I took FLT817 Program Administration class in Fall 2020. In that class, me and two other peers evaluated an intensive Summer Japanese program called the Natsuno Program which I directed for the last 4 years. At the evaluation, we focused on “Teacher Development” as I always had a difficult time hiring teachers for the program and teacher retention rate was very low and not many teachers were able to come back the next year. Having this evaluation brought new eyes to look at the program with different perspectives. Not to mention that two peers who evaluated the program were real teaches of Japanese language in the U.S. as a professional educator for high school and college level and both also work as a department of one so that they were very familiar with being the only one who needs to handle many duties in terms of Japanese Language program.
It was very beneficial for me to find out the results to improve the teacher development especially we conducted three interviews who has worked for the program before. One was with the program coordinator at the host institution that I worked with the last 4 years, the other was with TAs(because of online program setting during the pandemic in 2020) who participated as a students in 2018 and became a staff members in 2020 and one of the lead teacher who also experienced only online setting program due to Covid Pandemic in 2020. Although, the TAs and the lead teachers only had limited experiences of online program, and not in-person program, there were still things that I was able to witness and learn from it to improve. Despite the challenges of high turnover of instructors who often leave the area, there was no opportunity to interview an instructor who had experienced the face-to-face on-campus program other than myself as a director, we were able to come up with three most apparent which were hiring, onboarding, and work vs pay ratio.
Since last year, the pandemic situation is continuing, and the department of education decided to conduct the program online in 2021. To conduct the program this year, the part I can improve immediately is onboarding. After having an evaluation of the program, my mindset has been changed and I deeply understand and know the importance of training and making the teacher or staff feels well prepared before we start the program is essential. We talk about anxiety often when we teach FL to the students, but I have never thought of treating teachers or staff member such a same way. However, teachers are also a human being and if you were to do something you have never done (in this case, teach at the new environment, new students, working with a new people) in a very intensive program is very overwhelming. I want to focus especially, teacher training, preparation meetings prior to the program begins and therefore I decided to conduct very organized, productive, informative meetings this year. For example, I plan to share the detailed daily schedule early on so that the staff can picture what is the daily schedule look like. In addition to the language classes, we plan to conduct Chiri project. “Chiri” means “Geography” in English and we divide 38 students into 6 groups and each group has either one teacher or one TA. All of the students research about the topics in the region and at the end of the program, the students will give a presentation. Each event’s description documents, or explanation video will be also available to the staff so that when they conduct the project with their students, it will be smooth delivery. To set up the canvas site, I anticipate that the site itself will not be ready until the last minute like last year so that I demonstrated how to create the “page” on canvas, how to make the zoom link, how I want them to set up the pages on canvas to be consistent so that it is easier for the students to find what they need to find and access easily.