Teaching Skills That Matter-SkillBlox Instructional Support Pilot

Led by the American Institutes for Research and the EdTech Center @ World Education, the Teaching Skills That Matter-SkillBlox Instructional Support Pilot is developing and piloting expanded supports for integrating the Teaching Skills That Matter (TSTM) framework into adult foundational skills instruction.

The TSTM framework, developed by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education (OCTAE), focuses on many of the skills, topics, and teaching approaches most relevant to adult learners. It includes nine intra/interpersonal skills (such as communication, critical thinking), five topic areas (civics education, digital literacy, financial literacy, health literacy, workforce preparation), and three teaching approaches (integrated and contextualized learning, problem-based learning, project-based learning). In our implementation study, we explored the OCTAE-supported rollout of TSTM in states, which utilized a train-the-trainer model, and teachers’ early implementation of the TSTM framework in their instruction.

SkillBlox is a free application that teachers can use to locate and then organize instructional resources into “Blox,” a collection of digital learning activities they can share with their learners or other teachers. Informed by lessons learned from our implementation study, we worked with teachers to improve SkillBlox’s usability and curate free and open educational resources (OER) that support TSTM-aligned instruction through an iterative design and testing process. Teachers’ feedback from this usability and feasibility study will shape refinements of SkillBlox for our randomized controlled trial pilot starting in Fall 2024.