KYAE Skills U Lesson Bank

The KYAE Lesson Bank offers new and experienced high school equivalency (HSE) and ESL teachers a new and highly useful database of lessons across the HSE curricula and at lower levels of the ESL curriculum. Lessons are aligned with the College and Career Readiness Standards and offer extremely thorough lesson planning for every aspect that an instructor would want or need, from rating the text complexity of reading materials to relevant graphics and websites and YouTube clips that enhance understanding and interest for adult learners as well as technology needs for each lesson.

These lessons are written by and for adult educators who understand the motivation of adult learners to persist, and they keep the focus on objectives designed to help learners passa HSE and move successfully into the workplace or post-secondary educational environments. The website is easy to navigate and users can access lessons quickly; all lessons are open educational resources and are thus downloadable and usable for free, a real aid in reducing a teacher’s planning time. In fact, these lessons include all materials needed for a lesson--all is laid out logically with well-considered introductory sections, instructional delivery, guided practice, etc. Educators can easily modify these lessons to extend them for several days or shorten them to hone in on one particular aspect of a lesson, where they may be using it to reteach or reinforce a concept vs. introduce it for the first time.

Writing a standards-based math curriculum can be daunting for part-time teachers. This resource provides many wonderful examples for workplace and college readiness with targeted standards and implementation of the 3 shifts: focus, coherence and rigor. Many of the lessons do an exemplary job of developing conceptual understanding by utilizing hands on exploration of concepts for deeper understanding which is emphasized in the CCRS. In particular, the geometry and ratio units provide teachers with hands-on discoveries that are critical in developing geometric understanding and proportional thinking. Other lessons are more traditional and a teacher may need to provide more conceptual explorations for a deeper understanding. Specifically, teachers should avoid telling how to do a procedure before understanding what the procedure is.

Finding suitable websites is a time-consuming task for teachers. Many of the lessons provide technology links and/or technology to utilize within the classroom. Some lessons provide helpful videos to further support understanding. The lessons also provide the important vocabulary for the lesson as well as extra handouts for practice. The application part of rigor can also be difficult for teachers. Finding suitable real life and contextual problems takes time. Many of these lessons provide suitable and realistic applications that adults may encounter. Using these applications can tie many math concepts together and could be used as an assessment. The KYAE math lessons bank are well worth a teacher’s time to inspect. Not only do they provide wonderful resources and ideas, but they also can help teachers comprehend a model for writing and implementing math standards based curriculum.