Neil Kelly: Thanks, Veronica. Hi. This is Neil Kelly from the State CAEP office. I just wanted to welcome everyone and let you know that the CB21, EFL, and Curriculum Alignment has been going on, I think, we started once we got our original 500 million with the adult ed block grant, which is now California Adult Ed program. And that was way back in 2016, '17 or so. And we started looking at this issue through measuring our success report which formed some cross-functional teams with K-12 teachers and community college faculty.

We looked at adult basic education, ESL, we also looked at CTE, and then AB705 came about. So there's been a lot of work in this area. There still is ongoing efforts in this area as people still grapple with moving students through from adult education and noncredit to credit side of the house and what that looks like and tracking student progression.

So I'm looking forward to today's webinar because this is really important stuff. Although it's been buried as a result of the pandemic, we do want to remind everybody that it hasn't gone away. And with that, I think I'll turn it over to Randy, are you going to be the lead here? Or is that Blaire?

Randy Tillery: It's Blaire. I answer to her now.

Neil Kelly: OK.

Blaire Toso: Oh, right, for five slides. [laughter]

Neil Kelly: All right. I'll turn it over Blaire.

Blaire Toso: Thanks, Neil. Thanks, Neil. Thanks, Veronica. We appreciate your support, Veronica and the whole CAEP team who makes this webinar possible and really gets all the details together. And then Neil, thanks for kicking it off and underscoring the importance of this topic.

Let's go ahead and get started. So this is everyone who's going to be presenting on this. And I particularly want to highlight that, as Jessica noted, we have two guest presenters-- Alison Robertson from Cypress College and Jan Young from Glendale Community College. And just right up front, I'd like to thank them for sharing their expertise. They're going to be our voices from the field and really talk about what we lay out up front, what that really looks like in the work that can be done on the ground.

Quick agenda-- intros, we're going to overview AB705 and talk about what went into that and what made it feasible and concrete for the field. And we're going to talk a little bit about how CB21, why it's important for the AEP dashboard. And then we'll be moving to our panelists, Jan and Allison.

Before we get started, what we really wanted to do is, I know we get into the policy, and we talk about rubrics, and we talk about data. But up front, what this is really about is supporting your learners and on their journey. And so we'd like to get a context to this and talk about particular students who are really supported by this work.

And as you can see, this is a student who was interviewed. And this is her journey is that she started out the California Community College, and she went into the ESL program. And her achievement was that she went for the noncredit ESL program, went to cosmetology certificate, and is now enrolled in AS and an ADT in accounting. And eventually, she would really like to work legally.

And so through here, you can really see how that journey threads, that educational journey threads to support both her life goals and her career goals. This is her story. And what I'd really like to pull your attention to is where she started taking her ESL classes.

And then she was recommended to enroll in a community college ESL program. For two years, she took those pieces. And you know what that looks like with your learners, how it's a dedicated time that they've got a lot more than just their education going on. And the fact is that the CB21 is to help enable that journey, to make smoother transitions.

And as we talk about the rubric, you'll really think about alignment so that learners who have busy lives and complicated lives, how this supports them in making those smoother transitions and access. And recently, we were talking to some adult learners who had transitioned into the community college, and they were talking about how registering for classes was one of the most difficult pieces of that journey. So anything we can do to make the journey a little bit more explicit is really helpful.

And you can see that these are some of the challenges that she encountered on her journey and why maybe just making the education route a little bit more streamlined is important, because she talks about the lack of connection to faculty. That move that CB21 really begins to facilitate is from the noncredit-- from adult education into the credit side and where she benefited from these pieces. And you can really see the prevalent role that teachers have in this journey.

So I'm going to turn it over to Randy, who really was-- he was really involved, as you'll see, in this process of making AB705 something that actually meant something to the field so that we could understand what it was all about and put the policy into practice.

Randy Tillery: Great. Thank you, Blaire. So just because this is going to be a fairly dense presentation and a little bit, as Ricky Ricardo would say, kind of splainy. I wanted to basically be sure that people were clear in a couple of acronyms will be taught using all the time. And one of which is what CB21 means and what it means when we say Educational Functioning Level. Every time we do one of these webinars, we have a lot of new people for whom one or the others that these may be somewhat mysterious.

