Planning and Integrating Basic Skills into Vocational Teacher and Counselor Education Curricula. Final Technical Report.

Overview & Synopsis

This report on a project concerned with planning and integrating basic academic skills in vocational education contains three sections. The first section describes required elements of the project; the second section presents a detailed review of how each of the major deliverables was developed; the third section outlines recommendations. The goals of the project were: to develop competency-based materials for use in vocational teacher and counselor education training programs; to assist vocational educators and counselors to integrate basic academic skills into vocational education and school counselor education programs; to field-test the materials in preservice vocational teacher education and school counselor education programs across the country; and to disseminate the materials to preservice training programs and other curriculum materials dissemination networks. Two working groups of national experts in vocational teacher education and counselor education, representing higher education, the public schools, and business and industry, assisted in conceptualizing literature reviews and focus of the curricula. There were four major phases of this project: (1) information collection; (2) draft product development; (3) field testing; and (4) product revision and dissemination. Among appendices forming the bulk of this document are the Review of the Literature (in four chapters plus references) and the plan for site visitations; these two elements (the review and the visitations) together formed the basis on which the curriculum materials were developed. The rest of the appendices consist of various working papers including working group meeting materials, draft curricula, field-test related documents, and dissemination plans and brochure. The dissemination brochure contains a price list and order form for the finished product; namely, two sets of preservice competency-based curriculum materials: "Integrating Basic Skills into Vocational Teacher Education" and "Counselor Role and Educational Change, Planning, Integration and Basic Skills." (LL)