High-Quality Webinars for Professional Development
The NCTN partners with adult education, workforce, and community organizations and colleges from across the country to incubate and pilot innovations in policy, provide technical assistance, and promote professional development.
Academic Vocabulary Development
Participants compare their own ideas about vocabulary knowledge and its development in adult ESOL students against current definitions, and understandings in the field. After a brief review of the research, a variety of instructional strategies and digital tools are introduced that support students’ academic vocabulary development in intermediate and advanced adult ESOL courses to provide students with an adequate foundation for postsecondary coursework and career training.
College and Career-Focused Program Models
This webinar explores two major shifts in the field of adult education and workforce training named in the WIOA legislation to help one consider what these shifts mean for program design and classroom practice. Two approaches, Minnesota Fast Trac and LaGuardia Community College’s Bridge to College and Careers Program, explain how these two approaches strengthen pathways and move more students into postsecondary education and the workplace.
College and Career Ready Science Teaching Sampler
Science instruction is a perfect fit for the recent shifts in adult education instruction focusing on college and career readiness. These shifts include building knowledge through the use of complex, content-rich informational text and attention to coherence and rigor. This webinar provides a tour of free, high-quality science teaching and learning resources that help instructors weave quality content and learning resources into their curriculum.
ESOL Transitions Framework
This webinar introduces the Life Skills, College, and Career Readiness Guide for ESOL Learners Guide, a resource that includes a collection of tasks that teachers can use in their classrooms to build the skills that students need to succeed in their next steps. The guide provides dozens of suggested activities at all three NRS class levels, but it can be adapted in ABE classrooms as well.
Findings from the Adult Transitions Longitudinal Study
Learn about the findings from the ATLAS study, implemented by UMass Amherst and World Education with funding from the Nellie Mae Education Foundation. ATLAS followed over 200 ABE-to-College transition course participants for five years to uncover the factors that influenced them in enrolling, persisting, and succeeding in college.
Getting College and Career Ready in Science
This webinar explores changes occurring in adult education that bode well for science teaching and learning, especially the inclusion of science as a content area for rigorous English and mathematics college and career readiness instruction, and high school equivalency tests.
Program Design and Implementation: Focus on El Paso’s Experience
This webinar shares a brief history of the pioneering El Paso, Texas’ transition program at its inception and what it looks like now. Presenters identify and discuss some of the strengths and challenges similar to both native and non-native speakers of English preparing to transition to a postsecondary institution, as well as the strengths and challenges unique to ESOL adults.
Program Models and Resources for Serving English Language Learners
This webinar explores major shifts in the field of ESOL and adult education named in the WIOA legislation. Listen to a practitioner-led dialogue facilitated to help one consider what these shifts mean for program design and classroom practice. Learn about successful program models and practices from LaGuardia Community College’s Center for Immigrant Education and Training and World Education, Inc.