Literacy Improvement Program for the Horace Mann School Report Example | Topics and Well Written Essays

Literacy Improvement Program

Tyrone Sherman

Walden University

Literacy Improvement Program

Program planning is becoming indispensable in today’s highly dynamic society. An effective program planner must have the ability to assess how a program can be negatively or positively impacted by the social and organizational environment and must as well have a profound understanding of the needs of the various stakeholders. Planning programs for adults requires clear guiding objectives and learning outcomes expected if the project is in the education sector. This project presents a literacy program aimed at improving the reading and writing abilities of the adults around the Horace Mann School. It considers the social and organizational context of the program, the program needs, evaluation, and assessment.

Social & Organizational Context of my Learning Environment

Undertaking a doctorate in Higher Education and Adult Learning has informed me of the challenges that exists within our society. One of the predominant rates is the high number of people without degrees around the Horace Mann School. This is somewhat making the school’s efforts to provide education to children in the neighbourhood somewhat counterproductive. This program proposal aims at improving the educational competency of the people within and around the Horace Mann School. It intends to launch a program that will increase the reading and writing competency around the area. The project will be launched in the Horace Mann School.

The Horace Mann School has an enrolment of about 1500 students. While the school provides educational opportunities for children up to the 12th grade, the adults around the region are still lagging behind in terms of knowledge and educational qualifications. The school is designed as a classified knowledge base generator like many learning environments and will be of importance in running the program (Caffarella & Daffron, 2013). Also, since the school can comfortably handle 1500 students, it will easily handle the over 500 adults that the program intends to recruit.

Considering the project context, the major stakeholder is the school community – teachers, school management, students, and support staff. Among these stakeholders, it is only the students who have low interest in the program. However, all others have high interest and power in the program since they are directly involved in the program – affects them directly. Also, another stakeholder is the general public. The community around the school is the one being targeted by the program. As Caffarella and Daffron (2013) and Laureate Education (2009) posit, since they are a major stakeholder, the success of the program depends on their commitment and cooperation and must thus be fully involved during the program planning phase.

The immediate issue that needs to be addressed for the program to be successful is the low affinity for the public to participate in the program and the perceived lack of communication between the school and the surrounding community. A tainted relationship between the body running a program and the targeted beneficiaries has a negative effect on the attainment of the project deliverables (Caffarella & Daffron, 2013). To minimize chances of project failure, it will be important to educate the community on the importance of participating in the program and strive to strengthen the relationship between the school and the surrounding community. This will involve seeking the services of a public relations officer.

The main contextual factor influencing the situation is the lack of proper communication and the diverse nature of the school. The school has an informal communication structure which at times causes confusion (Caffarella & Daffron, 2013). The school population is also too diverse – in terms of social, political, and economic backgrounds - and difficult to manage as Galbraith (2004) indicates.

A major strength of the organizational environment is its large capacity. It can comfortably provide support facilities during the program. A main weakness is the lack of financial resources to facilitate and support the program.

The mission of the program proposal is to increase literacy level among the adults. This perfect aligns with the organization’s mission of enhancing student’s competency and readiness to face life challenges. The program will certainly improve parents’ understanding of the school learning environment and will help the school in monitoring student’s performance – and guide them.

Needs Assessment Plan

The aim of the program is to improve literacy around the Horace Mann School. The school’s mission is to “prepare a diverse community of students to lead great and giving lives” (Horace Mann School, 2017). It is concerned with the creation of a learning environment that is secured, safe, and individuals respect each other. Considering that our program will be run in this school, it is important to collect data that will help in assessing the needs of the program taking into perspective the contextual factors surrounding the program as advised by Caffarella and Daffron (2013). This data will be collected using both informal (informal interviews and observations) and formal method (survey questionnaire).

Informal Interviews

The community members and school support staff will be interviewed to determine what the literacy program should have for it to be efficient. The interviews will be informal in the researcher will simply interview randomly – without a plan – interview community members and school support staff. It will be done in less strict manner allowing the interviewees to also freely speak their mind (Kirkman, 2017). The main purpose will be to identify the 3 most important infrastructures that must be put in place for the program to flourish. Reliability and validity of the interview will be assessed by asking the same questions to different individuals and comparing whether there is consistency in their responses. The guiding questions are:

Do you believe the teachers in this school can spearhead an adult literacy program?
What should the school do to ensure more adults enrol in the program?
What support facilities should be added to the one’s already existing?
Might the students be angered by adults being around? Why?
What is the best time to run the program considering the school schedule?

