There were trainers from different backgrounds in the session this morning and one CELTA trainer mentioned an upcoming course being cancelled due to a lack of numbers which led on to a discussion around the benefits and drawbacks of smaller courses. With a smaller course, it’s much easier to get to know individual trainees and there’s more time to connect and focus on their individual needs – particularly in terms of helping stronger trainees to do more. On a larger course, it can often feel like you’re spending time pulling the weaker candidates through and so there’s less time to focus on what the trainer called “CELTA+1” input, such as working on decoding in a listening lesson or seeing how to really explot a reading text. On the other hand, larger courses tend to be more dynamic and on a smaller course there’s perhaps more need for trainers to help foster the community and encourage trainees to build relationships between themselves.
We talked a little about the CertTESOL and CELTA, with a feeling that perhaps the CELTA is far more prescriptive. However, this can also depend on a centre or trainer’s ‘interpretation’ of the criteria. For example, imagine a lesson where the teacher demonstrates excellent responsiveness to students’ needs and makes the controlled practice stage longer to accomodate them and allow time to consolidate their understanding, but subsequently doesn’t have time for a chunky freer practice stage: one trainer might regard this as a fail lesson, whereas another wouldn’t.
Then there was the question of a ‘paper trail’ and the need to provide evidence of what happens in the classroom to an external moderator or assessor. This can make it tricky sometimes to allow teachers to show their planning in different ways. New teachers require a template to follow in the early days of lesson planning to show their understanding of the though process behind what they’re doing, but they tend to be linear – which isn’t always the way people ‘see’ their lesson. For example, alternative ways of showing their planning process could be talking through the lesson and staging, a brainstorm or, as one trainee once did, a clock with each stage broken into the number of minutes it would take. Whilst the latter two could be included in the trainee’s portfolio of evidence of the planning process, this would be more difficult with an oral plan – though may suit some trainees much better.
We talked about the benefits of the moderation process. If I understand correctly (as I work in a Trinity centre), CELTA course providers source an assessor themselves and though there should be different assessors looking at the same centre, there may be cases when the same assessor is called to a centre as this can limit costs if they live locally – though this may be less of an issue nowadays with online courses. In the case of Trinity, courses are externally assessed by a ‘random’ moderator, which means that each course is seen by fresh eyes which might pick up on different aspects of the course to comment on. Trainers who attended this morning who are moderators / assessors themselves also commented on the bonus of being able to steal things they like from different centres to use on their own courses.
One thing we all agreed on was a feeling of a lack of time on initial qualifications, which reminded me of Mark Carver‘s comment about the distinction between learning to teach and learning teaching. We said it would be good to have more time to explain the rationale of processes to the teachers. Leading on from this, we discussed differnt course formats. For example, one centre ran an 11-week CertTESOL course which was frontloaded, giving trainees time to ‘get stuff out the way’ – such as assignments and a lot of the input – before focussing on teaching practice from week six onwards. Another course provider runs a 6-week CELTA, with heavy input in week 1, TP in weeks 2 and 3, no TP in week 4 to focus on assignments and preparation for the final weeks of TP in weeks 5 and 6, with little to no input in these final two weeks.
On the subject of TP (and moving away a little from blue-sky thinking!), we talked about when TP starts – is it better to throw them in at the deep end early on in the course, or wait a little? There was a feeling that TP can become something scary if it gets built up for too long before it starts and we went on to chat a little about the ‘performance’ of TP. We noted how sometimes teachers do a wonderful job of chatting to students naturally whilst waiting for everyone to join with a sudden change of energy and demeanour when the lesson ‘actually’ begins. Similarly, sometimes teachers aren’t quite sure how to end a lesson naturally with an awkwardness of passing over to the next teacher or an announcement of, “Well, that’s my bit done. And now…”
This idea of the lesson as a performance is perhaps negatively reinforced by suggesting teachers rehearse their lessons or script their instructions. Whilst practising the lesson or your instructions has definite benefits, it doesn’t prepare you for dealing with the students’ responses in real-time.
One fabulous idea which came up was to compare the classroom to another situation which trainees might be more familiar with. For example, a dinner party. If you’re hosting a dinner party and someone arrives early, you don’t just ignore them and carry on with your preparation. Similarly, if you see a guest at your dinner party has an empty glass, you don’t wait for everyone else to fnish drinking before topping them up. In other words, chat to your students when they arrive and push faster finishers to do something more, such as underlining their favourites words from the text, or writing another sentence in a grammar activity.
Another great tip was that anyone can correct the answers if they have the teachers’ book. Encourage teachers to do more than just say, “correct” such as asking students to think of another form of the word or asking them where they found the answer.
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