Participatory Evaluation

The other day one of my students at Puntos, who actually works for the Central American Women's Fund across the street (http://www.fcmujeres.org/) said that her boss wanted a complete evaluation of the class, to make sure that the money they were making a good investment in English classes and that the students were making progress. I played it cool, but was panicking a little, because I felt like it was a test of how good of a teacher I am. Ahh!

So I decided to go back to the book that my friend Jana recommended to me, Making Meaning, Making Change about participatory ESL learning. They say that traditional evaluations have been very unsuccessful, and that evaluation is a process of learning and collaboration between the teacher and the students that continues from the beginning to the end, starting with the students' goals. I took a sigh of relief, and gleaned many ideas from the book for ways to involve the students in the evaluation process using activities and excercizes that are applicable to their lives. Today I started by having a discussion about the times that they have needed or will need to speak on the phone in English. Out came some of their fears about speaking on the phone (which is so hard to do in a foreign language!!!). Then they picked one of these situations and wrote a dialogue about it. As one of them was about giving a financial report to their accountant in the states, they had to look up a lot of relevant vocabulary. Hopefully some of these tools will come in handy when I'm teaching English in the states...