So CB21, in the community college system, really refers to a course code in the management information system for the chancellor's office that, in the words of the actual data element is, a course level below the college level course for math, English, or ESL. I'm not sure if we held that language, if that's the way it was defined originally. So there's a whole series of courses below that transfer level English course, that transfer level math course, as well as in ESL that allow students to build their skills to be able to take that if they're on a transfer pathway in particular.

So it's based on a rubric developed by faculty and the academic senate. And student progress really would be measured, in this case, by course progression. So you're taking a course coded at one CB21 level. When you take the next course at the higher level, we know that you've progressed on your skills. This has both been really great and really problematic at different times, which is why the alignment with the EFLs is really so exciting in terms of providing a common standard. And we'll talk about how that came to be.

The other key concept that's important to know is the educational functioning level, which is the EFLs-- and we will say EFL all the time. It's a federally determined rubric for assessing an adult learner's level of skills in math, English, or ESL, English language proficiency. And typically, this is used in WIOA Title II. It involves pre and post testing with Federally approved instruments, such as CASAS, TABE, and others. It is also developed and informed by faculty, and psychometricians, and folks like that, and it's used for reporting student progress under WIOA Title II programs. If you're a WIOA Title II institution, you know all about that because you basically live and die by these things. So next slide.

Oh, and then understanding these-- [laughs] yeah, that's good. No, don't go back. Go, ahead, Blaire because I'm actually good. OK. So what I'm going to talk about here for a second-- and this is the one time I'll probably do more expository-- is why should CB21 matter to adult educators?

And one of the reasons it matters-- and you'll see in a second is that one of the things the legislature was explicit about is transition to post-secondary education, which, in their minds, by means transition to college is incredibly important and was one of the driving reasons why they created the CAEP program, then called the AABG program. There was a much stronger emphasis on transition to post-secondary education, post-secondary credentials, as well as jobs and wage increases than there had been in previous iterations of how adult education as a framework was meant to be accountable for the impacts on adult learners.

And so that's one of the reasons that, really, understanding both the CB21 framework and the EFL framework are critically important for whether you're an adult educator or a college practitioner to understanding how you can build programs that can really facilitate that journey. And I will say that while I said that today's presentation is going to be a little bit splainy, this is really a teaser to get ready for a whole professional development series and community of practice that we want to implement in the fall that will look at the role of adult education as a gateway to college, that we're not just saying post-secondary education.

We want to look at all the dimensions of what it would mean for adult education to really become that pathway for adult learners who aren't ready to go straight to the college. And that'd be identifying and reaching populations who would benefit from the dual-value proposition of getting a better job and going to college, like opportunity youth, or disconnected youth, or adults in need to dislocated workers in need of training to really get that pathway to the middle skill job. How it can really connect college and adult education pathways in new and innovative ways.

And particularly, you're connecting adult education pathways to guided pathways in the college system, what it means to develop highly-integrated bridge programs, where you're not just saying, now, you're at the adult school, and now, you're at the college. Now, you're at the adult school, but you're also taking a college credit course. And you have maybe faculty at the Adult School who meet the minimum credentials to teach noncredit course. So you're using all of the tools in the toolbox to define these highly effective bridge models to really help students make that journey and then digging in on the curriculum as well, in particular, going deeper around CB21 and the EFLs and how you define how you define the basic skills trajectory or progression of students that gets them to post-secondary education faster, so they can really accelerate that journey towards middle skill jobs.

And we don't know for sure at this point if this is actually included in our CAEP scope of work or not because we actually haven't gotten our contract yet. But we're actually developing these tools as we speak. And if it's not part of our CAEP work that goes through SCOE, we will offer it independently to the field to be sure that it gets out there and is available to you. Blaire?