The interviewer will just walk from house to house talking to community members. They will also walk in the school compound talking to the support staff. The data collected will be written on a note book and later summarized and stored in a folder with a strong password to prevent it from being accessed by third parties. Analysis will be done through a thematic analysis where data will be summarised according to themes. The findings will be shared with other stakeholder in a meeting that will be convened.

Informal Observations

The researcher will casually observe students as they go through their learning activities as well as teachers in their teaching duties. This will involve watching what they are doing and recording them in a notebook. The main purpose will be to assess how teachers are undertaking the teaching process and determine whether they will be able to teach the adults. To enhance reliability of the observation results, the same researcher will observe and make notes on the learning and teaching process in various classes and settings within the school. Guiding question is;

How are the teachers and students interacting in the learning process?
Are teachers using visual teaching aids?
How spacious are the classes?
Are public address systems available in the classes?
How competent does the teacher sound?
Are they handling students professionally?

The researcher will move to around 10 classes at random times to observe teachers and students. Data recording will be done during observation, but the researcher will strive not to be noticed since once they are noticed, the teachers and students may act in a fabricated way to please the observer as McGuire (2013) accentuates. Observation results will be summarised and charts generated and sent t other stakeholders through emails for them to assess and picture what needs to be done before the program is launched.

Formal Survey

The survey process will involve making an online self-administered questionnaire. It will be formal since the researcher will email the teachers and community members after obtaining their emails from the school teachers’ registry and walking around the school requesting community members to undertake the survey (The illiterate member will be given preference). The main intention will be to identify what may attract illiterate adults to participate in the program and what will need to be put in place to ensure teaching and learning will occur as anticipated. The questionnaire will contain both open and closed questions with most questions utilizing the Likert scale of measurement. Validity of the questionnaire will be enhanced by using questions that are similar to those used in other education and training programs (Hewson, 2012; Laureate Education, 2016d). The guiding questions will include:

What do you consider to be a good adult literacy program?
Is the Horace Mann School good for an adult literacy program?
What will attract you to an adult literacy program?
Why are many people around the Horace Mann School people illiterate?
Who can best educate an adult?

The electronic questionnaires will be distributed through the free package offered by the Online Survey Monkey. After the questionnaires are filled, the system will automatically summarize the results (Hewson, 2012). Results will be tabulated for each question and graphs made for comparison of responses to the questions. This data will later be communicated through projection in a stakeholders’ meeting.

Program Outcomes and Learning Objectives

As already hypothesised, the predominant aim of this program is to improve literacy around the Horace Mann School. From its website, the mission of the school is to prepare a miscellaneous community of students who will become great leaders and lead the society towards progress (Horace Mann School, 2017). Caffarella and Daffron (2013) advises that program outcomes and objectives should somewhat fit those of the institution that the program is targeting. Moreover, the program outcomes and objectives ought to be developed from an assessment of the situation – needs assessment. From the assessment of the Horace Mann School and the surrounding community, the following program outcomes and objectives can be developed;

Program Outcomes

Enhance the reading and writing ability among the community members
An enhanced teacher’s ability to handle adult learners
Enhanced collaboration between school community and the surrounding public.

These are wide outcomes the program aims at attaining. While these outcomes have been developed based on the needs assessment, attaining them is the main task that the project manager should be concerned with. Ross-Gordon, Rose, and Kasworm (2017) posit that while many adult learning programs have clearly defined anticipated outcomes, attainment of the outcomes becomes a challenging due to the failure to formulate tasks that scaffold the outcomes. This is furthered by Caffarella and Daffron (2013) who indicate that the lack of apposite program evaluation – particularly outcome measurement – strategies leaves the program implementer with ambiguity on what exactly should be worked on. Taking these into perspective, it is important to develop learning objectives geared towards the attainment of the program outcomes. For instance, to attain the first outcome - Enhance the literacy of community members – the following will be the guiding learning objectives;

Learners can read and write Basic English words by the 2nd week of the program.
The adult learners should be able to correctly spell and articulate Basic English words by the end of week 3.
Adult learners should be able to construct sentences by combining the words learnt.

