Texas Adult Education and Literacy Content Standards

The Adult Education division of the Texas Workforce Commission contracted with the Texas Center for the Advancement of Literacy and Learning (TCALL) at Texas A&M University to provide training for adult educators on a new set of Texas adult education content standards. AIR worked with TCALL to provide training to 120 instructional coaches from adult education programs in all parts of the state. The training consisted of four days of workshops over the course of a year, each with a pre- and post-webinar, and three follow-up webinars to support the coaches as they worked with their teaching colleagues on standards implementation.

Training focused initially on becoming familiar with the standards in the areas of English Language Arts, Mathematics and English as a Second Language, on relating instruction to the standards and ensuring the instructional topics were included in the standards and that all standards topics were covered. Training also included instructional coaching strategies such as listening, classroom observations, and providing effective feedback.

In the second phase of the project, the Texas Workforce Commission developed a new version of the standards that related every standard to work activities and industry examples from four high-growth industries in Texas: construction and extraction; health care science; transportation, logistics, and distribution; and advanced manufacturing. AIR provided training for instructors, career navigators, and program administrators on using the new standards to contextualize instruction to employability skills and specific work environments.