Anastasia's Bio

My paths as an educator started as a hobby - I was giving private English as a foreign language lesson back in Kazakhstan. I found a great pleasure in both designing activities for my lessons as well see my students’ enthusiasm and enhanced performance.
When I moved to the United States I firmly decided to obtain my Master’s degree in Education. I have chosen Languages Other Than English and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages graduate program at Hofstra University. During the theoretical part of the program, concepts and ways of language acquisition as well as new approaches in teaching foreign languages caught my attention and gave me a new perspective on teaching techniques. My favorite and most meaningful part of the program was, however, working as a student-teacher.
After successful graduation I started working as a Russian teacher  at Roslyn Academic Programs where I had a change to create a unique curriculum for teaching Russian as a foreign/second language after assessing students’ needs. Measuring students’ performance allows me make necessary adjustments.
My career as an instrutional designer started with enrolling in Instructional Technology and Media program at Teachers College. It allowed me to grasp instructional design theories, basics of programming, adult learning theories, emerging technologies that hold promise for utilization in educational and training programs and learn about various media.
In my current position as a manager at the upscale spa, where besides being in charge of managing sales, marketing campaigns, staff and technology implementation I work on improving the new employees’ training. Taking into consideration needs of this particular business and available resources I’m developing training materials for new hires as well as design and conduct the training myself. As the result new employee training has become less challenging and more effective.
On top of that, taking this particulat spa as an example for my master thesis project, I designed a training model that supports small business onboarding training including knowledge transfer with little resources and knowledge on instructional design. This training model is designed in a way where an onboarding training course, once developed by a particular business, could be implemented repeatedly to train a new employee. This project received positive reviews from my professors and ensured my successful graduation form Teachers College in February, 2019.