So one of the ways I think about the relationship between CAEP and AB705 is CAPE sets the goal, and AB805 sets the rules. So in the original legislation, AB104 in 2015, that's when they identified transition to post-secondary education, and completion of post-secondary credentials were two of the seven measures that the legislature really cared about. So thinking intentionally about this transition to college then becomes an important part of the puzzle although college is not the complete continuum of what we mean when we say post-secondary education. And we know it's important to the legislature. And if we can pay attention to that, it will be important.

The legislation also required the alignment of assessment processes and policies between the systems, which made looking at things like the EFLs and the CB21 and how they relate to each other really critically important and understanding how each system thinks about progression and student skills. And it just really created the need for greater alignment between the college and the frameworks for measuring students skills and progress.

Then AB705 came along, and it changed all the rules for how students get placed into college level courses. And it also changed the role of developmental education in the College system. And just really two years after CAEP started, and when we started doing some deep work around crosswalking things, then AB705 5 changed the rules and really eliminated, for the most part, the use of placement tests to put students into transfer level math or English. It created time frames for students to complete transfer math and English once they come to the system. It's one year for math or English, up to three years for ESL.

But the target for ESL is still transfer-level English so that within three years, someone who comes in and they start the ESL pathway should get to that transfer level English class within three years. It requires multiple measures, including the use of high school transcripts where available to actually guide the placement process into college level math and English rather than using the placement test. And it really changed the purpose for CB21, that rubric and framework the colleges use, because you were no longer going to have these extended sequences of credit-bearing developmental education courses, where students could be taking six or seven courses to get to transfer level math or English, which we know is basically a road to nowhere because students starting four levels down in the sequence very rarely made it to the transfer level course and did not succeed.

There was also some really interesting evidence that if you allow students to place themselves into transfer level math or English, the odds for success were about the same as if you used the placement test. So it began to become like, why are we even thinking about it this way? So these are the two things that really guide it. And like I said, CAEP really set the goal. And then AB705 really then set up all the rules that we have to think about if we're trying to look at helping students really make that journey. Blaire?

And what this really meant-- so this is the old CB21 course data elements. And you can see in some places, it's six levels. In some places, it's eight levels. I have heard, back in the bad, old days with colleges setting up ESL sequences of 11 or 12 levels. So these things did not align directly. But what was clear when we did the initial planning work with the Chancellor's Office that included K-12 adult educators and college practitioners is that in order to have a consistent framework for how students can make that transition from adult education to college, we were going to have to align these frameworks in some way, so instead of two systems with two frameworks, you really would have one solution for everybody.

And so then you had just AB705, which had all these rules associated. We had AB104 that had this whole consortium process. Thank you, Blaire. Keep going. Stop. [laughs] And in some sense, because the EFLs are Federally defined and were not going to change, if we were going to align these things, the alignment really had to be on the CB21 side, that that was where we had state control over the rubric and the framework where we could actually do some work. And we actually approach this in two different ways that relate to when AB705 was passed. Blaire?

Oh, keep going. There we go. So-- no, back. [chuckles] In 2017 and '18, we actually started Crosswalk. This is before AB705 was initially passed. So we had these big working groups, and we were looking at the EFLs and CB21 and trying to determine what level related to what level, which created all these kinds of crazy charts with arrows going back and forth. And you'd have competencies that may show up at one level and other competencies that might show up at another level related to the same EFL. And we were in the middle of that process when the legislature passed AB705, which changed all the rules. And so then we were like, well, why did we do all this work?

But what AB705 did is it created momentum in the system to ask the question, what should CB21 really be about? And if we aren't going to be using CB21 and all the levels in CB21 on the credit side of the house so much, maybe what we do is we look at this adult education noncredit kind of relationship and how we can think about leveraging CB21 to give tools to the field, to strengthen the ability of them to design programs that say, oh, you're at this level in the EFLs at the Adult School. You're at level 4. If you go over to the college, they actually now have a pathway into transfer level pathway or a CTE pathway at the college.

So you can play with that and think about what that looks like. And on the college side, I've seen noncredit and credit sequences that parallel each other. They actually of a collegiate and non-collegiate noncredit sequences. And when they get to a certain level and the non-college sequence, they're like, that's when they start talking hard to them about college. You're at this level. You clearly have the capacity to do more work. And they can move them over into the transition or the Bridge Program that then accelerates them into the Credit Pathway.

