I’ve been thinking quite a bit about food recently. Granted, this soon after the festive excesses of the Christmas/New Year period, the last thing you may want to read about is food, but please bear with me for a while. Recent debate over in Chia Suan Chong’s Devil’s Advocate blog series drew my attention back once more […]
Tag: celta
A Different Kind Of Scaffolding in ELT
There was a trainee teacher on my last CELTA course who had come to us without any academic background to speak of but with a wealth of life experience; in the end, he turned out to be one of the most interesting trainees I’ve worked with.
Powerful beyond measure
This is to the teachers I am working with on our current CELTA course. We have come a long way since the beginning, two weeks ago. Through your journals I have had the privilege of following your developmental and emotional journey. Of all the ideas, thoughts, questions and wishes that keep recurring, one of the […]
Dear Diary…
On our CELTA courses up to now, we have maintained an approach to finding out what our trainees thought about their teaching that is fairly typical of such courses: we ask them to write a self-evaluation after they have taught, which they submit to us before we sit down with them to discuss the lesson.
Security Theatre in ELT
A common feature of many initial teacher training programmes is a strong emphasis on detailed paper-based lesson planning. Whether this actually increases teacher preparedness to teach is questionable. Prompted by a TED Talk on Security Theatre and risk assessment, I suggest that focusing on anticipating problems and trying to eliminate perceived lack of control in […]
Why ELT needs to cut like a knife
A few weeks back I was working with a group of CEF B2 learners. I had recently returned from a holiday in France and had brought a souvenir back with me: a pocket knife made by hand in the traditional heart of French blade-making, Thiers. The knife itself (as you can see in the picture) is […]
Own Experience?
About a week ago, this comment appeared on my blog: Hi Anthony, I had an interesting chat with some other TEFLers and 1 person was positive that pre-CELTA teaching really helped him on his CELTA. This would fit in with reflection but do you think it’s important to only accept people with some teaching exp or even […]
Teacher Training Unplugged Hits Harrogate
Izzy and I have just returned from the IATEFL conference in Harrogate, UK – a 4-day whirlwind of ideas and experiences. One reason for going was to hold a workshop on our recent attempts to approach CELTA teacher Training in a Dogme-like fashion, and to help beginning teachers learn to teach this way from scratch. […]
Throwing down the gauntlet
We are language teachers and teacher trainers working on initial teacher training courses in Hamburg, Germany. During the course of our work we have constantly sought to refine our course design and delivery so that it provides the best training experience for the people who come to us as possible. Over the years this has […]
Simplify
Welcome. This is all about simplifying language teaching and teacher education. I hope you find it useful. All the best, Anthony