Category: Student Evaluations

BEA's Annual Evaluations

1/8/2014

Although it's the last week of the 2013-14 school year at BEA, the kids were kept busy as usual. In order to evaluate our programs and facilities, as well as to collect statistics for publications, we carry out a 100-question survey before the start of the summer break. The survey is completed as a one-hour class lesson: our teachers the purpose and procedure of the survey in both English and Cambodian, and ask students to write comments in English. For those students who can't complete the survey during the lesson, they're allowed to take it home for homework and submit it the next day. The questionnaire is divided into seven sections: (1) facilities; (2) materials; (3) programs; (4) teaching; (5) progress; (6); library program; (7) certificates; and (8) professionalism and future. Students answer the questions according to a four-point scale (strongly disagree = 1; disagree = 2; agree = 3; strongly agree = 4) and have the option of writing comments in comment boxes throughout the survey.

In the next few months, Nicole's first research paper on BEA's language program will appear in "Task-Based Language Teaching in Asia: Challenges, Opportunities and Future Directions" as part of a collection of academic articles. The title of her paper is a bit of a tongue-twister: "Bridging Communicative Language Teaching and Task-Based Language Teaching in Cambodia: Learners’ Reactions to an Integrated Program in the Non-Formal Education Sector." Her article describes BEA's language program and analyzes the attitudes of the students towards the school's teaching methods. Our school evaluations help with providing valuable statistics and opinions for publications like these.

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an accredited NGO school that provides English language education, leadership, and job skills programs to underprivileged youth from well-trained teachers in a safe, clean and professional environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

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Student Evaluations and Conferences

29/7/2011

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Hi everyone,

Yesterday was a super busy day for everyone at BEA with student evaluations and conferences.

Evaluations
My morning started out making the student evaluation. I had wanted more time to prepare it, but of course, there is never any extra time because preparing lessons takes up most of our mornings, so administrative work has to be during the few free moments of the day.

Anyways, this was my very first time to make a formal research evaluation. This one is a trial run before I do a more formal evaluation of the school next year. It was indeed a challenge because there were so many areas to cover. I included facilities, materials, curriculum, teaching, improvement and general headings on the survey with five subheadings for the curriculum section: speaking and listening, writing workshop, journal writing, task-based project and tests. There were 100 questions in total! Student had to read each question and then rank it on a four-point scale: disagree (1), somewhat disagree (2), somewhat agree (3) and agree (4). In addition, there were comments boxes where students could make suggestions and give their own comments.

During the evaluations, I was available for the students to ask any questions. Most of the students needed a few vocabulary terms explained to them. Ideally, we'll have more time next year to translate the survey into Khmer so that we can avoid any misunderstandings.

I'll be on a working holiday from next week, so one of my jobs is to go through the surveys and calculate the results. However, I had a quick glimpse of the surveys last night, and almost all of the comments were very positive, especially towards Shally and his teaching style. Many students also commented that BEA's teaching methods, the communicative approach (CA) and task-based learning (TBL), were new to them, but a good way to learn English. Once I get through these surveys, I'll make the results available on the website.

For those of you who are interested in how we evaluated our program, you can see pages 4-5 of BEA's annual evaluation at the end of today's blog posting.

Student Conferences
Shally had an incredibly busy day yesterday with student conferences. We have these student-teacher meetings at the end of each semester. The students get some one-on-one time with Shally to discuss any concerns about their learning at BEA. In addition, Shally explains the student's progress and final grades. Each student is given about 10 minutes, but often they want to talk much longer with Shally about other personal concerns.

During the student conferences, Shally also informed the students about the new teaching schedule from September. We'll be adding another class, so BEA will be starting from 3:00pm and finishing at 6:50pm. We will be having 50 minutes lessons instead of hour lessons. The reason we had to make this change is that many of the girls who wanted to register for the pre-intermediate course last year were not allowed because 7:30pm was too late for them to be returning home. In general, Cambodian parents are very protective of their girls and they are required to be home before sunset.

In addition, it was brought to our attention during the year that a few students were studying at other English language schools with the help of a sponsor. Shally and I agreed that it's no fair to enroll students who are already studying under sponsorship at another language schools because there are so many youth who have no chance at all to study anywhere. Those students were a bit upset because they do not want to give up their studies at BEA. Regardless, we need to give an equal chance to those who have no chance at all in the village.

Shally will be kept very busy today with the second part of student conferences and pre-registration.

I still can't believe we made it through the year...well, almost, just one more day...