So in 2018 and '19, what we did is, we got basically the academic senate-- thanks, in large part, to passionate people like Jan-- to agree that we should look at revising CB21 to match the federal EFLs. If you have six levels in math, English, and ESL for adult education, we would have six levels for math, English, and ESL for CB21, which, by no means, meant it was a done deal. It just meant we had agreement to actually gather faculty together and bring the senate into the room to help guide the process to see if we could actually do that. Blaire?

And so the purpose of the process in terms of revising CB21-- and it was really to integrate objectives around quantitative reasoning math, English and reading courses, and ESL, and then really aligning the federal EFLs with the rubrics used by the community colleges, in particular the noncredit programs, but also quantifying how those lead to credit, like where you get to and where the credit level-- where the transfer level course actually sits in relationship to all these noncredit levels. And so figure out what that would look like.

I'm not going to talk about CID here. That's a whole other thing that I would have to define for you, and it's an acronym I wasn't prepared to talk about. I know a lot about it, but I don't want to spend 10 minutes on it. And it's enabled faculty to really have the conversation about what kinds of skills they were teaching and how they thought about levels and to get very, very granular. I remember an hour long conversation about what it meant to say that a student could do this with support. And people from the adult ed side had one definition. People from the college side had another definition and getting clear about the language about what we meant by actually what was in the EFLs and, thereby, how we were going to handle that within CB21.

Then the goal was to have one consolidated rubric to facilitate alignment. And then to really to use the aligned rubrics to strengthen our ability to say that students are accomplishing skills. So if a student pre and post tests in CASAS, and they've achieved in EFL, and they've gone to a higher level course in CB21, we can say they've basically mastered the approximate same set of skills so that when we display something on the launch board that says the student gave one or more EFLs, we're actually looking at a more unified way of thinking about what that means.

So like I said, the goal is to revive CB21 to match the Federal EFL levels. There were moments where college faculty said things like, well, like are we just becoming adult ed now? That with all the weird things that people say in the early parts of conversations. But when people really dug in, it went really well. There were three primary workgroups-- math, ESL, and English. They use the revise the new EFLs because people remember three or four years ago, they changed the EFLs and revised them to better match the college and career readiness indicators in OCTE.

And we use the common assessment initiative rubric to develop the revised rubrics because the old CB21, as it sat, was pretty thin in places. It actually didn't teach geometry according to CB21 in math. And so the common assessment initiative had been through an exhaustive process with college faculty for a very long time. And the CAI rubrics had much more detail and texture about what we said students were actually accomplishing and learning at different levels. So we used that, so that brought additional detail and texture to the development of the rubrics themselves.

They included credit, noncredit, and K-12 adult ed faculty. The math and English groups were far superior and met twice and actually nailed down their rubrics fairly quickly. English, I think, was the easiest. Math had to figure a few things out. And then ESL took a year. Maybe it was because I was in charge of ESL. I'm not sure. But I think, as folks know, there's a lot to think about in terms of the diversity of students who enter ESL pathways.

So it was a much, much longer process. We had a main work group that met a few times. And that we had a subgroup of four or five faculty that included people like Kathy Wada from Cypress and Lisa Johnson from CCSF, who just dug in and kept meeting. Whether or not I thought they should be done, they kept meeting for a year to get the ESL piece done. And as such, I think it's a really marvelous group of work.

There were parallel groups that were establishing goals for the process and how this all related to AB705, and including identifying what the recommendations were for MIS changes for reporting. Blaire?

I think this is my last slide. And so I'm just going to revisit, how does alignment help? Well, it establishes equivalency between student skills gains, whether you're measuring it, by pre and post testing with CASAS or TABE and whether there's course progression and developmental education courses taken by students in noncredit programs. It allows us to have a common language about what those skills gains mean and that there's some proximal relationship between what happens in the EFL and pre and post testing and what happens in terms of course progression.

