A little belated, but so it goes…

We were very fortunate in many ways through the process of writing our needs assessment. Our first bit of good fortune was geographical: unlike several of our colleagues, the target context for our curriculum design project was local, just 20 minutes or so away at Bolsa Knolls Middle School in Salinas. Due to the convenience and proximity of this site, we were able to visit the school and have an in-person interview with the teacher of the Spanish for Heritage Speakers class. Upon arrival, we realized another bit of good fortune had come our way: Chandra had previously visited this very same class for Classroom Observation in the Fall, and had written an observation report which served as valuable information in the final needs assessment.

We felt lucky to be able to work on such an interesting local project, and especially to work with Kristal Gaskell, the teacher and MIIS alum, who was incredibly helpful, responsive, and gave us the freedom to really do what we wanted with the curriculum. She even took class time to administer our Google Forms survey to her students, which was the third major component of our needs assessment. However, while we wanted to acknowledge the many ways in which the needs assessment was a positive experience, this is not to say that we didn’t face any challenges. A major challenge for us has been the time constraints that we face as grad students, with many time commitments from school and work, and that made it difficult for us to meet with Kristall and unable to visit the class while it was in session this semester, while we would have liked to. This also affected our needs assessment in terms of a lack of revision and careful planning on the survey we gave to the students; after receiving the data back, we realized that there were some questions that didn’t reveal as much as we had hoped, other questions that should have been worded differently or in a different format, and additional questions that we wished we had thought to ask. While we did receive some valuable insights from that survey, we feel that we could have done a better job of designing that tool in order to maximize the usefulness of that data.

Our additional challenges have been more in the form of figuring out what to do with the information that we gained from the needs assessment; there were many limitations that we did not forsee, such as the issue of a too-strong web filter that blocked many educational and video-streaming sites that we would have liked to use, and the limited classroom resources. However, we have tried our best to rise to that challenge and develop a curriculum that takes advantage of the many strengths and hidden resources of that classroom.

Overall, the needs assessment process was a great learning process for both of us. We gained valuable insights from what we were able to do, and probably learned even more from our mistakes and struggles during the process. We are very grateful that we were able to spend as much time as we did on the needs assessment portion of this project, and hope that our investment in that portion will show in the final product at the Trade Fair!

-Chandra and Tom, Equipo Español 🙂