Taking Time to Talk:
Students and Teachers Setting Goals

Marty Tassi-Richardson
Blackstone Valley Regional Vocational Technical School

Deirdre McLaughlin
Barnstable County House of Correction

Haverhill Community Action’s “Entry Employment Experience Program” served (until its funding was cut at the end of June, 1994) 30 at-risk, drop-out youths aged 16 to 21 each year. The program was designed to give the participants necessary life and work skills, help them toward a G.E.D., and assist them in finding full-time employment, skills training or higher education as they completed the program. Marty Tassi-Richardson, a teacher in this program was the mentor in the Alternative Assessment Partnership Project. Marty has since been hired to teach in a similar program at the Blackstone Valley Regional Vocational Technical School in Upton, Massachusetts.

The Barnstable County House of Correction Adult Basic Education program offers classes in ABE, Pre-ASE, and ASE. The institution, which was built to house 75 inmates, now houses approximately 200. About ten percent of the inmates are female. At any given time, about half of the inmates are school drop-outs who do not have a G.E.D. Inmates who have a high school diploma or G.E.D. are able to attend classes to brush-up on skills. Classes are open-ended. Student population is very transient. Students are always leaving due to completion of sentence, parole, or transfer to another institution. New students are always arriving. Classes also have to compete with the opportunity to work at a job either inside the institution (kitchen, laundry, canteen) or outside (county farm, community service). Inmates may reduce their sentences by up to six days a month for attending classes (2 days), working (2 days), and participating in Lifeline or Inside-Out programs (2 days). Deirdre McLaughlin, a teacher at the Barnstable County House of Correction, is the mentee in the partnership project.

Martha Germanowski , a teacher for Haverhill Community Action, had developed the Educational Goals Assessment Package (EGAP) for use in her Step-By-Step program (an education program for the homeless in Amesbury)(see AiA, Fall 1991). Marty had adapted the EGAP for use in her youth program and had been using it for over a year when she became involved in the alternative assessment project. She felt that the package could be used more effectively and the project provided a structured way to explore this possibility.

Marty was concerned with a lack of engaged, thoughtful responses from many participants on both the initial intake assessment and the weekly log. She felt that if she more clearly defined the function of the assessment in the program for herself and students, they would respond in a more meaningful way. She wanted to make the use of the assessment tool meaningful and not just another “part of the program” to be gotten through as quickly as possible.

In the past, Deirdre’s intake involved the student’s filling out a form which asked basic questions necessary for completing DOE statistical reports: name, age, date of birth, place of birth, first language, last grade completed, possession of high school diploma or equivalency certificate, and ethnicity. The students were also asked their reason for wanting to attend education classes. At the same intake session, the students were asked to write a few paragraphs describing their last experience in school. They were asked to be specific about whether the experience was a happy one or an unhappy one and why. They were also asked what they hoped to accomplish in the classes.

After intake information is completed, Deirdre administers the TABE (Test of Adult Basic Education) to determine initial grade levels in reading, math and language. The new student is assigned to classes based upon the TABE results, with preference given to those who do not have the diploma or G.E.D.

In her program, Marty used the MAT (Metropolitan Achievement Test) to measure reading and math levels. In her program, Marty used the MAT (Metropolitan Achievement Test) to measure reading and math levels. Through discussions with students and observations, both engaged in informal double-checks on the accuracy of these stan- dardized assessments and the information they provided. Deirdre asks the student directly about how accurate they think the results of the test are. Marty used the adapted EGAP to do the same thing.

Deirdre’s main focus on entering the partnership project was to integrate student goals more formally into the program. Student goals had always been discussed, but had never been written down, except in a very small portion of the general intake form. Ongoing goals review and resetting had to be formalized.

