Literacy Assistance Center

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GED Institute 2002

In-depth Overview: Understanding & Teaching the New GED

Ira Yankwitt, Director of Professional Development/NYC Regional Adult Education Network

Changes in the GED

In January 2002, the General Educational Development Testing Service of the American Council of Education introduced a new series of GED tests. The aim of the redesigned tests, which had last undergone substantial revision in 1988, was to ensure that the content knowledge and thinking skills tested by the exam were consistent with the content knowledge and higher-order thinking skills expected to be mastered by high school graduates. To achieve this goal, the GED Testing Service (GEDTS) reviewed the content standards for English language arts, science, social studies, and mathematics from 13 states including New York, New Jersey, California, Massachusetts, and Michigan. GEDTS also reviewed national standards documents developed in the late 1980s and early to mid 1990s by organizations such as the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association, the National Science Teachers Association, the National Research Council, the National Council for Social Studies, the National Center for History in the Schools, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, and the National Center on Education and the Economy.

The result of GEDTS’s efforts was the creation of a new series of tests, each consisting of five subject-area subtests whose questions and demands reflect the substance of what students are expected to have learned by the end of high school. Because GED test-takers are typically interested in pursuing higher education or increasing their employability, the new GED places greater emphasis on higher education and workplace skills. The Language Arts Writing test now includes “how to” and business documents; it assesses the ability to organize and edit writing through both multiple-choice questions and an expository essay. The Language Arts Reading test concentrates on poetry, drama, and fiction, as well as nonfiction prose and workplace materials. The Social Studies test assesses knowledge of U.S., Canadian, and global history, civics and government, geography, and economics, with approximately 60 percent of the questions cast from a global perspective and 40 percent from a national perspective. The Science test focuses on life science, physical science, and earth and space science. It places greater emphasis on environmental and health topics and on the application of major ideas in science to everyday life. The Social Studies and Science tests include graphics in 50-60 percent of their questions, reflecting the increased need for adults to be able to read both written and visual texts in order to access information and develop critical understanding. The Math test addresses number sense, operations, probability and statistics, geometry, measurement, functions, patterns, and algebra. It requires test-takers to apply appropriate procedures, recognize concepts and principles, and employ strategies for problem solving. It also demands a greater integration of skills, places more emphasis on estimation and mental math, conveys much of its information through graphics, and requires test-takers to use a scientific calculator on half of the test.

Changes in GED Instruction

The alignment of the new GED with rigorous state and national standards presents both challenges and opportunities for instructors. On the one hand, the alignment of the new test with rigorous state and national standards places greater demands on instructors, who often have limited classroom resources, preparation time, and time allocated for professional development. On the other hand, because the new test places increased emphasis on content knowledge and higher order thinking skills, it allows GED teachers to move beyond a traditional “skill and drill” approach to instruction. Teachers who want to use participatory instructional methods and to integrate meaningful content now have the incentive and the rationale to do so.

The educational standards movement has had a tremendous impact on GED programs. Besides serving as the driving force behind the redesign of the test, it has also led many older adolescents, who have been told they are not going to meet state standards and pass high school exit exams, to drop out of school and enter GED programs. Many of these students come to programs with enormous misconceptions about the ease of the GED test, as well as with great wariness and bitterness toward formal schooling. This emotional element compounds the challenges for GED instructors. Not only do they need to re-envision their approach to curriculum and instruction, but they must also find ways to address a host of social and psychological issues they typically have not had to confront in classes comprised primarily of older adults.

Goals of the GED Lesson Planning Institute

In the fall of 2001, the Literacy Assistance Center and New York Citywide School to Work Alliance entered into a series of discussions designed to identify the types of instructional methods that best facilitate learning for older adolescents in GED classrooms. The goal was to develop an intensive model of professional development that would introduce these methods to a select number of GED instructors. The aim of the project was not only to serve the instructors chosen to participate in the pilot, but to generate a professional development manual, workshop modules, and GED curriculum materials that could easily be adapted by practitioners citywide.

The Literacy Assistance Center (LAC) is the hub of professional development activities for adult basic education, English language, and GED practitioners throughout New York City. From June 2001 through June 2002, the LAC held 18 GED workshops covering 10 different topics. The workshops were held both at the LAC and at conferences and staff development sessions throughout the city and state. As productive as these sessions were, “one-shot,” standalone workshops cannot provide the opportunities for reflection, classroom experimentation, and peer feedback that a multi-session professional development institute offers. Participants in the 18 workshops learned a great deal about the new tests and explored classroom strategies and activities designed to build specific skills, but they did not get a chance to look at instruction more systematically or explore a wide range of instructional methodologies.

