2018–2020 · Community Impact at Columbia University
My work as an ESOL Lead Teacher Coordinator at Columbia Community Impact was not limited to teaching a class or revising a lesson. It involved maintaining a learning system: curriculum, instructor onboarding, professional development, assessment, staffing, community partnerships, and the operational structures that let a multi-site adult education program function consistently.
The experience is an early example of a pattern that continues through my later curriculum and learning-systems work. Good instructional design is not only about the content a learner sees. It also depends on the systems around that content: the people delivering it, the tools they have, the standards they share, the data they collect, and the transitions learners need to make from one level or goal to the next.
At a glance
- Program scope: adult ESOL programming across five primary instructional sites.
- Instructor support: interviewing, onboarding, scheduling, training, and ongoing support for roughly 85–110 volunteer and part-time teachers per cycle.
- Curriculum: development of an independent Level 6 ESOL textbook—more than 329 pages across 40 lessons—plus updates and career-readiness integration across existing program materials.
- Career integration: incorporation of the CUNY CareerKit into Futures and Ventures ESOL materials.
- Professional development: recurring instructor workshops plus external professional learning through NYC adult-education networks.
- Assessment and compliance: literacy testing, learner progress/retention analysis, and required program documentation.
A 40-lesson sequence, not 40 standalone lessons
The Summer 2019 Level 6 booklet is organized as ten chapters and forty lessons. The sequence moves from orientation, listening, and goal-setting into career exploration and research; then into résumés, cover letters, informational interviewing, mock interviews, job-offer decisions, workplace expectations and rights; and finally into family literacy, continuing education, CUNY pathways, and concrete next steps.
The instructional architecture repeatedly pairs an authentic adult task with a language or rhetorical capability: career-sector comparison with comparison language; career research with paraphrasing and research organizers; résumé work with action verbs; informational interviewing with question formation; job-offer decisions with hedging and peer review; workplace expectations with modals of obligation; workers’ rights with transitions and evidence; and further-education research with comparison, visual organization, and textual evidence.
I summarized that structure in a Level 6 Curriculum Architecture Map rather than republishing the compiled textbook, which incorporates third-party readings and other material with mixed provenance.
Curriculum as infrastructure
One of the clearest needs in the program was continuity. A learner moving through levels should not encounter a completely different instructional philosophy each time, and a new volunteer teacher should not have to reverse-engineer the program from scattered materials.
I worked on curriculum updates with that continuity in mind. The Level 6 textbook created a more coherent resource for advanced learners, while integrating career-readiness material into existing textbooks connected language learning to the decisions adult learners were making outside the classroom: employment, education, communication, and navigation of institutions.
That work reinforced a design principle I still use: a resource is more valuable when it reduces the number of invisible decisions a learner or instructor has to make before meaningful work can begin.
Designing for the people who deliver the learning
The program depended on a large rotating group of volunteer and part-time instructors. That made teacher development a core part of curriculum quality. I coordinated interviewing, onboarding, training, scheduling, substitute coverage, observations, and recurring professional development across the teaching cycle.
In practice, that meant translating program expectations into something a new instructor could actually use: clear teaching materials, shared pedagogical practices, observation and feedback, and access to support when a class did not go as planned.
I also incorporated communicative language teaching principles into curriculum and teacher-development work, emphasizing language as something learners practice in meaningful contexts rather than only something they study as a set of rules.
Pedagogy as part of the curriculum system
The instructor-development materials show the teaching framework behind the learner materials. Teacher-training decks on effective lesson planning break lessons into Presentation, Practice, and Production: introduce or surface new language, create structured opportunities for accurate practice, and then move toward independent production and fluency. The framework was treated flexibly rather than as a rigid sequence, with repeated cycles where the lesson called for them.
Training materials also addressed differentiated instruction in mixed-level adult classrooms. Teachers worked with variations in readiness, prior education, interests, and learning preferences; practiced multiple grouping strategies; and designed different ways for students to interact with the same text or problem. The emphasis was practical: preserve the learning objective while changing the content, process, grouping, or scaffolding enough to make the work usable for the people actually in the room.
The Level 6 textbook itself shows that pedagogy at scale. Its 40 lessons connect advanced language practice to career exploration, labor-market research, interviewing, résumés and cover letters, workplace expectations, workers’ rights, family literacy, child development, further education, and CUNY pathways. Grammar and language structures are embedded inside consequential adult contexts rather than separated into decontextualized drills.
Instructor handoff as curriculum data
Level 6 class-summary workbooks show how implementation was documented. Instructors recorded the date, teacher, theme, specific topic, grammar/vocabulary/resources, alternatives, class reaction or mastery, additional exercises, and comments for the next teacher. That created a lightweight learning loop: what happened in one class could inform the next instructor and the next revision instead of disappearing at the end of the session.
Assessment, reporting, and program learning
The work also included literacy assessment, retention and progress analysis, grant-related support, and program reporting. Those responsibilities made the connection between instruction and data concrete: assessment should not exist only for compliance. Used well, it can show where learners are progressing, where they are getting stuck, and where curriculum or implementation needs to change.
That same connection between curriculum and operating data now appears throughout my work in professional learning, analytics, and portfolio management.
What carried forward
The Community Impact role brought together several areas that can look separate on a résumé—curriculum design, teacher training, assessment, staffing, community partnerships, and program operations—but functioned as one learning system in practice.
That experience still shapes how I approach learning products today: design the learner experience, but also design the system that lets other people deliver, maintain, evaluate, and improve it.
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