I was teaching at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, New York and I was actually teaching the Conversation Course. That course was for students who have completed five years of Chinese learning or have reached an advanced speaking level. At that time, the Chinese Conversation Course did not have a curriculum and I also could not find an appropriate textbook either. I simply asked students what they wanted to talk about and prepared lessons on those topics. However, although this class only happened twice a week, I felt that I needed to do a lot of preparation such as choosing proper reading materials and video clips, thinking about discussion questions and class activities, and etc. Therefore, with the opportunity of designing a curriculum, I would like to design the curriculum for the Saint Ann’s Conversation Course to help me better teach this class next year.

The Needs Assessment was extremely helpful for us to set course goals, choose discussion topics and decide class activities. Our Needs Assessment is composed of two parts – teacher interview and students survey. We contacted the head of the Chinese program at Saint Ann’s School, who is also the teacher of the current Chinese Conversation Course and scheduled for an interview. She asked us to send her a list of interview questions so that she could prepare, which made the interview very efficient – only lasted for 30 minutes. She told us that the goal of the Conversation Course was to create a relaxing environment where students could talk freely without pressure, aiming to improve students’ Chinese speaking skill in terms of fluency and accuracy. She said that she emphasizes teaching Chinese history, and she hopes that future teacher of the Chinese Conversation Class can bridge the old and the new aspects of China. These two points have become our primary design principles.

We created three version of student survey for three groups of students – future students, current students, and former students of the Saint Ann’s Chinese Conversation Class. We wanted to collect 10 respondents from each group, however, we were only able to collect 13 completed surveys, because there are only eight potential future students, only four students who are currently taking the Chinese Conversation class, and we could not reach to Saint Ann’s graduates who had taken the Chinese Conversation class before since their Saint Ann’s email accounts were automatically disabled after they graduated. That was a little bit disappointing, because we thought former students who had experienced the Chinese Conversation class could contribute a lot of their thoughts, but unfortunately we didn’t have input in that regard. In spite of that, the results of the student surveys were sufficient and interesting. We found that students prefer to talk about current and practical topics, tend to like the more relaxing activities, and are generally interested in improving their Chinese fluency. We would like to respect most of the students’ opinions, but we still might ask students to do some more demanding tasks, such as presentation, to let them out of their comfort zone (occasionally) and push them to practice their speaking.

I found the Needs Assessment very helpful and useful. I learned how to design thinking and ask questions by appreciative inquiries. Needs Assessment built a solid foundation for my curriculum design project.

Before participating in the curriculum design project, the process of designing a needs assessment was unfamiliar to me. I had worked with syllabus design and lesson planning in the past through a TESOL certificate program and international volunteer teaching experience, but had very limited experience in understanding how to systematically and effectively assess and incorporate student and teacher preferences and needs to fulfill project goals. An awareness that our needs assessment would be used to enact change within a community in need of additional support allowed me to more fully engage with the process and appreciate its usefulness.

The educational program we are working is situated in Nicaragua and operates under the philosophy of SONATI. The student population we are working with is comprised of adolescents who meet 2 hours every Saturday. In following with SONATI’s goals of “empowerment through conservation and free environmental education”, we sought to design an outline for a year long curriculum  that would incorporate English language learning through environmental awareness.

The process of creating our NA began with a skype interview conducted in Spanish with a administrator of the program. The purpose of this interview was to gather valuable information about the administration, students and class instructor that could be synthesized and analyzed to create survey questionnaires. Following the Needs Assessment Interview guidelines we had learned in class, we formulated interview questions for the administration that were categorically descriptive. These questions were designed to elicit details of the program and verification of information we had previously found through research. After greeting the administrator, we asked questions within the framework of a polite and relatively informal discourse.

The woman we interviewed demonstrated a genuine investment in these students and the ideals of the program.  Her visible determination to enact change and progress was additionally motivating for me as it reiterated the importance of sharing that same commitment as an active contributor to the educational progress of these students.

