about your COABE session in Norfolk.

No problem, it was a great session, and I’d love for our blog readers to hear about it.

So, Peggy, remind us, what was your session about?

My COABE 2012 workshop was a double session (two 75-minute sessions back-to-back) titled ‘Writing the Book’ on Writing for Postsecondary Transitions. I designed the session to focus on the writing that adult education students need to do for successful postsecondary transitions, and on ways that adult ed teachers can prepare them to do it. Specifically, I was trying to support the proposition that to help our students write for transitions, we can teach them strategies for:

•  Identifying transition-related purposes, audiences and tasks/contexts for writing (i.e., “rhetorical aims”).
•  Identifying writing genres appropriate to the rhetorical aims to be addressed.
• Generating and organizing ideas for writing.
• Using the full writing process at the transition level to accomplish their writing goals/rhetorical aims.

Tell us a bit about the participants – who attended your session?

13 folks participated; they represented at least 6 states and a variety of adult education/literacy centers and community/technical college providers. This was admittedly a fairly small group; however, it felt like an ideal size to me for some good interaction and collaborative learning, and the members of the group were really smart, engaged and insightful! I felt really fortunate to get to work with them in a pretty intense way, and the time just flew by!

You had a double session on the COABE schedule – how did you organize your presentation?  Can you give us some more specifics about what you covered?

I organized the session so that the first part focused on what I call “the WHAT and WHY” – instructional activities that teachers can use to 1) help students identify the rhetorical aims of the writing they need to do, and 2) help students know the “rules” of the different kinds of writing they will need to use – different writing genres like persuasion, description, comparison, process analysis, etc. — in order to meet these rhetorical aims.

The second part of the session focused on “the HOW”. In it we looked at the EFF content standard Convey Ideas in Writing and the research-based writing process that it describes, as an overall approach to accomplishing transition-related writing tasks that we can teach our students. With it, they will be able to apply the writing knowledge and strategies they are learning to plan, draft and revise text that will meet their writing goals. Then we spent time discussing some fairly detailed examples of what this kind of writing instruction might look like in actual teacher lesson plans.

That sounds great – a really chock-full session! Was there a specific format to the example lesson plans?  Could you share one of those examples with us?

Sure, here’s a model lesson plan we worked with that focuses on teaching students to write an ‘academic-type’ persuasive essay similar to those needed for post-secondary education placement tests and coursework.

As you can see, the lesson planning tool/form we looked at is organized so that the teachers have to clearly describe:

1. What they expect students to know and do in each step of the writing process for a particular writing task, and 
2. Exactly what knowledge, skills and strategies they will need to teach students in each step along the way.

As one participant pointed out, the planning form we looked at might also serve as a tool for developing scoring rubrics that both teachers and students could use to evaluate the resulting writing.

Sounds like there was a lot of discussion going on – like the participants were really involved.

In general I always like to “mix up” information-sharing and hands-on activities in a workshop like this, so participants did a bit of writing and talking to each other as well as listening to me! I remember one particularly great exchange about how we can help students learn how to do content revision of their writing (instead of seeing “revision” only as correcting mistakes or proofreading). In both sessions I tried to model in my own facilitation some instructional strategies that teachers can replicate and use in the classroom.

And how did the participants like your session? What kind of feedback did you get?

Participants seemed pretty pleased with the session. They indicated that they particularly enjoyed:

• The discussion and interaction between presenter and participants – the good sharing of ideas.
• The emphasis on explicitly identifying writing purposes and audiences (“rhetorical aims”), and
  
• The focus on teaching specific conventions and strategies so that students have the tools to consciously make choices about the best way to address their writing purposes.

When asked how the session might have been better, they pretty much said that they would have liked MORE — more strategies, more materials, more time! I have to tell you – as a facilitator I love to hear that, even though there never seems to be enough time to do everything I’d like to. That was especially true for me at this session because the participants were so interested and so interesting; what a wonderful opportunity it was for a good conversation among colleagues!

Well it sounds like it was a great ‘writing’ session at COABE – thanks so much for sharing with us!

Thank you!  I’m just hoping I’m lucky enough to enjoy many more such opportunities – both at COABE and via this blog.

Again, Peggy would love to hear from you – whether you attended the session or not, please share your thoughts on this topic!

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For more about on the EFF approach to teaching writing, including the research behind the process, visit the EFF Assessment Resource Collection and The Research Base for Convey Ideas in Writing

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Writing for Postsecondary Transitions: COABE Discussion, Thursday April 12

What writing do adult students need to do for successful post-secondary transition?

How can teachers prepare them to do it?

Writing content expert Peggy McGuire will lead participants at the National COABE Conference in exploring these questions during a double session Thursday, April 12 from 10:45 am – noon and 1:45 – 3 pm.

During her session, Peggy plans to lead a discussion of:

• the writing process
• writing purposes/audiences/tasks relevant to post-secondary education
• what it means to write effectively for post-secondary transition (skills and experiences needed)

Her session will also include discussions of ‘how to teach’ writing for post-secondary purposes/audiences/tasks, and will engage participants in activities designed to support  adult students’ development as writers who write effectively for post-secondary transition.

In preparation for her session, and for those of us NOT able to attend, we ask you to reflect on the following questions and then please  post a comment in response:

What kinds of writing have *you* needed to do to get into college/university or for any postsecondary courses you have taken? What writing skills did *you* need to be successful in classes?

We look forward to reading about your college-level writing experiences!

Again, Peggy’s session is Thursday, April 12 from 10:45 am – noon and 1:45 – 3 pm, and is currently scheduled for the Marriott III.  Be on the look out for a follow up post on her COABE session here on EFFTIPS!

 

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The Commission on Adult Basic Education (COABE) is hosting their Annual Conference in Norfolk, Virginia April 9th – 13, 2012.  For more information visit: http://www.coabeinvirginia2012.org/
You can also check out this link to the full conference program book  [pdf format].