I'm the GED Coordinator for an adult education agency in Missouri. We
understand our mandate to be serving adults with a need for basic or
secondary-level education whether or not they are working toward a GED
credential. Among the things we're doing to expand the perception of what we
do is offering a Transitions to College class. We have what I think is an
excellent class that combines a lot of information/conversation about
college issues with higher-level reading, writing, and math, and the few
students who have completed it agree. However, we have a lot of trouble
recruiting for the class. Students want to do it, but they have
transportation problems or schedule issues and can't commit to the
eight-week attendance requirement. We serve seven school districts, so
trying to offer a class in a central location is difficult.

We are considering changing models and having our Transitions teacher, who
is also an ABE/ASE instructor as well as a community college English
teacher, do the traveling. She would hold one Transitions to College session
per month at each of our sites. She would address issues such as time
management, financial aid, the work load, and so forth. Then we would
hope/expect that the demand for academics beyond the level required to pass
the GED Tests would increase systemwide, and all our sites would be working
on academics with Transitions students.

We might pilot this model for a few months to find out whether having the
teacher providing a teaser onsite would increase interest in and commitment
to the eight-week class, or alternatively, whether the traveling teacher
could provide enough information about college and the transitions academics
could be done on an individual basis so that the new model would address our
need to provide support for students transitioning to postsecondary
education.

I would be interested to hear any feedback, suggestions, or cautions you all
might have about our experience and our thinking here. Thanks!

Debra Morris Smith
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.nifl.gov/pipermail/assessment/attachments/20090205/a6278eab/attachment.html