What features in adult basic education (ABE) teachers' work environments slow down or enhance their abilities to do the best job possible? While not the primary focal point of this research, this question leapt to the foreground of the National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy's Staff Development Study, which is examining outcomes for teachers of participating in staff development. It is realized that we cannot hope to understand such outcomes if we do not first have a keen understanding of the realities of teachers' working lives.
Here is described the environmental factors that seem to influence teachers' abilities to do their jobs well.
These factors cover the physical facilities where teachers work, the amount of time and support they have to do their jobs, and the training or development opportunities they have. Even if these conditions exist within teachers' programs, they are greatly influenced by the policies and practices of the local, state, and national ABE and staff development systems in which these programs operate. These preliminary results are based on data from questionnaires completed by more than 95 teachers who participated in our study, as well as in-depth interviews with 18 teachers and their program directors. The statistics up to now show that at least five categories of factors influence teachers' ability to do their jobs well in adult basic education:
1. Access to resources that affect how teachers do their jobs, including classroom and program facilities and access to materials and technology.
2. Access to professional development and information, including access to written and electronic material, which helps them better understand their classrooms, their programs and their field.
3. Access to colleagues and program directors, allowing teachers to meet with, talk to, and get feedback from those within their program, their state, and in the larger field of adult basic education.
4. Access to decision making that allows teachers to participate in helping to improve the quality of services that learners receive, particularly through program policies and practices.
5. Access to a "real" job, including sufficient working hours to complete all of the teaching, program, and other tasks required of teachers; paid preparation and professional development time; stability; and benefits.
Although people think about these factors as problems of "access," they are, in some instances, not just a function of access but a sign that such resources do not even exist. Here is discusses each of these broad categories, their effects on teachers and programs, and their implications for adult learners and for the field as a whole.
Environmental Factors
While some teachers were provided with good facilities in which to work, more often conditions were unsatisfactory. Teachers had to work in borrowed space: in classes occupied during the day by K-12 teachers, in school cafeterias, or in the back rooms of offices. Time and again they couldn’t use the blackboard, move chairs, display student work, or store materials. The most tremendous case was a teacher who taught in a storage closet used by the local police that had walkers and folding chairs hanging from the ceiling, with ventilation so poor that students with allergies were having difficulty breathing. The inability to leave materials in place from one class to the next constrained teachers' abilities to plan and implement lessons, the lack of textbooks, particularly books students could take home; equipment such as computers and overhead projectors; teaching supplies; and access to photocopy machines were other missing resources frequently mentioned.
There is an extensive range in amount of access to knowledge and information about the field and about teaching and learning in adult education. Even if the greater part of the teachers in our study had taught in the K-12 system, 57% had not taken a single undergraduate or graduate course related to teaching adults. Seeing their lack of prior preparation, it would seem that professional development on the job would be of paramount importance. Until now support to attend workshops, other training activities, and participation in conferences was notably lacking.
However even lacking support, most practitioners do participate in professional development. Workshops are the most common type of professional development, and then conferences. Most teachers go to single-session workshops and perhaps attended one state adult education conference in a given year.
Some teachers obtain little or no information about what is happening in adult education in their state. In reality, some of those who attended staff development were surprised to learn that a "field" of adult education existed at all. They were uninformed of journals in the field, of resources on adult education available through the Internet, or of the existence of national organizations for adult educators. One teacher described her orientation this way:
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