The New York Citywide School to Work Alliance (STWA) works with educators to build their capacity to better prepare young people for future careers. Much of the work of the STWA is informed by the 1991 report “What Work Requires of Schools,” developed by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS). The SCANS report outlines five competencies and a three-part foundation of skills that the Commission argues are essential for meeting the demands of the 21st-century workplace. The competencies include the ability to:

  • Identify, organize, plan, and allocate resources
  • Work with others
  • Acquire and use information
  • Understand complex interrelationships
  • Work with a variety of technologies

The three part-foundation consists of:

  • Basic skills, including reading, writing, listening, speaking, arithmetic, and mathematics
  • Thinking skills, including creative thinking, decision making, problem solving, visualizing, knowing how to learn, and reasoning
  • Personal qualities, such as responsibility, self-esteem, sociability, self-management, integrity, and honesty.

The STWAs interest in the new GED is rooted in several factors:

  • The GED purports to assess the basic skills and higher-order thinking skills necessary to succeed in the workplace.
  • The GED is an indispensable credential for high school dropouts seeking to increase their marketability in the workforce.
  • An increasing number of young people in the STWAs target population are leaving traditional high school programs to enter GED programs.
  • Several of the STWAs partners, such as the NYC Department of Educations Office of Alternative, Adult, and Continuing Education, and the NYC Department of Employment, are now providing an increased number of GED classes to older adolescents and young adults.

The LAC and the STWA are steadfast in their belief that the most effective way of building basic skills, higher-order thinking skills, workplace readiness, and preparation for higher education is through active learning. The STWA defines active learning as a term used to describe a variety of student-centered learning strategies and methods that require the learners to take an active role in their own learning process and the teacher to take on a more facilitative rather than lecture-style role. Examples of these are cooperative learning, project-based learning, contextualized learning and applied learning. The STWA also points out that research shows that active learning fosters the skills (i.e., SCANS) that are necessary for career success in the modern workplace, i.e., problem solving, research, accessing information, appropriating resources, working well on a team, etc.

Through discussions with the LAC, the STWA agreed to sponsor a five-day, 35-hour GED Lesson Planning Institute for 20 instructors who teach GED classes specifically targeted to 1624 year olds. The principal goals of the institute were to:

  • Introduce participants to promising instructional practices that incorporate active learning methods
  • Develop model, peer-reviewed GED instructional plans that integrate these approaches

For their efforts, each participant would receive a $300 stipend on submission of their final instructional plan.

Forty practitioners applied for the institute; of those, 23 were accepted. Nineteen began the institute on the first day, and 17 of those completed their final instructional plan. In selecting participants, the LAC tried to create as diverse a group as possible: from new teachers to those with over 20 years of experience; from teachers in short-term, employment-focused programs to those in traditionally structured education programs; from teachers who were already familiar with some of the practices we were planning to introduce to those who were likely to be skeptical of any practice that challenged their classroom authority or control. Participants taught in a wide variety of settings: Department of Education GED programs, a City University of New York adult education program, union-based GED programs, community-based youth or employment programs, and a correctional institution.

The format of the institute was based on the premise that the best way to learn to use active learning methods is to engage in activities that incorporate those methods. During the planning process, the LAC remained aware that the participants in the institute were themselves adult learners. We considered the research in adult education that contends that, to best facilitate adult learning, instruction must be purposeful, transparent, and contextualized in the learners real-life interests and needs. This is true whether the adult learners are students in a GED class or instructors in a GED institute. We also took into account research in cognitive science that maintains that adults develop new knowledge, skills, and strategies by engaging in tasks that draw out and build on their existing knowledge and experiences. Placing new knowledge in, and interpreting new knowledge through, existing mental frameworks facilitates the development of new knowledge and expertise.

Based on these assumptions, and after careful review of the promising practices we were planning to introduce, we developed an institute that provided multiple opportunities for participants to:

  • Share their experiences as learners and teachers
  • Reflect on those experiences and draw tentative conclusions about learning and teaching
  • Compare and contrast their conclusions with those drawn from the literature on youth and adult education
  • Share examples of their own best practices
  • Develop new ideas and practices that integrated their emerging knowledge about the GED test, the 21st century workplace, higher-order thinking skills, and promising practices in youth and adult education into their instruction

Activities included individual exercises such as reflective writing and silent reading, small- and whole-group discussions, cooperative learning activities, individual and small-group presentations, and opportunities to experiment with new ideas and to learn by doing.

