Aligning Curricula and Career Education for Student Success (ACCESS)

A Statewide Curriculum Alignment Initiative

Cal-PASS believes it is now time for the synergy of a large cross-PLC collaboration to use and showcase the expertise and talent of the PLC faculty in a statewide project. In addition, as we all know, the budget is a grave concern and our desire to maintain existing PLCs has led us to seek funding that would provide ongoing support for your work.

To that end, Cal-PASS has applied for and received grant funding from private foundations to lay the groundworkto align curricula of exit level competencies for English, math, and ESL courses from 11th grade through transfer level coursework in the community colleges. Many PLCs are already engaged in this type of work, and this grant will allow that work to continue and link PLC curricula alignment in a systematic and statewide manner. In addition, the project will integrate Career/Technical Education competencies in these basic skills as well as embed English, math, and ESL competencies in Career/Technical education coursework. We are calling this work the ACCESS initiative: Aligning Curricula and Career Education forStudent Success.

A total of26PLCs from across the state, involving over 300 facultywill be participating in this work. There are12 English, 1 ESL, and 13 math PLCs associated with the following community colleges:

  1. Chaffey College
  2. College of the Siskiyous
  3. Contra Costa College
  4. Grossmont-Cuyamaca CCD
  5. Merced College
  6. Rio Hondo College
  7. City College of San Francisco
  8. College of the Redwoods
  9. Santa Barbara City College
  10. Santa Rosa Junior College
  11. Sierra College
  12. Skyline College
  13. West Hills College

This document provides information about the grant about the work that math and English PLCs will be engaged in over the next two years. The language of the grant regarding the PLC work is below:

To improve student transition and success, there must be more systematic work dedicated to better aligned curriculum both in English and math as well as between these core skills and career/technical education courses from high school to post secondary institutions.

This work will pilot partnerships across the state focused on improving English, math, and ESL alignment across high school and community college segments and building contextualized curricula in CTE courses that embed these English, ESL, and math skill sets. In turn, contextualized examples will also be embedded in English, ESL, and math courses. The pilot project will have several outcomes including the following:

  • Develop exit competencies and entrance competencies for all ACCESS courses of interest
  • Create model assessment examples for all exit competencies, including embedding contextualize CTE examples into all coursework
  • Show how sequential courses within a discipline are currently aligned or misaligned, and make recommendations for how to align the curriculum
  • Create a curriculum map from 11th grade through transfer-level coursework at the community colleges
  • Draft curriculum guides, which include all of the components above, as faculty resources to inform their daily practice of teaching

This work will help to inform statewide efforts to better align the English, ESL, and math sequences from high school to college, and provide classroom faculty with contextualized examples of assessment materials to inform their practice. Curricula Guides that are the outcomes of this project will be distributed in June 2011.