It supports multiple methodologies for tracking skills gains in the LaunchBoard. Like I said, we captured data using pre and post testing for CASAS provided to us by CASAS. We have a data element that allows using other federally approved instruments, like TABE. And then we also use course progression in CB21 coded math, English, or ESL courses to also capture EFL progression in the LaunchBoard.

And then I think the most important thing is it creates common targets for K-12, adult ed, noncredit, and credit practitioners to develop transition and bridge programs from adult education into post-secondary education and college. And my largest hope is that we have the ability to dig deep on that sometime in the future to really get math, and English, and ESL faculty to have hard conversations about what's in their courses and how they could impact those and then re-tweak them in ways that really facilitate the student journey and develop more common language around what we're teaching and why it matters. And I think that's my last slide, Blaire.

Blaire Toso: I think so, except I think you were actually going to talk about the rubrics. We went ahead and took a screen capture of each of the rubrics. What I do want to point out is, here at the bottom of the screen is the link. It's a little bit difficult to find them. When you go to this link, you have to scroll down on that document to actually access them. There'll be a little link at the very bottom of the page that will take you to them, which is another reason we'll send out the rubrics. But, Randy, you were going to say a little bit about each of the rubrics.

Randy Tillery: Yeah. A couple of things when-- and, really, it's more about the general structure of them. What you can see in the-- [audio out] --and i think this is really the important part is you can see we tried to identify both the CB21 level, where that sits in relationship to the transfer level course. So if this is English, it would be English Composition is the standard transfer level course for English. But it also identifies the EFL level. And then they added Lexile measures, which I don't know enough about to say exactly how that's defined. But I think, for those of you who are in English, that's probably pretty important to as another way to anchor the work.

And then we break it up into groups of tasks, like writing assignments, reading and critical thinking, organization development, and thesis central idea, mechanics, grammar, and syntax, research and resources, additional considerations, voice technology, and teamwork. And then as you go down through the levels, what you'll see is there's quite a bit more detail than there is in the National Reporting System Educational Functioning Levels, in the EFLs.

And part of that was the creative college faculty had done such exhaustive work and with real detail around the types of assignments, the types of activities, that it seemed reasonable to load some of that information into here as well and to figure out where it fit so that when you're having conversations, it clarifies some of those differences in definition that faculty may have when they're using the same word in different contexts. I will say, in terms of the words meaning different things, math is always so great because you say a word in math, it means the same thing to everybody if you're a mathematician, which always makes those conversations really fun. And I think you'll see the same attention throughout. Like, this is-- I don't know if this is math. Yeah, this is math.

So this isn't quite as detailed. And this is something, actually, Jan, we probably could look at [laughs] as I'm looking at the levels there in the math side. And I will say that there was a gap. And I think the COVID impacted these. These all got done a year and a half or so ago. And then we had COVID.

So even we had a hard time finding the rubrics online getting ready for this presentation. And a lot of them still say draft on them. They're actually not draft. They are actually done. But it doesn't mean they're done in terms if we wanted to be sure that we're providing better contextual information that doesn't affect the content. It's something we could probably look at. And probably, we have an example from ESL last.

And once again, it's a similar general structure. We did talk about a lot of the international standards for ESL as well as some of the standards that are used here in the United States as a part of this. So this is just an example because there are several groups that handle the structure of it a little bit differently in some cases.

But I think we are open to feedback generally about how we can be sure. Make these more usable is probably the most important thing. Like, I could almost see turning them into interactive tools or something like that that people could use to explore. I think it would not be hard to do something like that given the fact I had an exhaustive conversation with Cathy about building tools yesterday. And that's where I'm going to pivot back to Blaire.

Blaire Toso: Super. Thank you. And I'm going to go over this very quickly. As Veronica said, she's going to be sending these all out. We just wanted to make sure that there was a link established between what this all means as well as the adult education pipeline because you do want to code for CB21 in MIS. So this is why you want to use it. It's because it's used in all of these metrics. You can see that if you want your outcomes to display on the AEP dashboard, your data to be included in there, it's important because it shows up in all of these different metrics.