Outline of the GED Lesson Planning Institute

The GED Lesson Planning Institute was held in five sessions in April and May of 2002. In preparation for the first session, participants were asked to read the introduction and first chapter of the GEDTSs report Alignment of National and State Standards, as well as a short piece on key findings excerpted from the reports Executive Summary. The first reading provided background on the history of the GED test; an overview of the standards reform movement of the 1990s; and an explanation of, and rationale for, the effort to redesign the GED test to reflect state and national content standards. By completing the reading in advance, participants arrived at the institute not only with a deeper understanding of the new GED test and the educational reform movement encompassing it, but also with a greater command of the professional educational discourse that shapes their work.

Session one of the institute began with participants introducing themselves by orally completing six statements describing their background, the students they work with, and the most satisfying and challenging aspects of their work. This exercise was invaluable because it provided participants with an opportunity to find commonalities, acknowledge unique challenges, and build a level of trust and familiarity with each other. Much of the remainder of the day was spent exploring four key issues:

  • Characteristics of positive learning experiences
  • Differences between the teacher-centered approach to instruction typical of traditional K12 education and the student-centered approach more prevalent in adult education
  • Major changes in the new GED test and their implications for instruction
  • Competencies and skills needed for the 21st-century workplace and their implications for older adolescent and adult education

In examining each of these topics, participants engaged in personal reflection, small-group discussion, and whole-group discussion. They read an excerpt from adult educator Malcolm Knowless 1984 work, Andragogy in Action (Jossey-Bass, 1984). They compared Knowless distinction between the didactic, pedagogical model of youth education and the participatory, andragogical model of adult education to their own beliefs about, and approaches to, teaching older adolescents and young adults. They read the Executive Summary of What Work Requires of School: A SCANS Report for America 2000, in order to compare the skills, abilities, and traits that the SCANS report identifies as necessary for success in the workplace to their own experiences as workers. Midway through the first afternoon, the group had generated three lists: the key components and characteristics of positive learning experiences, the instructional implications of the new GED test, and the instructional implications of the SCANS skills and competencies. Not surprisingly, all three lists were compatible. They recommended the adoption of the more participatory, student-centered, active learning models that Knowles would associate with andragogy, rather than the didactic, teacher-centered, skill-and-drill models that Knowles would associate with pedagogy.

The final set of activities on the first day focused on critical thinking and the new GED test. Participants discussed what critical thinking meant to them and how they promoted it in their instruction. They compared and contrasted their ideas about critical thinking with Blooms taxonomy, the six-level hierarchy of cognitive skills developed by educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom in 1956. This taxonomy serves as the basis of the higher-order thinking skills embedded in the new GED. In the last exercise, participants read a GED-level text and then worked collaboratively in small groups to develop six questions based on the text, one for each cognitive level of Blooms taxonomy.

For session two, participants brought a resource they had found particularly effective in their instruction. They presented their resource in small groups: what it was, who they used it with, what they used it for, when and where they used it, why they used it, and how they used it. The groups then created a comprehensive list that characterized their members effective instructional practices. The lists were discussed by the entire group and synthesized into a master list.

The remainder of the second session was spent examining the first promising practice: theme-based, interdisciplinary instruction. Participants read a piece from Harvey Daniels and Marilyn Bizars Methods That Matter (Stenhouse, 1998) and then worked in small groups to identify the key components of the practice; the benefits and challenges of integrating the practice into GED instruction; how the challenges might be addressed; and how to re-envision the instructional practices they each described in the days first activity to fit the new practice. Participants concluded the second day by sharing their small groups insights with the entire group.

Session three of the institute took place one week later. In the interim, each participant was assigned a set of readings about one of four additional promising practices: project-based learning, the application of multiple intelligence theory to classroom instruction, small-group activities, and cooperative and collaborative learning. When the institute reconvened, participants broke into small groups based on the practice they had read about in order to engage in the same process of inquiry about the new promising practice as they had used in session two on theme-based, interdisciplinary instruction. After the small-group discussions, representatives from each group gave a presentation on the practice they studied, offering examples of how that practice could be integrated into instruction. The entire group then discussed and generated a list of features common to all the promising practices. They discussed ways the promising practices could promote the positive learning experiences they had identified in the first session and how the practices could better prepare their students for the new GED test and the 21st-century workplace.

The final set of activities in the third session focused on instructional planning. Participants wrote about a lesson that they had taught that was particularly successful, specifying the steps they took in the planning process that they believed contributed to its success. They worked in small groups to identify the elements of a model instructional plan and the questions GED instructors need to ask themselves when planning. Based on these small-group discussions, the whole group worked together to outline the key elements of a model GED instructional plan and to identify guiding questions that would facilitate the instructional planning process. As the session concluded, several participants pointed out that while this was originally billed as a GED Lesson Planning Institute, the promising practices discussed and the format of the instructional plan that was developed lent themselves to multi-session units and projects as well as single, standalone lessons.