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an NGO school that provides underprivileged youth with quality English language education in a safe, clean environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

BEA Annual Evaluation Sample
File Size:	120 kb
File Type:	pdf

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Review and Sample Lessons

28/7/2011

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Hi everyone,

Just two more days until the end of semester two at BEA. It's been such an amazing year, and I can't wait for the start of the new semester in September. However, there's still a lot to do before then...

Tuesday's Lesson: Wonders of the World
I was off teaching on Tuesday to catch up on paperwork while Shally taught the kids my “Wonders of the World” lesson. This type of lesson introduces global society to Cambodian students while also giving them the necessary vocabulary to talk about such topic. In this lesson, Shally reviewed the vocabulary from Monday’s lessons and then introduced other famous monuments found throughout the world. The purpose was to have the kids use this vocabulary to talk not just about Angkor Wat, but also other places.

Each student was given two pictures of a famous building with some basic facts. The students had to talk about two of the four following places: Macha Picchu, Neuschwanstenstein Castle, the Great Wall of China or The Golden Pavilion. They then has five minutes to prepare a mini-presentation for their partner. During this time, Shally was kept really busy with pronunciation instruction. One of the challenges of introducing supplementary material in a Cambodian classroom is that students want to know the meaning and pronunciation of every single word. After their preparation, they explained their monument to their partner, and their partner had to ask questions. The students were given only basic facts about each place. However, they wanted to know much more about each of the places, especially the pre-intermediate class.

Here’s one of the dialogues from two pre-intermediate students:

Kimsan: If somebody paid me to visit the Great Wall of China, I would go right away.

Saren: No! You have to keep the money for university and for your family!

Out of the four places, the Great Wall of China and the Golden Pavilion were the most popular places that students wanted to visit.

Sample Lesson Plans:
For those of you interested in our lesson plans and materials, you can view them at the end of this blog. You can see how we've localized vocabulary for a Cambodian classroom. In addition, you can see the process in which I've been training Shally to develop his lesson plans. This is a review vocabulary lesson, so it's a bit different from our typical speaking, listening and reading lessons. However, you'll get a sense of how we approach teacher training at BEA. These lesson plans also play an important role in Shally's online teacher training when I'm back in Japan.

Please forgive any typos - we're just in the first draft stage.

Wednesday's Lesson: Sentence Auction
In Wednesday’s class, it was Shally’s turn to get caught up on paperwork. He’s been spending most of the week calculating second semester grades. He’ll meet with each student on Thursday or Friday to discuss their progress at BEA and to pre-register them for their new course in September.

This was actually the first time I was completely on my own without Shally in the classroom. It was quite pleasant to have the kids all to myself.   In today’s lesson, I decided to review some of the writing problems they had in the paragraph writing section of the quiz. Overall, the students have made a lot of progress in writing more clearly and coherently. I now have no trouble understanding their writing. The reason for this is that they are now consistent in their use of English writing structure. I was also surprised to see that the writing workshops in February had a big impact on the structure of their writing. Almost every single paragraph included topic and concluding sentences. When I did the writing workshops in February, these two structures were the most difficult for the students to grasp.

In order to review some of the key grammar and structural difficulties from their paragraphs, we had a sentence auction. The first part of the activity consisted of a worksheet with sentences taken from their paragraphs; some were correct and some were incorrect. Students then had to work in groups to identify the correct sentences. Afterwards, we played a sentence auction game with these sentences. Each group was given $25 BEA dollars (our school’s currency used for games) and had to compete with other groups to buy the correct sentences in an auction. In the Basic B class, students took up a bit of class time arguing about which group had the most powerful team names (before we play a game, groups have to choose a team name). In this class, the groups chose “The Birds”, “The Rabbits”, “The Tigers” and “The Apples”. The Rabbits claimed that the would win because they were the most clever while the Tigers believed they would win because they could eat the Birds, the Apples and the Rabbits. Indeed, the Rabbits did up winning the sentence auction. I always love these types of classroom deviations. As usual, winning teams got three pieces of chocolate while the others got one piece each.

Evaluations:
I’ll be spending my morning making up our course evaluations for the students to complete later this afternoon. During the month of August, Shally and I will review these to see how we can revise our program and make BEA an even better experience for the students from September.

Back to work…

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an NGO school that provides underprivileged youth with quality English language education in a safe, clean environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Wonders of the World Lesson Plan
File Size:	153 kb
File Type:	pdf

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Vocabulary Review Worksheet
File Size:	201 kb
File Type:	pdf

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Wonders of the World Activity
File Size:	2475 kb
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BEA's Annual Evaluations

Student Evaluations and Conferences

Review and Sample Lessons

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