And they're primarily, you want to view them on the CB21 slot in the Progress tile. And you can look at it both on the summary and the detailed pages. Just to be explicit, we wanted to make sure that people understood how that's calculated and why that shows up and how it aligns to what is going on with EFLs that are also taken with CASAS. And by doing that you'd want to look at our metric definition dictionary, which is very explicit. But this is the way that you're going to want to code for that.

And the CB21 course progression, and that's one of the reasons why the rubrics are so important is because that's how we align between the EFL gains and CB21. That course progression is melded into that. There is discussion that we may, in the future, disaggregate. So you can see CB21 progression apart from those EFL gains that are made on the WIOA II approved assessments.

And we just wanted to quickly point out that you can see these. There's the completed one or more educational functioning levels. And you can see them by time trend ESL and by student type. We also wanted to point out that another way that you want to look at them is an outcome would be that you subsequently took a transfer level math course, which allows you to see the progression across these different domains, which is part of that student journey. And again, you can see them by race, ethnicity, by demographic, by program type, and student type. And that just shows you how they look on the dashboard.

And PPIC put out a really nice blog about mathematics and CB21 making the difference. And as they said, they've made tremendous progress under AB705. And then it's really overhauled the placement policies that made it harder for students to take and complete gateway courses. And that's our ultimate goal, right, is to support these students in their transitions as we said up front with the learner journey.

If you would like to look at it further, they've got a really nice map. And you can also-- what they do talk about is that there's a little bit of an equity issue in that. While we're making these progressions, if you drill down and look at progression and success by race and ethnicity, that there is definitely-- there are some equity gaps taking place. So I suggest you look at that. And there is the link to that.

And so then we just wanted to take a quick look at what it's looking like here on the AEP dashboard. And you can see that, as far as completing one or more educational functioning level for our students, we do see some gains. I am disregarding our COVID year because everyone has seen drops, and I think that that is not a result of the work that we're doing as adult educators, but more so how the environment, and the COVID pandemic, and moving to online, and other people's complications in their lives has created problems for that. So there is a rise. And it looks like a dip just because we enrolled more students overall statewide in AEP programs or Adult Education Programs.

But then if you look at the transfer level English and the transfer level math, as I said, we see that as the progression between your EFL gains and taking those transfer level courses, that we are beginning to see some increase between-- but not a great deal of increase. And again, with the math, we're still staying at 3%. It looks like an increase simply because, again, we enrolled more students.

So that was the quick AEP lineup because I really wanted to get to hear from our presenters. And we're going to hear, as I noted up front, Alison Robertson from Cyprus College. She's going to talk about English as a second language, what work her college has been doing in the AB705 CB21 work. And then we'll move to Jan Young from Glendale Community College, who's working in the English. We had wanted to get math, and we were-- but weren't able to find someone during the summer. So I just doubly appreciate Jan and Alison's willingness to take their time out of their summer and present. So I'm going to turn it over to Alison first.

Alison Robertson: Hi. Thanks, Blaire. Thank you very much. My name is Alison Robertson. I am the ESL Department Coordinator at Cypress College. And just for a little info, Cypress is part of the North Orange Community College District. So we have Fullerton College, Cypress College, and the North Orange Continuing Ed, which is our noncredit college. Go ahead and do the next slide. Thanks.

So you just heard about the rubrics. And we did use the rubrics when we were revising. So because of AB705, we went through a big overhaul. And we use the CB21 rubric to review our old sequence. And in doing that, we confirmed that our highest level at our old sequence, 186, was showing a lot of academic creep. In other words, we were practically creating a transfer level English course for our students.

And so using the CB21 rubrics helped us identify what we needed to do when we revised for AB705. And so that course, the 186, which originally was a one below transfer level, we took that as our basis for our new high level course. We turned it into what we call ESL 110. And that is now a transfer level course. And we use the CID for English 100 to create that course.

And then everything below in our sequence, starting with 109, we use the CB21 rubrics to adjust and correct as we revised our sequence. So if you go ahead to the next slide. So this is our new sequence. So our highest level 110 is now, as I said, a transfer level composition course. And it does meet the same exact requirements as an English 100 course. So at our campus, It's called the English 100 in the English department. And our ESL 110 meets the same requirements. So it has requirements for our local degrees. It transfers over Cal states, and it transfers over to UCs. And then our 109 and 108, those are our advanced levels.

