About This Publication Beyond Ourselves: Activities for Implementing Ohio's Indicators of Adult Basic and Literacy Education Program Quality is designed to assist adult basic and literacy education (ABLE) practitioners in developing programs that address Ohio's Indicators of Program Quality. The activities in this publication were selected from programs outside Ohio; they were identified through an extensive search of the literature, including the ERIC database. Each of the activities was selected because of its relevance to one or more of Ohio's quality indicators, focus on small group interaction, and adaptability to a variety of settings. Collectively, the activities address all of the quality indicators equally, with no attempt to indicate order of importance. Although it would have been helpful in making activity selections, evidence of their past effectiveness was not available from research and, therefore, could not be considered as a selection criterion.

Using the Publication
Because the activities are all categorized under the eight Ohio indicators of quality, the set of activities for each Quality Indicator can be located by checking the Table of Contents for the given category. The description of each activity contains the following information:

The narrative accompanying each activity is designed to provide enough information for you to adopt the activity as described. However, based on your experiences with your learners and learning setting, you may also adapt or modify activities to suit your needs.

Use of the indicators of program quality to evaluate program effectiveness will not require you to change what you have been doing or the way you have been doing it. It will merely direct your thinking so you can recognize a correlation between your activities and the quality indicators, thus helping you to ensure program quality. This publication is designed to help you in your efforts to develop high quality ABLE programs by stimulating you to adapt, adopt, or develop activities that address the model indicators. (For more information about Ohio's Indicators of Program Quality, see page 3.)

Using References for Additional Information
The activities in this document were selected from an extensive bank of resources identified in the literature search using the criteria cited earlier. Of these resources, many contained activities that were appropriate; in order to keep the document to a manageable size, however, only those judged to be most superior were selected. A complete list of these resources appears in the References section of this document. An index lists each reference with the quality indicator(s) to which it applies.

To facilitate your selection of additional resources, an "Adaptability Code" has been assigned to each resource. This code-A, B, or C-reflects the "usability" of the resource as follows:

Depending upon need and time, you can select the appropriate level of resource by consulting the code in the Adaptability Code column of the index.

Also highlighted in the index (*) are the references from which activities described in this document were drawn. The codes for these references are also given, which reflect diversity in the degree of difficulty involved in adapting activities for inclusion in this document. Since all the references have been reviewed and determined to be relevant, do not limit yourself to only the references coded "A" or "B." Some very excellent ideas are presented in the references coded "C" that would be worthwhile to develop should you have the time.

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