It is good to be back in Delhi. Familiar places and friends have made this an extraordinary experience. On my first day I have been provided with an update from the work completed over the course of the year.

Let me first provide an overview of the last working session. The AAMF organization provides free ESL classes for students across the Delhi city. The last visit resulted in the idea to create a Learning Management System (LMS), embed music into the curriculum as vehicle to expedite language acquisition, and restructure the organization to support 5,000 students and 100 facilitators (teachers). When I departed one year ago, each goal had a blueprint.

And now they all have been successfully implemented. Current enrollment is 11,000 students across 80 centers. Each centre houses over 100 students, six days per week. The sessions are designed to run one hour and forty-five minutes up-to eight sessions per day.

The LMS was constructed in house collecting several data points including: attendance, evaluation, assessments, centre location, student teacher data linkage, curriculum placement, music program sessions, game sessions, and student levels. Music has now been embedded through a push-in model, enabling the classes to be co-taught. Finally, the organization has been restructured to support the growing population of students. Every 10 centers are now supervised by a Compliance Supervisor. A total of 8 Compliance Supervisors were put into place to coordinate the professional training, assist in evaluations, and to assist in quality of instruction.

Today, we started down the road of critical thinking. How does this get incorporated into the curriculum and instruction already taking place for language acquisition? Is this the responsibility of this organization? Can it be done in a year? What are the political, social, and cultural barriers? These were several of the questions we grappled with today.