Top-down and bottom-up needs in a language institute – Jim Fuller (IATEFL Harrogate 2023 talk summary)

These are my notes from this talk. If you notice any problems, please let me know! They are one of a number of posts from this year’s IATEFL conference, all of which you can find by clicking here.

The talk title was slightly different but I was a couple of minutes late!

Management are at the top, with teachers at the bottom of an organisation. Top-down, we prioritise management needs. Bottom-up, we prioritise teacher needs. IN Jim’s organisation, they’ve tried to meet both sets of needs.

Here are other ways of conceptualising the LTO:

For example: Front line: teachers are where our business is.

Identifying needs – Top-down

Mission statement

When Jim joined the LTO, they didn’t have a development programme. He wanted to look at the mission statement, but the one they had wasn’t very informative for the organisation, the customers or the teachers. Teachers had separate goals.

They wrote a much more in-depth one. It took about 6 months to draft this collaboratively, and then they started to share it. Their mission statement should collect everything they need as an organisation to move forwards, conveying their goals.

If the organisation doesn’t have one, you should put it together: have a workshop to do it collaboratively. If teachers have a say in the mission statement, there’s more of an element of buy-in.

This is not a static document – it’s updated every year.

Parent / Student questionnaires

We normally collect data on satisfaction. They wanted to go deeper into the experience. This reveals faults in management, e.g. communication.

They have about 400 students. They send out Google forms at least once a term, and get about a 3% response rate. They take a 10% sample from each teacher and chat to the students. They also use FlipGrid to give time to spontaneously respond.

Teacher end-of-course feedback forms

These give teachers voice in how the courses are implemented. The teachers are the ones who understand how management processes are implemented on the grounds.

These forms are useful for collecting data on the materials, was the syllabus clear, was there enough support from management. They do it at the end of every course, including individual courses which they plan the syllabus for.

Identifying needs – bottom-up

Development programme preferences

Jim has adapted a form from John Hughes. They give them a list of potential themes for workshops, and give them a certain amount of marks to allocate to the different possible workshops. He included questions about theory v. Practical solutions.

Teacher self-assessment

Jim adapted a form from ELT Concourse. They self-assess to say their level of knowledge in different areas.

Jim gave them some things that they should know at each of the levels to help them come up with a more realistic score.

The teacher I’d like to be

They consider ‘the teacher I was’ and ‘the teacher I’d like to be’. On these forms, they put a cross to show where they think they are. These forms are collected and handed back at the end of the year so teachers can see how they’ve progressed.

With all of these tools, no single one is perfect. Use them together.

Evaluating the programme

Termly SWOT management meetings

When you have a SWOT meeting, focus on teachers, management and administration, and learners. This is good for both evaluating and for identifying potential new needs.

End-of-term questionnaires

There’ll be a question on each of these which changes every term based on something specific which they’ve done that term in the PD programme. These questionnaires are given to both teachers and students, for example on using the coursebook if that’s the training focus.

Observations

Jim believes observations are really powerful, but only when they’re based on co-constructed criteria.

The observations can tell us whether there’s evidence of learning.

We need to collect data from the learners too about how they feel the lessons went.

This is where the co-constructed action points are essential too in terms of providing control to the teachers and identifying other needs. Our job as managers and trainers is to guide teachers to their own action points.

Bringing it all together

Prioritising bottom-up needs leads to happier teachers and better teaching, which leads to better learning, which leads to more business.

Development costs money, but if done correctly, it makes money. Tell the school owners!

Process 1: start of the year

Most of these things can be done in induction week, apart from the snapshot observations.

Based on the data they collect here, they create development programme aims for Term 1 and create the management calendar.

The workshop preferences form is created from the needs the teachers identified.

This is their management calendar:

Process: End of term 1/2

They collect the data, send out the workshop preferences and update their plans for the next term.

Process 3: End of the year

The ‘Appreciative Inquiry’ is an end-of-year meeting to encourage teachers to reflect, in person if possible.

Some evaluation questions

These will change depending on the content and the aims you’re trying to meet.

What about the learners?

We need to be careful about how we perceive and ‘value’ accountability. If we’re investing money in something, we need to see results over time.

Areas you can possibly consider:

Exam results (maybe!)
Learning behaviour (attendance, learning strategies – for acute problems, such as issues with a specific class, this really helps)
Satisfaction (data collection is your friend!)
More learners (hopefully this will happen over time!)

Reflection

A summary of the tools from this session. What could you implement in your context? Put it in the briefcase. If it’s interesting, but you can’t use it yet, put it in the freezer. It you can’t use it, put it in the bin.