From Bloom’s Taxonomy, the first learning objective is knowledge-based (Clinton Community College, 2017). Literacy starts by mastering basic vowels, alphabet, and words. While this might be considered to be the role of the teachers who will be handling the adult learners, it is also the role of the program developer – who is me in this case. This can be inferred from Ross-Gordon, Rose, and Kasworm (2017) who avow that “The most common adult educator role across a wide variety of organizations and agencies was that of the program developer/administrator who wore hats involving both instructional program development and more managerial functions, along with an unspoken role of advocate for adult education within the larger organizational context. In fact, the typical adult educator is simultaneously an administrator, supervisor, program developer, counsellor, and sometimes, even a teacher” (p. 73).

The first objective meticulously supports attainment of the outcome by supporting the second objective. The teacher, in association with the program developer, will help students pronounce and spell words through practice. They will be required to participate in dictation forums where they will be writing the words pronounced by the teacher. This is a comprehension level objective and the number of students who will successfully wrote the words will be a sign of the program success (Clinton Community College, 2017).

The 3rd objective assesses not only the literacy improvement, but the adult learners’ ability to apply the knowledge gained in their daily communications (Clinton Community College, 2017). The learners will engage in forums where they will be using the words and vocabularies learnt to construct coherent sentences. This objective will be assessed by the number of learners who successfully create varied sentence forms using words learnt. It will, in the long-run, help improve literacy among learners and the surrounding community as can be inferred from the ‘How’ section of ‘The seven Design Steps’ hypothesised by Laureate Education (2016a).

Program Design Structure

This program is aimed at improving literacy around the Horace Mann School; a school whose mission is to prepare an assorted community of students who will become great leaders and spearhead community progress (Horace Mann School, 2017). Considering the aim of the project, it will involve various stakeholders and should adopt a structure that will help it achieve the goal. According to Caffarella and Daffron (2013), most of the programs in adult learning fail to attain their desired goals since the knowledge disseminated to the participants may not be further disseminated by them making the training less efficient. Effective structuring that comes from effective program assessment and planning helps make the training and program more efficient by availing the apposite training resources and requirements and creating an apposite environment for the program’s success as aspect upheld by Hanford (2005) as well as Caffarella and Daffron (2013). “The challenge in designing and delivering professional development is to come up with a high quality product that not only has an impact on the participants at the time of the activity, but also transfers into their practice — and that of others around them” (Caffarella, 2001, p. 1). Program efficiency can, therefore, be properly undertaken and the effectiveness of the project team appraised if the structuring was done in a way that is in line with the interests, prerequisites, wants, and predilections of the stakeholders (Caffarella, 2001; Hanford, 2005).

Program Implementation Format

The size of a program’s target population must be considered when implementing a program. The program planner must ensure that there is ample space and time for the program to be implemented in groups whose size is not too large or too small. An overly large group increases the prospects of having instructors/trainers social loafing due to a reduced accountability while also making it hard for students who are not academically talented or require specialized attention to grasp anything from the program (Caffarella, 2001; Caffarella & Daffron, 2013).

Similarly, a smaller group will imply that most resources – including the trainers - will be underutilized (Caffarella & Daffron, 2013). Taking this into perspective, the literacy improvement program will be implemented in moderate size groups of 15-20 people. This will ensure that the resources are properly utilized and all participants have the opportunity to learn. However, since planning is an interactive rather than a sequential activity, appropriate alterations and adjustments will be made depending on turnout and resources availability.

Program Timeframe

The program will commence on 16th August 2017 and run for a period of 2 months. This is a perfect timing since students will be on summer vacation and most parents will be free to attend the learning program. During the 2 months period, the program intends to improve learning and literacy among 200 adult members from the community. The adult learners will participate in the literacy program every week for the entire period, but will not be attending it during weekends. Every day, the program will be starting at 8am and end at 3pm with a 2 hours lunch-break starting from 11 am.

Resources Required

Planning for resources and effective resource allocation is essential for a program’s success. According to Caffarella and Daffron (2013), many organizations find themselves unable to successfully complete projects due to resource unavailability. To avoid being in a cash crunch, the project requires funds amounting to $15, 000. This money will go into taking care of transport costs for trainers, food and drinks for the participants and trainers as well as meeting daily operational costs.