The information we received through this interview guided the creation of our questionnaires. We learned that there will be a new teacher teaching the class, the class will meet for two hours every Saturday, students possess a low proficiency level, and student and teachers have access to various technological resources within the classroom including projectors and computers.  Individual questionnaires were written for the students, the administration and the on-site volunteer teacher based on this information. Each of these three questionnaires was appropriately formatted for its corresponding audience. While the student questionnaires mostly targeted degrees of interest (playing games or working with animals), the administrative questionnaires addressed logistical concerns such as the duration of volunteer teacher experience for most teachers and how the philosophy of the SONATI program is typically implemented within the classroom.

The questionnaires were delivered via email and efficiently completed and returned for our analysis. The results of these questionnaires elaborated on our previous findings from the interview and offered us additional information that would prove critical for developing our curriculum. We learned that the new teacher is a non-native speaker of English who has never taught English before. She is interested in using games to advance learning of English through an environmental focus. We also learned that the students of the classroom come from a mix of exposure to English and a variety of proficiency levels. These students interests aligned with that of the teacher in respect to the desire to use games and projects to advance their learning. Responses to our question about why they want to learn English elicited broader social implications about their current social status and awareness of the broad sense of opportunity that is generally identified with the English language. These results further highlighted the importance of our involvement in this project.

Kelly, Catherine and I interpreted these findings to develop a curriculum that reflects the interests of community members and the overarching SONATI program within which their classes are framed.  Our year long CBI program is designed to combine English language instruction with environmental education through adequate consideration of student skill level and administrative concerns.

The NA serves as a fundamental tool for increasing learner motivation by reminding learners that educators are invested in their progress and want to address their needs and interests. The process of creating a needs assessment introduced me to the strategies through which successful teachers and administrators enact meaningful change in an educational program. Throughout the NA process I was continually reminded of our role as catalysts for this change. Change that may begin on a small scale has the potential to transform communities. I look forward to discovering how the following stages of our curriculum design project may lead to this feasible goal.   

Needs Assessment Reflection

The task of designing needs assessments for our curriculum design project was great learning experience for me. I had some practice creating needs assessments for the Language Teacher Education course, but was not able to pilot the assessments to see if the assessment design was successful in gathering the right kind of feedback. It was also motivating to create NAs that served a purpose of helping us to design a curriculum that would be useful to the program at SONATI.

We began the process of our NA by creating initial questions to ask through a Skype interview with one of the SONATI directors. We wanted to gather information that would help us create surveys that elicited detailed responses based on the initial interview. The interview was conducted in Spanish by Kelly and Dean. Since I don’t speak Spanish, I was a silent observer but was able to roughly follow what was being said. We used the information gathered during that interview to create three different surveys, one for the directors of the program, one for the volunteer teacher, and one for the students. We delivered the surveys via email and received feedback quickly. Receiving the feedback quickly was encouraging because it shows that SONATI is invested in this project and is excited to receive the final product.

Through the interview we gathered the following basic information about the course and the materials in the classroom:

• The classes will be two hours long on Saturdays
• There are 20 students between the ages of 12 and 16
• There is a new volunteer teacher who began teaching in March
  • They will be working on pronouns, colors, and general vocabulary and grammar
• The students might learn English in public school, but they have very low proficiencies
• Their classrooms have projectors, computers, a blackboard, and CD players.

From the administrator questionnaire, we received more information about the volunteer teachers who work for SONATI. Most of the Nicaraguan teachers serve for one year and the foreign teachers typically serve for three to six months. SONATI wants the curriculum to be broad and flexible enough to cover a one-year period, giving the teachers space to adapt the lessons to their own needs.

We found out that the volunteer teacher is a non-native speaker of English, but studied English for ten years, and practiced her English through traveling. She is not a trained teacher and has never taught English before. She is interested in teaching through environmental content and using games and projects to reinforce learning.

We received responses from eleven out of the twenty students who ranged in age from eleven to fifteen. There is a mix of the students’ exposure to English, but their levels are all beginner. They are interested in doing group work and learning English through studying nature. They are most interested in studying natural habitats and recycling. Some of the students responded that they are motivated to learn English because “it is very important for any future career”, “When I’m older I might need to work or study in English”, and “Because I like it a lot. I want to better myself, I want to be somebody in life, I want to be a translator”.

Based on our findings, we decided that we will create an environmentally focused flexible CBI program for classes that meet two hours a week on Saturdays for twelve months. We believe that SONATI will be pleased with the curriculum if it is aligned with the foundations mission to educate about the environment. There was some hesitation from one of the administrators about designing a content based curriculum for low level learners, but we hope we will be able to show that is possible to combine both English language instruction with environmental education at a level appropriate for the students.

Upon receiving the survey results and analyzing them, we realized we forgot to ask a few important demographic questions, like the name of the town where the new class is offered. We realized we should have asked someone outside of our group to review the surveys before sending it out. We might have received suggestions such as creating a likert-like scale on the student survey instead of having them just pick one answer. That way we would have gathered more information about students’ interests in topics to cover in the course.

I had the opportunity to attend the 50th anniversary of the TESOL conference in Baltimore this year, and I was definitely opened up to a completely new world. The conference had at least ten sessions for every time slot (starting at 8:00 am and ending at 6:00 pm), and most sessions were 45 minutes long. There was also a poster fair that occurred in the middle of the day and a job fair and exhibits that go on all day. I decided to focus my time on sessions, which were mixed in nature. They were listed by time and also by the type (ex. CALL, IEP, etc). Some were based on research, others were teaching tips, and some were just general workshops. The presenters came from all over the world and there was a very diverse selection of sessions each day. Unfortunately, not all presenters were willing to share copies of their presentation or exercises that they sampled so it was all about rigorous note taking during those sessions. For anyone who would like my notes, feel free to shoot me an email!

There were some sessions that really stood out to me, and frankly, changed my way of thinking about certain concepts of teaching. I can even go as far as to say that I am drawn in different directions in terms of my future goals in teaching. I will bring up some of my favorite sessions, although it is definitely hard to choose just a few as I was in sessions for about 8 hours a day.

I attended an IEP session by Sarah Lopolito and Anne Kerkian that explored the options for students with low TOEFL scores who still wanted to attend a North American University. Through A.C.E., an IEP program that operates in three universities (one in Seattle and one in Rhode Island, unsure of the third), the students can be given access to the undergraduate program without a TOEFL score if they complete their program. This presentation was mainly about an academic and social preparedness that the IEP program had structured, where the ESL students were asked to take one gen ed course at the university level as a way to test their ability to function in the university classroom. They would pair that with an ESL class (of which’s teacher would also be part of the uni class), and together they would explore the new things they were introduced to (mostly sociocultural things about the classroom like kids talking loudly in the back compared to the front, students needing to communicate with each other and teacher appropriately, etc.). The presenters highly recommended this strategy to properly prepare ESL students for the academic world, and to also open the university students up to new cultures and insight from international students. This presentation really introduced me to the many cultural shocks that international students deal with, and has helped guide me in my test proposal project for LA.

A session that I had very much looked forward to was one by one of my favorite researchers, Bonny Norton, and her colleague Ron Darvin. They won the TESOL 2016 award for new research on their work entitled “Investment and the Right to Speak in the 21st Century.” This session was a breakdown of their ideology and it was so great to be able to speak with most of them. In short, Norton has been publishing works on learner investment and identity since the early 90s. Norton sees identity as how a person sees or understands their world, their relationships, and themselves, and that it is ever changing. Investment in anything is an awareness that they will gain something from what they are currently pursuing. Investment can have a huge impact on learning language, but investment can also be jeopardized by the classroom environment based upon the social powers that exist there. It is thus different from motivation, because it can be manipulated by the current context. I could rant for a long time, so I’ll avoid that. In short, it was a great session the explore their newest research!