Participants were given three weeks between sessions three and four to design instructional plans incorporating at least one of the promising practices that had been examined. When participants returned for the fourth session, they engaged in a formal process of peer review, modeled on the Statewide Peer Review process developed by the New York State Academy for Teaching and Learning. To conduct the reviews, participants worked in groups made up of four members. For each peer review, the group selected a facilitator/recorder and a timekeeper in addition to the presenter. Each peer review followed a uniform 45-minute format that included:

  1. Formal presentation of the entire instructional plan
  2. Uninterrupted positive feedback from group members
  3. Uninterrupted constructive criticism from group members
  4. An opportunity for the presenter to respond to the feedback and criticism and engage in open discussion with group members
  5. Development of concrete action steps for enhancing the quality of the instructional plan

To facilitate the positive feedback and constructive criticism, participants were asked to keep in mind the guiding questions for model GED instructional plans they had articulated in the previous session.

The fifth and final session was held a week later. Participants shared their final instructional plans with members of their peer review group. Each peer review group selected a representative plan to share with the entire group. The instructional plans developed ranged from a single, standalone lesson that used music in order to build reading and writing skills; to several multi-session, interdisciplinary units on topics such as manifest destiny, the Spanish-American War, and the environment; to an entire curriculum on fair trade and globalization. One instructional plan focused on career exploration. Another used the theme of education and the GED itself as a springboard for instruction. Another, designed for a union-sponsored Spanish GED class, incorporated project-based learning in an interdisciplinary lesson focusing on literature.

Evaluation

The GED Lesson Planning Institute had a profound effect on those who participated. The institute provided them with a framework to reflect upon current practice and an opportunity to experiment with new practices. It was both an overview of active learning models and a model of active learning. In the debriefing session and written evaluations at the end of the institute, many participants commented that the formal peer review process was one of the highlights of the five sessions, providing them with the opportunity to receive the type of serious collegial feedback that they seldom receive. As one participant wrote:

The peer review process was fabulous. It was a rare opportunity to have gifted teachers comment on your work. At my place of work there is no space to do that. I feel the process really made me take a look at what I was doing, and try to improve it. I was made accountable for improving it.

In general, written comments focused on the deep and immediate impact the institute had on participants attitudes towards their students, their feelings about themselves as teachers, and their classroom instructional practices:

It really did transform and expand my thinking about teaching these populations, thereby increasing my respect for what we are all trying to accomplish with them as teachers and co-learners. I am more open to students ideas, and flexibility in the design and implementation of my lessons. Im also more multiple intelligences-minded in my approach and try to be as interdisciplinary in my planning as possible.truly relevant, constructive, and forward-thinking. The skill/drill game is boring for adults and older adolescents. I knew this, yet I was uncertain as to how I could present the material needed to pass the GED with more intensity. Project-based learning and particularly integrated lesson plans are methodologies that enabled me to bridge the gap between boring skills and drills toward intensive, interactive lessons. The institute has greatly impacted my thinking about teaching older adolescents and adults. I now have to look at their situationwhere they are coming fromand rightly approach them. Each student is different from the others so I have to handle them in such a way as to help them have good self-esteem. As they are older adolescents, they will be involved in the things concerning them. I am a facilitator rather than an expert. It has helped me to realize the value of student-directed learning, i.e., using student backgrounds and interests as resources for lessons. I will also emphasize more flexibility with regard to learning styles in my lessons as a result of the Institute.

Finally, the participants noted the ways in which the institute itself modeled the promising practices it introduced:

In every workshop the practices were modeled, i.e., group work (small and then reporting out), collaborative learning and cooperative learning. [The facilitator] used real, concrete material. He pulled on information that we had and allowed us the time and space to share that information. Again, we were affirmed throughout the process. The facilitators behavior ideally modeled the promising practices of open-mindedness, flexibility, respect for all learners (their needs, preferences, and styles), and the ability to lead us into meaningful learning experiences without being overbearing or pedagogical. These behaviors, in my opinion, support the development of self-esteem in adult learners.

The Literacy Assistance Center is grateful to the New York Citywide School to Work Alliance for providing the support needed to develop an intensive professional development offering for GED instructors. Through the process of planning and facilitating the institute, we learned a great deal about the new GED test, active learning methods, and the real-life dynamics of GED classrooms serving older adolescents and young adults. As mentioned many times throughout the sessions, all of us are both teachers and learners, and as we teach, we learn.

GED Lesson Planning Institute Table of Contents


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