The new ABE license contains many concepts and ideas that lend themselves to staff development, regardless if you want to obtain the license itself. The license represents literally 30 years of discussion among Massachusetts practitioners about what teachers should know and be able to do to be effective ABE instructors. We propose using parts of the license, like a collection of useful tools, throughout the career lives of Massachusetts ABE teachers.

Let's look at some of the license components we feel can be put to wider use.

The Standards
At the heart of the new teacher's license are 29 standards, which cover practitioner skills from understanding individual learner needs through assessing your own professional development needs. We invite you to read through the standards (see pages 16-17); in our opinion, they provide useful benchmarks for professional development. Program directors, staff development trainers, and individual teachers often believe they know what ABE teachers need to know or be able to do, but here is an actual list to guide one's thinking. Not many states can boast such clear consensus on standards, so why not take advantage of them?

In themselves, the standards could form the basis of staff development needs surveys, teacher evaluation instruments, or orientation and training plans. Their use need not be very formal; an individual teacher, for example, could simply consult the list when thinking about what training, coursework, or reading she might want to do in the coming year. Just as important is for teachers to learn how much they might already know; if a teacher has brought herself far, it's very empowering to have that fact confirmed or reinforced.

Good Practice
The approved Regulations and Guidelines that govern the license do not make light reading—they are documents that need to meet legal criteria, after all—but both DOE and SABES are busily developing more reader-friendly support materials (see www.sabes.org/license). By just skimming the official documents, however, the reader will come away with some valuable impressions—for one, the importance of keeping up with new research; for another, the value of curriculum and lesson planning. Even the best teachers fall behind on new and promising ideas, or lapse into "winging it" rather than planning out lessons. From influences such as the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards project, or NCSALL's theory-to-practice efforts, the new license has been instilled with an emphasis on lifelong learning.

Feedback on Actual Teaching
There is a license requirement for a demonstration of teaching because everyone who worked on the license believes that teachers need direct feedback on their actual practice. Many programs might find the demonstration model useful. Briefly, teachers are asked to find a qualified observer (e.g., someone with ABE classroom and supervisory experience). Prior to the class observation, the teacher describes her learning objectives for the class; after the class, the observer indicates whether the teacher succeeded in meeting her objectives. This simple format can be expanded or contracted as programs, or groups of colleagues, see fit. By the same token, it can be as formal as an annual evaluation or as informal as peer feedback.

Sneaking in the License
We are not trying to be sneaky, but we would like to point out that teachers who use the license to guide their professional development (and keep relevant documents in a file cabinet or box in the attic) might wake up one morning and discover that they have met all the requirements for obtaining the actual license. It's important to realize that you do not need a big chunk of evidence for every single license requirement; a solid set of lesson plans, for example, could be used to cover half-a-dozen standards. The license is actually pretty efficiently designed, and it lets teachers meet standards through direct experience and in a flexible array of ways.

We hope you are now convinced that rifling through the license "toolkit" might have some solid advantages. We can report without reservation that teachers with whom we are working attest time and again that elements of the license are challenging them in exciting and rewarding ways.

Carey Reid is a staff development specialist at the SABES Central Resource Center. His job is to help practitioners obtain the ABE teacher's license. He can be reached by phone at 617-482-9485 or by e-mail at creid@worlded.org.