Youth of Promise Projects

Online Case Stories and Instructional Strategies

The assessment tool will be linked to an online instructional manual for teachers. Part I of the manual is a compilation of case stories developed by a group of adult literacy teachers under the direction of Jean Lowe, former director of the nation's GED program. The first-person stories describe students and their goals for enrolling in an adult literacy program. They discuss instructional approaches implemented and give qualitative statements of the results. Each case story was presented to Lowe's group where it was fully discussed. Group members asked poignant questions regarding why specific approaches were used, what other approaches were ignored, and what the teacher may wish to consider for future instruction. These two to three page stories with discussions are followed by comments from the project director intended to offer additional insights from an experienced special education teacher and teacher education professor's perspective. At the conclusion of each case, instructional strategy suggestions are given with references to Part II of the manual, which focuses on instructional strategies.

Part II of the manual contains a compilation of instructional strategies for easy use by busy teachers.  Teachers may download a page at a time for instant use. In some respects, Part II is a recipe book of ideas with clear steps to follow.  This makes the strategies quickly available to the teacher and student. Even so, the strategies are presented in a manner that allows opportunities for students to construct their own knowledge. The need for students to construct their own knowledge underlies the process of strategies articulation. That is, the challenge for development of Part II is presentation of strategies that foster student ownership of learning with teacher guidance rather than presentation of teacher driven instruction that creates an atmosphere of teacher as the fountain of knowledge and the student as a recipient of that knowledge.

Case stories in Part I refer to specific strategies provided in Part II, but there are many instructional strategies included in Part II in addition to those referenced in Part I. A well-developed layered index has been engineered to allow teachers to "drill" into a topic or area for specific strategies that address specific student needs.

Part I of the manual is finalized and available for viewing by clicking the "Adult Case Stories" link on the menu to the left. Part II will be placed online in stages as strategies are prepared.