Dear CLTA-AZ , 

I am writing to apply for the Fifteen Years of Teaching Award. During my 15 years of teaching Chinese language and culture at college, secondary, and heritage schools, I have continued to improve my mastery of Chinese teaching skills that enable me to best teach all students with different backgrounds. My working experience includes 8 years of being a college Chinese instructor, 5 years as an AP Chinese teacher at a top-ranking charter school nationally, BASIS Chandler, 2 years teaching AP Chinese, and finally, being the Chinese immersion program leader teacher at Hamilton High School, the largest and the most comprehensive public high school in Arizona.

 Ever since I developed the Chinese program at Mississippi College (MC) in 2008, MC became the first college able to provide students with a Chinese minor in the Mississippi metropolitan area. I taught Chinese at various levels through each semester and offered courses on Chinese culture/civilization and TaiChi every year. Furthermore, in 2008, only one year after the AP Chinese test was established, I was selected to work as an AP Chinese test reader. This gave me the valuable opportunity to work with Dr. Taochung Yao and other Chinese language education pioneers at Kansas City in the summer of 2008. This wonderful experience benefited me in the following years and encouraged me to finalize my decision on teaching Chinese as my career. Additionally, in 2008, I aimed to solve an impending issue in the teaching practice which is, how to help the non-heritage high school language learners pass the AP Chinese test in the world language program? It was then in the year of 201, I finally got a chance to put my eager ideas and longing efforts into practice. Because of certain family reasons, I relocated to Arizona. I was foreign and unsure of what was to come. Opportunely I got an offer to be the first AP Chinese teacher at BASIS Chandler, a charter school emphasizing on standard test scores. The administration of the school put much care into the students’ performance on AP exams and required students to pass at least one AP test before receiving a diploma from BASIS. Therefore, as the first Chinese teacher in the history of education at BASIS, I have an uncountable number of memorable experiences. Upon the innumerable memories, I still remember clearly my very first workday at BASIS. On the first day I sat in front of my desktop, among the large batch of emails I had received, the very first one was from the principal. The contents of this email scrutinized over ensuring the future success and passing of the AP Chinese test by the new students in that class. At the time, I hadn’t even gotten a chance to meet each of the students and for that reason, I was unable to give an answer to that email. Therefore, that occurrence gave me inspiration and motivation in the following years, to put order and pedagogy into the Chinese class at BASIS. With that being said, there are two principles in my teaching: firstly, is obtaining the factor that can encourage the students to achieve higher goals in learning Chinese which gives the sense of accomplishment. Secondly, the AP preparation work should start from the first year of their Chinese learning, and the content sequence should be spiral, guaranteeing the efficient and effective buildup of knowledge. As a result of such methods and teaching, more and more students managed to pass AP Chinese test with 4 or 5 within the next two years. In 2018, there were about 130 students in Arizona who took the Chinese AP, and I must proudly say that about 10% of these students were from my AP class. Furthermore, our average score was above 4, which was even higher than the state average. What is more noticeable was that most of my AP students were from a non-heritage background, their families were from Cuba, India, Korea, Columbia, Pakistan, etc., meaning that the only Chinese language environment these students could get was in my classroom and personal practice under the guidance they had in class. However, it is also important to mention that the AP Chinese test was not the single goal in my class, the students also got a lot of opportunities to use Chinese in daily life. My students participated in the Arizona High School Chinese Video Competition organized by Arizona State University. There were more than 40 high schools statewide that participated in this competition every year. BASIS Chandler Chinese class won the best overall award in 2016 and 2018, and best screenplay in 2017 and 2019. In January 2020, the AP Chinese class was invited to sing two songs in Chinese at Mesa Art Center as a part of the Arizona Chinese Lunar New Year Gala, they not only sang “Chengdu”, but also used their talent to revise the music by adding Bbox, guitar and violin to the music. This performance caused quite a stir in Phoenix. After 5 years of teaching Chinese in a world language setting, I have become increasingly confident in teaching non-heritage speakers and helping them to reach the high AP Chinese level within 4 to 5 years. During 2018, 2019 and 2020, more than 90% of my students took the AP Chinese test, and most of them were non-heritage speakers. Most of my students went to top elite universities, and regardless of where they went, whether it was Stanford, MIT, or Emory, they usually could pass the Chinese placement test, and began taking college level Chinese at least from level 300.

 In the summer of 2020, I made a big decision to meet a new challenge in my teaching career. I decided to transfer to Arizona’s largest comprehensive high school, Hamilton High School. I made this decision based on two reasons, primarily, I desired to be the teacher to teach the first ever group of Chinese immersion students in Arizona in 2 years, and moreover, I wanted to express my teaching pedagogy in a more diversified setting. Now at the end of my third year at Hamilton, I have to say the last three years of teaching have been tough and challenging, but also very fulfilling. The amazing thing is that some students, especially non-heritage students transferred to Hamilton from BASIS Chandler to take Chinese class with me. I also met fabulous colleagues at the Chandler Unified School District. With the help of my colleagues, I achieved two goals in the past two years. Firstly, I redesigned the teaching sequence of all the secondary level Mandarin courses, and all the units now spiral designed, so that all AP topics will be repeated at least 3 times during the 4 to 5 years of Chinese learning at Hamilton, with the different levels of the interpretive, interpersonal, and presentational tasks for each student. Secondly, the first group of DLI students entered high school in 2023. To guarantee these DLI students taking AP Chinese in 10th grade, I helped the junior high school teacher rewrite their teaching plan. Now most of my colleagues are feeling more confident in the DLI program. 

Besides working as a full-time Chinese language teacher, I worked as the principal of Contemporary Chinese School of Arizona (CCSA), the largest Chinese school in Arizona. CCSA is based in Arizona State University and sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences-School of International Letters and Cultures at Arizona State University. CCSA has provided 26 years of excellence in Chinese education. CCSA has enrolled over 8,000 students over the past 26 years. Since taking on the principal position in 2020, CCSA overcame tremendous difficulties to keep the school running amidst the pandemic. I led the teacher group to initiate the earliest online classroom among all the Chinese schools in Arizona. As the principal, I am in charge of more than 40 volunteer teachers, most of whom are also public-school teachers. Besides regular teacher training, I also initiated a statewide event in 2021. With the help of the Department of East Asian Studies at ASU, I have successfully organized the Annual Arizona Chinese Language Experience Day twice. The Department of Education of Arizona and the Phoenix Sister City Council all participated in this event. These are a few of the several experiences and reflections I wanted to share with you. I am also glad to say that I look forward once again to meeting with my colleagues in CLASS at this year’s AP grading in Cincinnati. Thank you for your time and consideration. 

Sincerely,

 Ran An