Those two courses-- so ESL 109 would be CB21 rubric A, the top level of that ESL rubric. And so that course is now meeting our local degree humanities, our CSU C2 humanities as well. It only meets the UC elective. We are still in a bit of a fight with the UCs over the IGETC 3B, which is their humanities for 108 and 109.

If you know Kathy Wada, you know we're not giving up. So we will, as she said, submit it 100 times if we have to until we get the deficit-minded GE reviewers to understand that these courses are absolutely fulfilling the requirements for humanities. And then our bottom half-- 107, 106, 105 are all CSU elective transferable.

So all of our courses now have transferability. Our old sequence all had transferability as elective only. And so this new sequence, we were able to get with these electives for G-- or sorry-- going beyond elective and getting the GE credit. And this is important because our students-- those of you in ESL know-- our students are advanced foreign language learners. They're doing significant work, and they deserve that credit for what they're doing.

OK. Go ahead and next slide. All right. So this is just a page from our counselor reference. I wanted to just show this because I think it's really important to recognize that a lot of what we're doing happens in tandem with all of the people across our campus. And so this is page one of our counselor's quick reference guide. And we created this with our counselors. We created it with our assessment specialists, with admin and deans involved.

And we wanted to make sure that the process for getting students into our courses was very clear to our counselors because, obviously, counselors are key to getting our students into the courses they need. And part of this is also on our website in our college catalog so that students have access to the information as well.

Basically, the green and the blue boxes at the top are the key boxes. Those are the ones that essentially AB705 says. If you're a high school grad or equivalent, you go straight into transfer level. So those students would go into our ESL 110, or they could choose English if they wanted to. And then the blue box is essentially saying, if you're an ESL student, then here's how we're going to handle it and follow our process. And that bottom box is our basic process.

So we use the CELSA placement test. So I know on a previous slide, it said that placement tests were eliminated. But just keep that in mind. It was eliminated for math and English but not for ESL. So we do use the CELSA. That is state approved.

We also have a prerequisite challenge opportunity. So once our students take the CELSA, they then have the option to challenge that CELSA placement immediately by just doing a writing for us, and so they can get placed higher. And then they can then talk to a counselor and get their clearance into our courses.

We also have another challenge available to all our students. Once they get into the sequence, they take a course at the end of any semester up through our 108 level. They have the option to, again, challenge to try to skip a level. So we have those two different challenge options open so that we can move our students through our sequence as quickly as they can. OK. Next slide.

All right. And so this is just a rundown of that. We have the multiple opportunities to maximize movement. We have the two types of challenge opportunities. And we want to make sure that our students are one, placed correctly initially, but we also want to recheck to make sure our students are-- some of our students do gain those skills more quickly. And so that's why we have that end-of-semester challenge jump as well to let them continue pushing. All right. Next slide.

One of the other things we did as a best practice besides the transferability and the ability to move our students quickly is the Milestone certificate. So this aligns with our Guided Pathways. Some of you may know Kathy Wada essentially developed these at our college. They are fantastic. One of the best practices is that we give our students a Milestone certificate, so they see they have accomplished significant work. It shows their achievements. So these certificates are essentially part ESL courses, and then the last course is a course in one of these pathways. So it's not purely ESL.

We are still fighting against that. You can't have a certificate with just ESL, though, because we now have ESL 110, which essentially is written communication. So we are still working on the equity there. But these are really wonderful certificates that give our students that sense of accomplishment and help move our students beyond our program and through their own pathways. And in our first couple of years of doing this, we've had-- I'm not sure the number now, but the initial was somewhere in the 600 certificates have gone out, just a huge, huge number. So they're absolutely a key thing I think everyone should look into. OK. Next slide.

All right. So this is just my summary slide. We consider our program to be an effective program because we have so many different components that work together in tandem to help our students get through our program and into whatever program they want to move on into. One of the key things is collaborations. So for example, we have a colleague in our department who is on the CAEP committee, our work group. And so she works with people from Fullerton and our noncredit college.

