This is the latest version of what I think of as the Embedding Literacy and Numeracy Pipeline. This is how you get those literacy and numeracy skills embedded into other content areas.
- Use a broad brush tool like the TEC literacy and numeracy assessment tool to assess your learners’ overall literacy and numeracy achievement levels. Make sure you look at your data.
- Develop embedded literacy and numeracy learning outcomes to help you focus with laser-like precision on specific and narrow areas of need within the context of your training or work. Your learning outcomes need to bring together specific literacy or numeracy skills with specific content areas.
- Pre-test your learners with contextualised literacy and numeracy diagnostic assessments to find out what they already know and can do. You might need to create these assessments yourself. Get on with it…
- Set up learning plans to monitor progress towards specific and measurable learning goals. If you can negotiate these with your learners, well done…! If not, set them up anyway for your own purposes.
- Design teaching and learning sequences with appropriate activities and resources to address the specific and relevant skill areas you identified. Focus on moving learners from the step that they are at, to where they need to be.
- Deliver your embedded literacy and numeracy teaching interventions with a focus on relevant literacy and numeracy skills within the context of your trade or vocational training. Make it fun… and remember: Context is king.
- Post-test your learners by reusing your contextualised literacy and numeracy diagnostic assessments from earlier to see what they have learned. This is a kind of progress test. Celebrate the achievements.
- Evaluate the effectiveness of what you did at each stage. Ask yourself what worked and what didn’t and why.
That’s it… Oh, here’s a handy set of cards for this that you can print out, cut up, and use for training purposes:
