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.