Space will freely be provided by the Horace Mann School. A total of 10 classes will be required – each class should have a sitting capacity of 15-20. Each class will be assigned two trainers making the total number of trainers (adult teachers) required be 20.

Moreover, the program will require an executive sponsor who will provide oversight and direction. This takes into consideration the recommendation by Hanford (2005) who avows that “One senior executive sponsor is designated as the final decision maker, and other executive sponsors serve as members of a steering committee. In addition to providing advice and impact assessments, these committee members are jointly responsible -- with the senior executive sponsor -- for a successful program outcome as well as desired outcomes in their respective business segments” (n.p). The program will also require a steering committee of about 5 people. This committee will be directing and advising the program implementer who will be supervising the adult teachers and support staff provided by the school.

Program Evaluation Plan

Improvement literacy around the Horace Mann School was the main aim of the program. The school is concerned with the creation of a learning environment that is secured, safe, and individuals respect each other (Horace Mann School, 2017). It is imperative to collect data that will help in assessing the success of the program taking into perspective the contextual factors surrounding the program as advised by Caffarella and Daffron (2013). This data will be collected using both informal (informal interviews and observations) and formal method (survey questionnaire).

Informal Interviews

The community members and school support staff will be interviewed to determine what they have learnt from the literacy program. The interviews will be informal in that the researcher will randomly – without a plan – interview community members and school support staff. It will be done in less strict manner allowing the interviewees to also freely speak their mind (Kirkman, 2017). The main purpose will be to identify the 3 most important infrastructures that must be put in place for a similar program to flourish next time. Reliability and validity of the interview will be assessed by asking the same questions to different individuals and comparing whether there is consistency in their responses. The controlling questions are:

Do you believe the teachers in this school were successful in spearheading the adult literacy program?
What should the school do to ensure more adults enrol in the program?
What do you think should be added to make the program more attractive?
Did you learn anything from the program?
Was the program scheduling appropriate considering your needs?

Informal Observations

The researcher will casually observe students and teachers after going through their learning and teaching activities respectively. This will involve watching what they are doing and recording them in a notebook. The main purpose will be to assess how teachers have undertaken the teaching process and determine whether they were able to teach the adults. To enhance reliability of the observation results, the same researcher will observe and make notes on the after-learning and teaching process in various settings within the school. Guiding question are;

Do the adult students and teachers seem to be happy after the program?
What should the school do to ensure more adults enrol in the program?
What support facilities were missing?
How are the adult students behaving after the program?
What do the adult students do during their interactions?

Formal Survey

The survey process will involve making an online self-administered questionnaire. The main intention will be to determine if the program was successful. The questionnaire will contain both open and closed questions with most questions utilizing the Likert scale of measurement. Validity of the questionnaire will be enhanced by using questions that are similar to those used in other education and training programs (Hewson, 2012; Laureate Education, 2016d). The guiding questions will include:

What did you learn from the program?
Are you able to and pronounce Basic English words?
After attending the program, can you read and write?
What did you enjoy most in the program?
Has this program changed your perception of the Horace Mann School? If yes, is the change positive or negative?

The planning process turned out to be informative. I learnt that the evaluation process is continual and is mostly based on the needs evaluation plan. The plan should consider the needs and perspectives of the program participants for its results to be meaningful.

In planning future programs, I will be more careful on participants’ needs. My needs assessment will determine my project objectives and anticipated outcomes. I will use the project objectives and anticipated outcomes to develop the evaluation plan.

Conclusion

The above project presents a program aimed at improving the reading and writing abilities of adults around the Horace Mann School. It has been outlined that an effective program planner should consider the needs of a program from the perspective of the target clients. The implication of this is that the planner must consider the interests and needs of the adult community members when planning the literacy program. In this project, these needs were considered and appraised effectively. The social and organizational context of the program was also taken into perspective and meritoriously factored in when planning for the program, its design and structure as well as its evaluation. If the above program is implemented, the literacy level around the Horace Mann School will upsurge significantly.

Literacy Improvement Program for the Horace Mann School - Report Example

Extract of sample "Literacy Improvement Program for the Horace Mann School"