I attended one session that focused on collaboration for ELLS, primarily focusing on kids and young adults, but I felt it was appropriate for various age groups. The presenter, Karen Nemeth, had tons of experience using collaborative learning, especially in terms of project-based-learning. She brought in her ideas of the essential elements of PBL: driving questions, significant content, revisions and reflection, public audience, voice and choice, in depth inquiry, need to know, and 21st century skills. She believed firmly in modeling all activities, key terms, and how one works together (assigning roles to each team member like we have done in class before). She encouraged the use of Maker education, where learners are able to physically create something and explore another world through making it or parts of it, claiming that the process is more important than the actual product. She provided a lot of examples that I can supply for anyone especially interested in PBL.

The last session I will talk about was called “A Guide to Borderless Self” by Elena Reiss and Rita DiFiore. This was the last session of the day for me on my first day at the conference, and it certainly was filled with valuable information on the identities and voices of ELLs, particularly those in IEP programs. They began their session with introducing an activity where ESL students in their classes were asked to pick out pictures that explained how they felt at that moment. They then played a voice recording of a Chinese student who explained the pictures and how they connected to his emotions. It was heartbreaking, as he described a picture of a man without a face. He saw his time spent in the United States so far as a very difficult time, as he felt that people only saw him as an Asian student without the English capabilities necessary to communicate properly, and he felt lonely, misunderstood, and that people refused to see who he was as a person. This student was an example of someone who felt they were losing their identity due to the culture shock and treatment from their peers. The session then focused on the many different ways one can open up their IEP students to exploring their fears, anxieties, and stressors so that they can better handle these identity issues that they most likely will face at some point. I could talk much further on the strategies these two wonderful teacher’s used, so if anyone wants their strategies or sample exercises let me know!

Overall, the experience was fantastic. I encourage anyone who is considering going to a convention to consider the TESOL 2017 conference in Seattle next year.

The needs assessment process was really interesting. At the beginning of the process I was worried about having to work alone on the project. Fear of the unknown is often mitigated when there is someone else with you. I would often look around and see the other groups of students working together, and I would sometimes get super envious. However, now that I have gone through the process I see that there are many benefits to working alone: one hundred percent freedom, the absence of having to coordinate work schedules, and the lack of having to combine different styles of prose into one narrative. My curriculum design project is a business Russian language course designed around SILP. Now that the needs assessment portion of my curriculum design project is over I can list some of my biggest revelations during the process.

The first revelation I had was that because of the specific focus of my design project (business Russian) I had to be creative in the collection of my data. Originally, I thought that I would find and use MIIS MBS students who study Russian as their second language. Unfortunately, that desire proved to be impossible to realize; consequently, I had to stretch the qualifications of my potential applicant pool. I ended up conducting interviews with two current MIIS students and having a former MIIS student fill out a questionnaire via email.

One of the current MIIS students I interviewed is an MBA student who studies Spanish and Mandarin. Professor Shaw explained to me that students who study business and have experience studying and using foreign languages are more than qualified to give me information of what aspects they would like to see in a business language course. The other student with whom I conducted one of my interviews currently studies in the Localization and Management program here at MIIS. This student studies Russian, has lived in Russia for many years, has dealt with Russian business and bureaucracy, and is currently designing a translation program. This student was more than qualified to give me valuable information for my needs assessment project, and he helped me a lot.

The last participant of my needs assessment project is a former MIIS MBA student who studied Russian with my Russian professor, Anna Borisovna. The former MIIS student currently works as a financial consultant at a major bank in San Francisco, and he provided me with the most valuable information. The only issues I found was that the he was really busy and I felt that terrible asking for his help. In order to mitigate this problem I sent him a questionnaire consisting of only 13 questions that I felt were most critical.

Another major realization I had was that I wish I would have asked a lot more questions during the interviews with the MIIS students. Again, similar to the situation with the financial consultant, I did not want to take up too much of people’s time. I still managed to extract very valuable information and Professor Shaw agrees that, despite the limited amount of data, I managed to obtain useful information for my business Russian curriculum.

In conclusion, the needs assessment process was a very educational experience for me. Going into the process I kind of felt I didn’t know what I was doing, but during the process I realized that I was learning how to do it by doing it. I now realize what I could have done, should have done, and I know what to do next time.