And they work together to discuss how we're helping our noncredit students get into our program. We work with our counselors. We work with our admin and our deans. We want to make sure everyone understands what our program is and how it works so that our students are given the best help they can. So for example, one of the things we did over this last year was we were able to get more specialized counseling help for our ESL students.

So we now have an ESL, quote/unquote, counselor that I can send our students to. So any time I get inquiries, I can ask students to come in-- hey, come talk to this particular counselor. They know our program. They know how things work. And you can ask all these questions about this program.

And I think that's it. There's a lot of information on this slide, I know. But essentially, we made some major changes because of AB705. And it was, I think, very beneficial to help our students get through our program. So that is it for now. Thank you.

Blaire Toso: Super. Thanks. And looking at the time, no further ado, Jan. Thank you so much. I'm going to hand it over to you.

Jan Young: Thanks. I'm Jan Young, and I'm from Glendale Community College. I was also part of the CB21 work group for English. So I learned a lot. And I think what I wanted to focus on today-- next slide-- is really the process we went through. And that's where I really learned how to create the gap or how to fill in the gaps, I should say, and create a program for students to help them through the pathways or the sequence.

And while I'm really addressing just noncredit to credit in my examples, this is applicable to if you're doing it from adult high school into noncredit, adult high school into credit. Let me just say, the rubric is a starting point-- and Randy alluded to this-- to start the conversation and getting these groups together. We have, at Glendale, for over 15 years, an English collaborative with our high school and our college to work on aligning our curriculum. But I noticed with AB705 and our noncredit programs that there were some gaps.

And so in the noncredit program, we have our ABSE, which is the high set GED prep course. And again, what you have to do is look at the outcomes of one program and then the entry points for the next program. And in that gray area is where students sometimes get stuck.

And so that's really what I wanted to point out here. Again, you read this, what you're going to accomplish once you pass your GED language arts through reasoning tests. And you're going to be able to do all this analysis and draw conclusions. And you're going to be able to write analyzing two passages and talk about which argument is stronger and put forth the evidence.

And then you look at the entry standards for English 101, you say, oh, OK, read and critically analyze, check. Organize fully developed essays, OK. Employ basic research-- well, we didn't do that. But that's a class. And then revise writing, oh, revision, OK.

So you look at the gap, and you say, well, first of all, GED is timed. And so it's quite different when the instructor is telling you to write something and be very thoughtful about it, and also to revise it and what that includes, and also what the elements are for the basics library research techniques. So what we did was-- next slide-- is we created an English workshop.

And I put this picture because I kind of feel noncredit is that little island out there. And in the past, we used to say, oh, you passed the GED. Congratulations. Good luck. And obviously, we've moved beyond that now. But we really expected our graduates to swim across and somehow get up on that pathway where you begin with English 101, and then proceed with the courses you need to take to get your degree. And English 101-- I think math 101 is probably more of a hurdle. But English 101 is really important. And you want your students to be successful.

So how can we do that to prepare them? So what we did was we sat down with the credit faculty and the noncredit faculty together, and we really got in the weeds. And that's why the rubric is so helpful for that because what is your definition? I mean, in English is, again, what Randy said is so true. Math terminology is math terminology. However, in English, it's open to interpretation because we're all about the gray.

So that's why we wanted to target incoming students that would be coming into 101 that might feel not as confident to being successful, our GED graduates, and we also have the ability to offer this to second and third repeaters in our English 101. And so for summer and winter terms, we're doing one week of 15 hours. And then this fall, we plan on piloting for after the drop to pick up some of our second and third repeaters. But the main thing here is that's the gap. So next slide.

All right. So we built the bridge. And the bridge is-- and, again, I'm not telling you anything you don't know already. But it is so true that self-efficacy is more than half the battle. In our workshop, we infused growth mindset and habits of mind. And I think that's really important. And I've been doing this for many years now. And I always thought I was empowering them with knowledge. But at the end of the day, we're empowering them with self-confidence, and it's the students who do all this. And that, to me, is really critical.