Getting to Know Each Other
We met for the first time over lunch before the project’s April 8 meeting at DOE headquarters, though we had spoken on the phone the week before. At the April meeting we decided that we should formalize our ongoing assessment, making it a regular part of classes. We also wanted to rely more on student goal-setting and regular review of the weekly or monthly plans used to achieve those long-term goals. We decided that in order to improve the ongoing assessment, we had to improve the initial assessment process as well. We had to formalize our initial dialogue with students on their learning experience and standardized test scores. From there, we could create an ongoing dialogue which uses that initial assessment as a reference point to allow students and teachers to meaningfully assess their progress. We set dates to visit each other’s classrooms and agreed to read through the Tool Kit in the meantime, pulling out any relevant tools which we would consider in reworking our intake.

After visiting each other’s classrooms, we discovered that the environments and the populations we served had many similarities. The participants in both programs shared common educational backgrounds and faced some of the same obstacles. Most of the participants had experienced some degree of academic, social and emotional difficulty in their previous school experiences. In some cases these were complicated by drug and/or alcohol abuse or physical abuse at home or in school. Poor attendance was a problem in both programs for all of the above reasons.

What differed were the practical day-to-day procedures. Deirdre works with students of all ages. She may see a given student only once a week for 2 hours, or up to three times a week, depending on the student’s need to work on reading, math, and/or language. Marty’s program met five days a week for three hours a day and was limited to 16 to 21-year-olds . Deirdre may have up to 80 students at any given time, some working on only one subject area, and others on several areas. Because their class hours are more limited, some of the things Marty decided would be appropriate for her program were not feasible for Deirdre. Deirdre’s program often had to compete with constantly changing jail schedules for work details, court appearances, medical appointments, visits, etc.

When Marty visited Deirdre’s program in April, she was dissatisfied with how the weekly objectives sheets she had been using with her students had been working. Students were not consistent in filling them out and didn’t feel that they were necessary. Students had been setting objectives on Monday, and reviewing them on Friday. Marty’s discussion with Deirdre led to the conclusion that weekly plans needed to be an integral part of each class day. The previous year, Marty had students set and track objectives each class day. This had seemed to be too much for students and had led to the abbreviated process she was using this year.

Our ongoing discussions led to the development of a new process. Marty will ask students to set objectives at the beginning of the week, but will ask them to comment on their work toward those objectives each day. These weekly plans will be filed along with the initial intake form, developed as a result of this partnership project, for teacher and student reference. Marty will also meet monthly with each student and the program counselor after program hours. For these meetings, the student would be given a copy of his/her file which included the initial intake form. The teacher and the counselor would review the forms beforehand in order to focus on the student’s successes and in order to encourage further achievement. Students might wish to modify their original responses and / or goals. Deirdre’s students will review objectives on a monthly basis, but she will ask students to write a brief comment about the list, what’s been accomplished, problems, etc., each week. She started using the goal sheets with a pilot group of ten students in June.

In order to create the new intake form, we pulled items from the Toolkit and combined them with Marty’s adapted EGAP. Some ideas from the Toolkit were added verbatim; others were modified in ways which we thought may produce more of a response from our students. We rearranged the order of questions on the intake a number of times. One major change we made to Marty’s adapted EGAP was taking out the Career Goals and Personal Goals sections and substituted it with a section of questions that would encourage students to think more creatively and in-depth about goals and objectives.

At the June 3 project meeting, we were both fine-tuning what had been produced. Even as we passed out samples to other mentor-mentee partners at the meeting, we had to explain that we were going to rearrange certain sections.

We both felt that working together was a wonderful experience. The way that the partnership project was set up enabled us to accomplish a lot in a short period of time. Our meetings and conversations gave us a chance to problem-solve and brainstorm. Having a partner often encouraged us to see things from a different perspective and to get feedback so that the process of eliciting and implementing solutions was much more efficient. The larger project meetings gave us a further chance to reflect on the partnership and share ideas. All this in turn enabled us to better meet the needs of our students, which is our most important GOAL.

See Intake Forms >>

This article was published in Adventures in Assessment, Volume 7 (December 1994), SABES/World Education, Boston, MA, Copyright 1994.

Funding support for the publication of this document on the Web provided in part by the Ohio State Literacy Resource Center as part of the LINCS Assessment Special Collection.