Louisiana

Professional development system

The Louisiana State Plan for Adult Education and Family Literacy requires full-time professional staff (nine-month to twelve-month employees) to attend a minimum of 15 hours of State-approved professional development each year. Paraprofessionals and part-time teachers are required to attend a minimum of 10 hours of State-approved professional development each year. The above professional development requirements are in addition to on-site trainings conducted by individual programs, such as orientations for teachers that discuss procedural processes required at the local level.

STAR implementation

The adult education programs in the state were invited to participate in the STAR initiative through an application process. The application included questions for the supervisor and the teacher to determine program openness to change, commitment to in-depth trainings and commitment to implementation.

The state staff examined the NRS data of each program from the previous fiscal year and considered the following of each program that applied:

• total number of students being served in each program
• number of students with intermediate reading levels
• number of intermediate students completing a level and if the student advanced one or more levels in that fiscal year
• number of teachers in the program and the location of the site in the state

Currently ten programs are participating in the STAR initiative.

The goals envisioned for the STAR program are to:

• Increase teachers' knowledge and use of evidence-based reading instruction.
• Improve the capacity of adult education programs to support evidence-based reading instruction.
• Assist adult education programs in making instructional changes required to improve the reading achievement of intermediate-level adult learners.
• Deliver training and technical assistance to increase teachers' knowledge and use of evidence-based reading instruction and improve the capacity of adult education programs to support evidence-based reading instruction.
• Improve adult reading with explicit and systematic instruction in each of the four reading components: alphabetics, vocabulary, comprehension, and fluency.
• Provide tips, techniques and tools for conducting diagnostic reading assessment; provide strategies and activities for teaching alphabetics, vocabulary, fluency and text comprehension; provide guidance on how to effectively plan instruction to meet learners' needs; and provide customized technical assistance to ensure that the STAR toolkit and training package improves reading achievement in the Adult Basic Education programs.

Programs implementing STAR