Chapter Nine: Approaches to evaluation

Chapter Nine: Evaluation

1. Last year in November. There were eight community members in the meeting. The meeting took place in the community hall. This meeting was an official ASB meeting with three ASB members present and five community members, four of which were school staff members and one elder.

All members attending the meeting discussed Yugtun/English language use within the community. The ASB chairperson extensively discussed the fear of losing our Yugtun language. He strongly supported the Yugtun Immersion program in our community. Following his strong Yugtun Immersion support, other members agreed with him, including the school staff.

There was no change for the language program.

2. Formative evaluation works well for our program. We are constantly changing and adding teaching material for teaching in our language program. I think it is the administrator’s call as well, to do formative evaluations on our language program teaching style. The parents would agree with what we do in the school with their children. They usually put their full trust to us educators for the best education for their children. They usually leave their trust to us educators to teach their children to the best of our ability. The same is for to community members. They trust the educators to teach the children to the best of our ability. Whatever the parents, administrator, and the community members suggest to change in education of the children, we, educators, usually follow through with their suggestions, but it is very rare.

3. Formative evaluation: we are constantly changing our material for the best teaching to our children in the program. We constantly assess the material and teaching style and if there needs to be adjustments, we make them accordingly. Or, we make additional material to supplement the teaching material. For example, we make supplemental material by translating material in addition to what material we already have.

In addition to formative evaluation, we also do Illuminative evaluation. The same as formative, we do what needs to be done in the teaching and make adjustments accordingly. The main materials we rarely use are textbooks.

Advantages are that we, educators, know where the students are as far as their academic and language use abilities are. We make adjustments according to the students’ needs academically and language-use wise.

Limitations are that we have limited materials. We have limited access to materials and we make up material as we go in each unit in Upingaurluta.