Significantly Increasing ESL students into CTE

Program Overview

ESL enrollment, even before the pandemic, at Whittier Union Adult School had was healthy. However, there were few ESL students concurrently enrolled in CTE courses. There were several reasons this lack of ESL students was occurring. For example, ESL and CTE class meeting times conflicted or were at inconvenient times that lengthened a student’s day. In addition, ESL students were often unaware of the option to take CTE classes. Neither the ESL students nor the CTE instructors had a strong connection to each other. In response, some of the unique features of our program include bringing the CTE teacher into the actual ESL classes twice a week. These embedded courses prepare the students for the second step of the pathway. A 30-minute period of embedded support (tutoring) at the end of each 3-hour lesson was created. This embedded support allows each teacher to work with small groups that need extra instruction. The school provided Chromebook loaners for a $25 deposit so that students could have internet access as well as capacity for word processing and other laptop features.

The Program of Practice

Even before the pandemic, Whittier Union Adult School had few ESL students taking CTE courses. In 2017-18, we had 51 ESL students in CTE courses. The following year, we had 45. In 2019-20 during the onset of the COVID lockdown, we dropped to 22 students and then only 27 the following year. Although the enrollment in ESL was healthy, we had few students concurrently enrolled in our CTE courses.

There were several reasons this lack of ESL students was occurring. ESL and CTE class meeting times conflicted or were at inconvenient times that lengthened a student’s day. In addition, ESL students were often unaware of the option to take CTE classes. Those that were aware did not feel they could be successful. Neither the ESL students nor the CTE instructors had a strong connection to each other. We did not have well-articulated pathways in CTE that our ESL students could understand or be willing to invest time in.

The pandemic exposed the lack of technological knowledge that our ESL students possessed as well as the lack of technology they owned or had access to. It also revealed the wide spectrum of technological skills our faculty possessed. The lockdown gave us the time and opportunity to reinforce our vision of focusing our ESL program on job readiness and occupational skill gains rather than being primarily about teaching language.

The Response

We used our Continuous Improvement Plan (CIP) as a tool to take a hard look at our student data. We analyzed our strengths, challenges and constructed tangible solutions. Our CIP/WASC Team came up with three organizational goals. One goal was to increase the number of ESL students enrolled in a CTE class. By increasing ESL students into CTE, we knew we would increase their job readiness and occupational skills. One immediate result of pursuing such a goal was the development of more accessible pathways for our ESL students. We analyzed what we were doing with our IET and IELCE courses and created a new pathway into office support careers.

Our Principal and Assistant Principal met with our ESL Chair/TOSA, ESL Course Lead, CTE Department Chair, CTE Course Lead and Testing Coordinator to brainstorm how we could increase ESL students in CTE. Our ESL students were not technologically proficient. Therefore, we created Google Suite classes accessible to all our ESL students. We brought the CTE teachers to the ESL students and had them teach in the same ESL classroom. We waived CTE fees for ESL students. New support services included adding a second counselor. One counselor focused on HSD/HSE and the second focused on CTE and especially our ESL students. Our ESL Chair worked with our CTE Department Chair to build a Google curriculum for all ESL levels. We now have a Google section embedded in each ESL class. At monthly ESL Staff meetings teachers share best practices for ESL students taking this course, strategies on teaching technology and assessment. Google instructors meet to discuss our pacing guide.

Throughout the year, our ESL Chair shared with the Administrative Team student barriers she would hear about in her one-on-one meetings with students. We worked to eliminate or reduce these barriers throughout the year. For example, we created an ESL Chromebook Loaner program where students deposit $25 to get a Chromebook for one year. We completed purchase of Chromebook class sets for all ESL classrooms. These meeting groups developed the idea of embedded support at the end of each ESL class to allow for one-on-one instruction. We provided our TOSA hours to work with all ESL and Google Workplace CTE teachers. Our ESL and CTE teachers work together in Leadership meetings. These collaborations also aided in strategic selection of COAPPs.

We use a co-teaching model for the first step of this office pathway, Office Clerk. This first step consists of two 30-minute embedded Google courses in the ESL class for four consecutive quarters. ESL teachers act as additional instructors when the CTE Google instructor is presenting the lesson. This first step course of Office Clerk is four quarters to allow more ESL students to participate. We were not successful with stand-alone google classes that took up additional hours in the same day so we spread out the hours over four quarters. We were very successful with this new approach.

