After a decade of development, revision, and field testing by practitioners, SABES, and ACLS, the Massachusetts ABE Curriculum Frameworks are now in final form. According to Jane Schwerdtfeger, curriculum and assessment development specialist at ACLS (2005), "The goal of having curriculum frameworks is.to provide guidance to ABE programs for developing ABE curricula and instructional materials that are based in sound educational theory and rooted in the experience of practitioners and students."

The Frameworks are part of a larger effort to make assessment, curriculum planning, and instruction more congruent with each other. As Jane also noted, "The new ABE tests for Reading and Math were built on the Math and ELA (Reading) standards. If the standards outline what students should know and be able to do, then our goal is to have programs' curricula inform their instruction, and instruction aligned with the new tests. When all three are aligned, then the tests will be better able to capture literacy gains. These tests will replace our use of the TABE in 2006."

In my 20+ years of experience in ABE, I can safely claim that many ABE practitioners are resistant to mandates. We don't like being told what we should teach our students and how we should teach it. But the Frameworks don't restrict us in our teaching and curriculum planning; rather, they offer a tool to help us think through the integration of content, skills, and teaching strategies appropriate to our students. Unlike traditional curricula where everything is spelled out for you, the Frameworks do not "contain lesson plans or scope and sequence charts, but (they do) describe the components with which each program and teacher can design a curriculum that is relevant to the needs of their particular group of learners." (Bayer, et al., 2005)

Teachers who responded to this issue of Field Notes suggested that the Frameworks enhanced their practice by providing them with a structure for content-based instruction. Nancy Coffey, Vicky Hall, Michelle Faith Brown, and Susanne Campagna illustrate how they have used the Frameworks creatively in their teaching. To keep things concrete, we have included some of their lesson plans as tools teachers may want to adapt, or as models for using the Frameworks to suit your own curriculum and lesson planning.

The details of how the Frameworks are organized (strand, standard, benchmark, the numbering system, etc.) become clearer through frequent use. Wherever possible, I have chosen to keep the capitalization consistent with the capitalization in the published formats of the Frameworks. So, you will see the names of strands, standards, and benchmark capitalized. You will come across the term Frameworks to refer to the entire range of Curriculum Frameworks (ESOL, English Language Arts (ELA), Science, Technology, and Engineering, Social Studies, Math) and Framework to refer specifically to the content area discussed in that article.

I hope some of the articles in this issue expand your sense of possibilities about how the Frameworks can be used to your advantage. Make them work for you and for your students; they exist to enhance and improve your work, not to limit and restrict it.

Schwerdtfeger, J. (2005). "An update on the ABE curriculum frameworks." Field Notes 14 (4): 1, 5-6.
Bayer, J. et al. (2005). Introduction to curriculum frameworks and curriculum development. Boston: SABES.

Lenore Balliro is the editor of Field Notes. She may be reached at: lballiro@worlded.org