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United States: Nuns, Keys, and Writing Themes: Improving Critical Writing Skills in Adults and Teachers across New England

A long wooden table sits in the small conference room of a converted Catholic girls' school where a group of adults is writing intently in spiral bound notebooks. The group is diverse and lively: six or seven nuns who have worked together for over 20 years, a half dozen 20-something Americorps volunteers from across the country, and a number of adult immigrants and refugees whose first language is not English. Each is holding an old skeleton key, a catalyst for writing about a memory that they will read aloud and later revise.

This creative and self motivated group, the Notre Dame Education Center Writing Team, has been meeting in South Boston on Friday mornings for several months to work on their writing skills, to learn more about the writing process, and to experiment with strategies for teaching writing to students in adult basic education classes. In between these sessions they share materials and ideas with other colleagues and students. They also keep reflection journals on their teaching, personal journals and spelling notebooks, and they complete writing homework assignments between meetings.

Students and World Education's Lenore Balliro after
writing class.

The group has been part of an experiment in staff development sponsored by the System for Adult Basic Education Support (SABES), to improve skills, innovation and confidence among adult basic education teachers. Through five SABES regional resource centers across the state, teachers and students together gain skills and confidence in writing using experiential, theme-based exercises that deepen their knowledge and increase their comfort level over an extended period of time. Recent research in staff development for adult basic education programs supports this model, one which avoids a one-shot-workshop approach. As teachers become more comfortable with and knowledgeable about writing, their competence in teaching writing increases.

SABES supported six basic education programs last fall where students' skills in writing differ depending on their educational goals. For example, most of the students at the Center for New Americans in Western Massachusetts need help with writing when English is a second language, while students at the Valley Opportunity Council need more guidance on GED essay writing. In one program, a subcommittee of students created a student newspaper while others wrote and published letters to the editor in a local newspaper. One woman took the idea of dialogue journals-a literacy activity practiced in many programs-into her home and began using it as a way to communicate more effectively with her teenage daughter.

The results have been impressive: programs documented their experience by producing rich and extensive portfolios of their work, including samples of teachers' and students' writings. Formative evaluations conducted by an outside evaluator showed that 97% of participants were highly satisfied with their involvement with the project and felt that their knowledge of teaching writing deepened.

In the fall of 2004, SABES began a new theme: math instruction. SABES regional resource centers, in partnership with TERC, a nonprofit leader in improving math, science and technology outcomes for students through effective teacher training, will train and support a cadre of ABE practitioners to expand their math teaching strategies by integrating the themes of writing and math.

SABES, a statewide system for staff development in adult basic education, is entering its 14th year. For more information about the system, please visit the SABES website at www.sabes.org.


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