The second step of the pathway uses an alternate teaching model. This second step is a separate course outside of the ESL class, administrative assistant. In this second step ESL students enroll in a separate CTE class held immediately after or before their ESL class. While we had this second class prior to this initiative, now the class is a part of this pathway and offered at a convenient time. We now have many more ESL candidates prepared to enroll in these more advanced classes.

To address the disparity in technological knowledge our faculty and staff possessed, we provided significantly more opportunities for professional development (PD). We worked with our district staff development office to open additional PD opportunities to all adult school staff.

The Unique Features of the Program

Some of the unique features of our program include bringing the CTE teacher into the actual ESL classes twice a week. We adjusted our traditional ESL schedule to make this happen. We gave up one hour of instruction each week in every ESL section to allow for 2 x 30 minute Google Workspace instructional lessons by the CTE teacher. These embedded courses prepare the students for the second step of the pathway.

We created a 30-minute period of embedded support (tutoring) at the end of each 3-hour lesson. This embedded support allows each teacher to work with small groups that need extra instruction. All students are always free to stay but students struggling in various areas are strongly encouraged to remain in class. We provided Chromebook loaners for a $25 deposit so that students could have internet access as well as capacity for word processing and other laptop features.

The Outcome

After we started instituting the practices we described above, we immediately saw significant results. We now have large numbers of ESL students enrolling in our CTE courses (see Table 1 below - ESL Students in CTE). We are thrilled to report that we have witnessed a dramatic increase of 67% growth compared to our pre-pandemic 2017-18 year.

In 2017-18, we had 51 ESL students in CTE courses. The following year we had 45. In 2019-20 during the onset of the COVID lockdown, we dropped to 22 students and then only 27 the following year. Remarkably, this past year of 2021-22, we jumped to 85 students in CTE. Please note that we only counted the 85 ESL students who were regularly attending all four days a week and attended all four quarters. We did not want to skew the data with students that enrolled but dropped or did not complete the course.

TABLE 1: ESL Students in CTE:
2017-18 51
2018-19 45
2019-20 22
2020-21 27
2021-22 85

This past 2021-22 year our ESL students improved significantly at every ESL Level in measurable skill gains. These gains are listed in Table 2 below - NRS Performance Data from CASAS - ESL students who took a pre and post-test the past 4 years.

Table 2: NRS Performance Data for last 4 years – from CASAS
Measurable Skill gains of ESL students w/ pre and post-tests

ESL Level 1 2018-19 100% 19-20 0% 20-21 93% 21-22 92%
ESL Level 2 88% 67% 83% 100%
ESL Level 3 78% 85% 75% 99%
ESL Level 4 76% 72% 69% 91%
ESL Level 5 71% 40% 72% 36%
ESL Level 6 45% 46% 36% 93%

When we agreed on our goal of enrolling more ESL students into CTE classes, we looked at our job readiness rates within our Consortium. We are a part of the Rio Hondo Region Adult Education Consortium along with two other Adult Schools, ROP and a community college. The biggest adult school in our consortium is the El Monte-Rosemead Adult School. They currently have three times the ESL enrollment that we do (see Table 3: ESL participation data taken from the Adult Education Pipeline Launchboard). Yet even with triple the number of ESL students, we have 50% more ESL students who have completed an occupational skill gain (see Table 4: Occupational Skill gains data also taken from the Adult Education Pipeline Launchboard). This is a remarkable turnaround given that only five years ago they had quadruple the amount of students than we had making such skill gains.

Table 4: Participants in ESL
Comparison between two Adult Schools from same Rio Hondo Consortium
(source: CASAS TOPSpro, Adult Education Pipeline Launchboard)

Whittier Union Adult School WUAS
El Monte-Rosemead Adult School EMRAS

2016-17 WUAS 845 EMRAS 4,412
2017-18 823 4,043
2018-19 802 4,113
2019-20 736 3,669
2020-21 362 1,515

Table 5: ESL Students who completed an Occupational Skills Gain
Comparison between two Adult Schools from same Rio Hondo Consortium
(source: CASAS TOPSpro, Adult Education Pipeline Launchboard)

Whittier Union Adult School WUAS
El Monte-Rosemead Adult School EMRAS

2016-17 WUAS 14 EMRAS 68
2017-18 33 14
2018-19 <10 23
2019-20 12 49
2020-21 36 24

As far as staff development, the year after the pandemic the Adult School Staff went from being the lowest in participation rates in professional development out of seven district schools, to the top participating school in our district. We are very proud of the commitment our staff made to improving themselves technologically. As a result, our staff is better able to teach in an evolved hybrid format with a wider set of technology resources.