Evidence 2: Survey for ESL Workshop Participants

As a part of the curriculum to complete my Spanish for the health and Human Service

professions minor I had to perform a workshop for a local ESL class. In this assignment I a

developed a lesson on the banking system. In this lesson my group and I provided the class with

information to navigate the banking process as well as important vocabulary that they can use in

conversation. The purpose of conducting a lesson for the ESL class was to empower the local

community. In consideration of competency nine’s learning behavior, to critically analyze,

monitor, and evaluate intervention and program processes and outcomes, we wanted to evaluate

whether or not this goal was accomplished. Therefore the method we chose to evaluate the class

was not through quantitative evaluation such as comparing pretests and posttests. Instead we

decided upon qualitative methods in which we asked for their opinion on how the information

was delivered, as well as if they found the information to be helpful.

At this point in my academic career I had some experience with ESL classes because of

my internship placement. The agency that I was practicing at was GED and ESL agency so I had

to opportunity to understand the experience of the ESL student because I conducted intakes with

them. Non-native English populations are vulnerable and the experience of school can be

intimidating as I have found in my internship when working with this community. Therefore in

consideration of competency nine’s second learning behavior, to apply knowledge of human

behavior and the social environment, person-in-environment, and other multidisciplinary

theoretical frameworks, my group and I strived to make a survey that was competent and

considered their vulnerabilities. Therefore we prioritized questions regarding whether or not they

felt comfortable asking questions and working in groups. If the evaluation indicates that they are

not comfortable then we can seek measures to accommodate them. Considering their culture and
their language are not society’s mainstream culture, it is important to class facilitators that the

classroom feels like a safe place to students.

Other questions pertained to how valuable the information was to them and whether or

not they benefited from the process. Our goal for the project was to empower them so this can be

evaluated in the form of what they felt they have gained from the experience. We asked

questions to test their knowledge as a means to evaluate whether or not they learned from the

lesson. The questions were opinion based and requested for the student to report whether or not

they felt they learned about a certain topic, or even developed some mastery on the skill. For

examples the questions would be statements that would say things such as “I know more banking

vocabulary now. Students were requested to either agree or disagree with the statement. With

collaboration with our professor we felt that this styling was an appropriate method for

evaluation of outcomes. We then used this information to evaluate whether or not the class was

an overall success and saw areas that we could improve upon. For example some of the students

agreed with the statement they were confused at times in the classroom. In accordance to

competency nine’s final learning behavior, to apply evaluation findings to improve practice

effectiveness at the micro, mezzo, and macro levels, my group and I used this information to

make suggestions to our teacher for future students when they are assigned with the same task of

delivering a lesson to ESL students.