Family & Community Adult Education Adult & Community Learning Services
Adult and Community Learning Services

ACLS Professional Development Data Entry Policy Clarification

Dear Program Directors,

Since 1990, the Massachusetts Guidelines for Effective Adult Basic Education (the Guidelines) have outlined an approach to continuous improvement that connects professional development to the strategic goals the program has set to increase the effectiveness of its services. Since that time, the Department has provided financial support for continuous improvement by including in every grant for instructional services funding to support program and staff development, and by investing in professional development providers such as SABES, MCAE, and the Massachusetts Worker Education Roundtable.

In FY 2006, we added to SMARTT the capacity to collect data on program and staff development. We need to be able to answer questions about program and staff development, such as: What proportion of our programs and practitioners are participating in SABES or any professional development at a meaningful level? To what extent are practitioners engaging in professional development activities that support their programs' improvement goals? Has everyone completed the required New Staff Orientation, Assessment, SMARTT, ADA and Countable Outcomes trainings that is supposed to have done so? What can we learn from the professional development participation of programs that are functioning really well for their students? What activities and approaches seem to be more effective? Are there specific activities we should be recommending for programs that are struggling? We look to this new capacity in SMARTT to help answer these and other questions.

Over the past decade, the Guidelines have provided guiding principles to help programs design student services that meet the characteristics of "effective" adult basic education, in terms of intensity of service, class size, access to support services and other variables. SMARTT has been developed as a tool both to assist programs with the technical aspects of designing programs aligned with those guidelines, and to help the Department to ensure that the funds we are charged with managing are used to provide services that meet those standards for effectiveness. During this multi year funding cycle, we are paying more attention to the infrastructure that supports continuous improvement and professional development, and once again, we will look to SMARTT to help manage the information.

As of July 2005, all program and staff development activities provided by SABES were entered into SMARTT directly by SABES (thus saving programs some of the burden of data entry). In order to obtain information about (and give credit for) other types of program and staff development that are not SABES related, programs had the capacity in FY07 to enter "non SABES" activities into SMARTT directly; this required some data entry at the program for "non SABES" activities. The SMARTT section of the monthly mailing lists how many activities and numbers of session hours were entered in FY07.

Starting in FY08, all non SABES related activities must be entered by the program into SMARTT.

If you have any questions about how to enter the non SABES related activities, please contact Donna Cornellier.

Current data is now available to programs and practitioners in SMARTT that include program summaries of professional development for SABES and non SABES related activities as well as individual reports for each staff member. The same information is available to the Department, and will be used in professional development planning, strategic planning, and technical assistance, as well as to ensure that the significant resources invested in program and staff development are being applied as intended. Professional development reports are being designed that will be available in Cognos in the near future. We hope that these tools will be of use to programs to both keep track of staff development activities and the relationship of those activities to program improvement.

I look forward to working with everyone to better understand the connections between professional development and continuous improvement that will increase the effectiveness of our services.

Sincerely,
With Literacy in Mind,

Anne Serino
State Director