DTI – STAR PANEL
MARCH 12, 2007
CHAPTER TWO: A Context for STAR Implementation (Featuring Dr. John Strucker)
Grace: In this segment of our conversation, I’d like to talk a little bit about the change process and states’ readiness to begin improving reading instruction. Dr. Strucker, why is STAR, something like STAR needed at the intermediate level?
John: Well I, thanks Grace. I think to answer that question, we should start with the challenges presented by the intermediate learners that Cheryl was referring to. These are the folks from grade five to nine in their reading comprehension. The fact is that this is a very, very diverse population, and to date, teachers in the field have not received much training in how to work with them. I think we have a pretty good idea in the field of what we want to do with adult beginners, the folks who are just starting out, just barely learning to read. We know that structured language approaches, and direct instruction seem to work well for them. And I think we do a heck of a good job getting people prepared for pre-GED and then on to the GED or adult diploma, focused on those skills. It’s no accident that people at the intermediate level, those at grade five to nine, present such a challenge because of their diversity. One size can’t fit all with them. They have a lot of different reading profiles; that is different profiles of strengths and needs in the components of reading, vocabulary, alphabetics, fluency, comprehension. You could see all different combinations. Some people are good at fluency, they read well with good word recognition but they have vocabularies that are not sufficiently developed. Other people have pretty good vocabularies, but they don’t read fluently. So one size doesn’t fit all. In addition, the other thing about this population is that, many of them are native speakers of English who’ve gone through U.S. schools, but they also include folks who are not native speakers of English, people who are immigrants to the United States who may have even transferred from ESL programs into, ABE intermediate classes. So, what this means is that, there’re a bunch of challenges that programs and states have to face in order to implement, how to work with these students.
Grace: So, how does a state know if their state and local programs are ready for STAR?
John: Well, I think any state taking on STAR is going to face two big challenges, and I want to talk about each of them for a minute. The first is, you got to get into managed enrollment, and the second problem that is going to be faced down at the site level and the classroom level is you need to be able to create time for teachers to do diagnostic assessment. So let me talk first for a minute about managed enrollment. As you may well know, open enrollment is actually the norm in our field in adult literacy. Recent studies suggested that eighty percent of the programs across the country follow an open enrollment model where students are free to enroll at different times in the semester, and where there aren’t really stringent controls on how many times they can drop in and out, or how many classes they can miss, and even in some cases whether they can be terribly late to class. That tends to be the norm. But in order to implement focused instruction, which is a sequence based on diagnostic assessment and which attempts to target specific profiles of students, you really need managed enrollment. You need to have basically the same folks in front of you in the beginning of the semester or term that you do at the end. We know that some people will drop out, but what, it’s very difficult to try to follow a sequenced curriculum in vocabulary or fluency or comprehension or alphabetics if people are rotating in and out of the class the way they do in an open enrollment situation. So that requires a kind of high level of commitment at the state level to do. And then each site is going to have to find its own solution to how to implement managed enrollment in their site with their population and their teacher staff. The other thing that needs to happen, as I mentioned, down at the classroom level is that teachers need to have the time to do diagnostic assessment. We estimate that the kind of assessments that are taught to teachers in STAR would take about thirty to forty-five minutes per person to do, and they have to be done individually. So, teachers have to find a way, working with colleagues or volunteer teachers, which I used to do when I was in the field, to have their classes covered so that they can meet early in the semester with students and then place them accurately and then design instruction that’s focused to their needs. I guess the other thing that we learned in the STAR pilot training, which involved six states, and we heard this from everybody at all levels of….of the STAR program, from teachers to program directors to state officials and state directors, there has to be a lot of communication up and down the line; not just from the top down, but from the bottom up and in between, because it involves a lot of on-the-fly problem solving to find ways to implement managed enrollment and diagnostic testing. So you’ve got to have that kind of communication and creativity so that people at one level can share with people in another, and people at different sites within a state can share what they’ve learned with their colleagues at other sites. So I’d say that that sort of commitment up and down the line is really critical.
Grace: Thank you for that, John.
3
Star Panel