Materials Created
As GECO coordinator, it was my responsibility to organize teachers, resources, and materials, promote the class, and create connections with community partners and organizations. Below you will find links to various materials I created for GECO while I was coordinator. Materials provided include a needs assessment, curriculum outline, mode of communication between teachers, and a piece of promotional material.
Needs Assessment
Prior to taking this position, there was no formalized needs assessment for new students to take. A needs assessment allows teachers to know the skills and abilities of their students, and with that knowledge, they are able to meet the students where they are. Since GECO is a free class, attendance was never regulated, which made it difficult to keep track of students' progress. In addition to this, it was often hard to genuinely assess a new students abilities without seeing what they are capable of. To fulfill this need, I set out to created a needs assessment. In Gonzaga's MA/TESL program, students take a class that specifically targets curriculum design, testing, and assessment. In this class, as a part of creating a curriculum, students are asked to create a needs assessment for their curriculum. Luckily, the year prior to spring 2015, a group of students created a curriculum similar to the demographics of GECO, and created a needs assessment that fit GECO's context perfectly. Below is the original needs assessment I used from the graduate students' curriculum. The present needs assessment is a modified version of the original one. The revisions made were based on discussions with World Relief staff, experiences of GECO teachers within the last six months, and comments given by GECO students.
Curriculum Outline
One of the unique characteristics of GECO is that it has no curriculum. Although seemingly strange, the lack of no curriculum was a purposeful design by the founders and the director of the MA/TESL program. With no curriculum, graduate students are given the opportunity to create their own lesson materials and plans. With two students team-teaching every class, students gain an incredible amount of teaching experience, as well as collaborative teaching experience. This did not prove to be the easiest at times, but its overall benefit could not be ignored. However, there was still a need for some kind of stability when it came to determining a curriculum for the class. To mitigate this, I collected all of the student feedback we had received since beginning GECO, spoke with student-teachers, and collected notes taken from our GECO retreat in April 2014, and considered which subjects deemed the most appropriate for the students that were attending class. The curriculum outline provided below is a result of this. This is only an outline, created to give a solid starting point to new students teaching GECO for the first time.
Attendance Punch Card
As part of the construct of GECO, attendance was not required, which can have positive and negative effects. There were times when attendance became more of an issue, only because we would have anywhere between two and seven students at times. GECO teachers had commented that the fluctuating numbers made it difficult to plan lessons. To solve this problem, I thought of an incentive to give students to encourage them to come to class. Each student was given this card, shown below, when they first came to GECO. If students could come six times, then they would win a prize, ranging anywhere from language books and journals, to a Starbucks gift card. Our numbers have still continued to fluctuate, but we do have a few students that come to class regularly, and I am proud to say that I have given a prize for attendance at least once. One is better than none!
Class Reports
The freedom of GECO definitely had beneficial value, but gave way to inconsistency at times. Not only did students come and go, but teachers did as well. When I became coordinator, it had become mandatory for MA/TESL students to participate in GECO a certain amount of times each semester. To ensure that each graduate student was given the opportunity to fulfill this new requirement, students rotated teaching classes nearly every week. In addition to creating a teacher's schedule, I also created a class report template. Previously, short, informal reports were submitted after each class in a binder kept in the student office, but there was a lack of consistency for submitting the reports and its location was never in the same place. Gonzaga had also switched to the Microsoft Outlook program and had began setting up Outlook Sites for each program. To maintain a sense of consistency, I created a class report template that teachers could fill out after every class and post onto the Outlook Site. By having the class reports on the Site, teachers, no matter when they are scheduled, could check the folder and see what has happened in class and know how to appropriately construct their lesson. Additional components were added to include an element of reflection. As a Jesuit university, Gonzaga capitalizes on the reflection process and deems it as a necessary part of personal, spiritual, and professional growth. In addition to attendance and what the lesson plan was, teachers are also asked to reflect on successes and struggles of the students and personal successes and struggles they faced as the teacher and how they can improve.