Pass the CELTA, please

This post is a lot longer than usual so feel free to read it section by section as you have the time.

So here I am at the end of my CELTA course doing a 5^th assignment. At least this one is self-imposed and there’s no word count. I won’t be going into the exact scores I received for my classes as that is personal information. This is what my CELTA tutors call a hot evaluation to the CELTA. Everything is my personal opinion or experience and the way I saw or felt things and I make no claim to know what other people thought or experienced.

Why a CELTA?

Back in January, I had been studying towards passing the IELTS when I had a sudden urge to take a TEFL course. There were a few reasons for this. I’d thought about taking one for a few years but hadn’t had the time or the money. Now I had the money and I figured I could make the time. My main reason was to get a legitimate TESL/TEFL certificate that could be recognized worldwide in case I ever wanted to work in another country. I had passed a TESL course back in 2003 but it had really just consisted of a bunch of reading material and my signing a paper to the effect that I had three months teaching experience. There had been no training, no assessment and the company that had issued the TESL certificate had gone out of business in 2008 and I was pretty sure they hadn’t been accredited to start. Another reason was that after teaching for many years I wanted to start working towards actual teaching accreditation and a real TEFL certificate seemed like the first step. The last reason was that while I was comfortable working with kids, I felt my teaching adult learner skills were lacking and if I ever applied for a job teaching adults, I wouldn’t feel confident in myself.

I had two options for passing another TESL. For timing reasons, I had to take the course in  July so I had a choice between the SAFEA course which is mostly online with one week of “training” in the last week of July and the CELTA, a one month long intensive course backed by Cambridge which I knew from past research was held in Shanghai in July. I decided to go with the CELTA as my first choice and filled out the application form. I also contacted SAFEA but wasn’t impressed with their response which basically consisted of “pay us money and we’ll let you do some stuff online.” Before applying to the CELTA, I did a little research, enough to fill out the application form without sounding like I’d never heard of the course. When setting up my pre-application interview I asked to do it after the Spring Festival holiday which they agreed to. I didn’t know what to expect as the only thing I could find out about the interview was that they asked some grammar questions so I spent a week reviewing a grammar book.

The interview itself went fairly smoothly with my open grammar book right next to me and a chart of verb tenses for the verb questions. I don’t think they really expected us to know it all and in any case, I was planning on doing a lot of grammar reviewing before the course and I figured if I didn’t know my grammar perfectly right now I’d know it by the time the course started. A day or two after the interview I received an email from Language Link informing me I’d been accepted into the July CELTA course so I informed my boss I would be taking the first two weeks of July off from work in addition to my usual two weeks of holiday at the end of July. With all the arrangements made, I put the CELTA out of my mind for the moment, concentrating on finishing the first rewrite of my novel. My goal was to get the rewrite out at the end of April and then start focusing on preparing for the CELTA. After the May holiday, with my rewrite sent to my alpha readers (shout out to all of you, you know who you are), I settled down in earnest and started studying.

The first week of May I did the CELTA pre-course task. Some of it was easy, some I had to scramble and research to answer but it gave me a rough idea of what areas I needed to focus on. I started a daily routine of reviewing phonemes and verb tenses every morning. From what I could gather online, it seemed to me that the CELTA used the British IPA system so I focused on learning that even though I generally speak a more American sounding English. I found out later that you can use the American IPA just fine for the course. I bought a few books online: Learning Teaching by Jim Scrivener, one of the recommended grammar books and Teaching Essential Grammar also by Jim Scrivener, who, I was beginning to gather, was one of the names to know in the EFL universe. I spent the rest of May going through the grammar book and then in June switched to Learning Teaching. I read through it once and learned a lot, mostly about how much I didn’t know when it came to teaching, and then a second time doing all the exercises and watching all the videos on the accompanying CD. I began trying out techniques mentioned in the book in my advanced English class at my kindergarten and I was happy to see that they were working and that I was already learning teaching.

June 28^th was my last day of work so Friday afternoon I started a weekend of intensive CELTA preparation. I’d already watched quite a few videos on the CELTA, most notably the CELTA web diaries (celtadiaries.com) which had given me a good idea of how the course would be and the general outline of the course. I’d also read a literal ton of blogs and articles, mostly from Sandy Millin’s blog (https://sandymillin.wordpress.com/2015/03/23/useful-links-for-celta/) but I had been saving something for this weekend. The website, www.elt-training.com, had a whole series of free videos covering about every topic and class in the CELTA and I spent the weekend watching each video and taking notes. By Sunday June 30^th, I was ready for the CELTA to start the next day and looking forward to a month of training and discussing teaching with like-minded people.

And we’re off…

      The CELTA officially started on July 1 at 12:30 pm so naturally I woke up at 6:30 am. I spent the morning watching some last videos then headed off to the school location at around 11:00 am. When I arrived there was no one there. The classrooms belonged to a local language school and were being used for HSK classes so I hung out in the hallway. Eventually one of the rooms opened up and some random foreigners started to drift in one by one. By the time 12:30 pm, our scheduled daily starting time rolled around, there were twelve of us in the room and we met our CELTA tutors.

      Despite being a non native speaker myself (though with a native level), I was still surprised that the majority of the class was also non-native speakers but I figured they had all passed the application and interview as well so they must all have the required English level. Four of the non native trainees were Chinese, one was Swedish, one was Russian, and one was Iranian, and then me from France. We had one native speaker from England and two others, a married couple, from Canada and one from Zimbabwe. Our tutors explained the general administrative details of the course and then split us into our teaching practice groups, with six trainees in each group. We would be observing our groups’ classes and working with each other. Each trainee in my group was given a letter from A-F. I was A. Our tutor announced that A-C would be teaching the first teaching practice or TP the following day. Joy!!! We started our input sessions but of course my mind was on how I was supposed to teach the following night. I knew from my research that CELTA tutors often taught their classes by trying to make it more of a discussion and despite being naturally shy, I had decided I would get the most out of the CELTA course and jump into the discussions on the various aspects of teaching whenever possible. I quickly got the reputation as someone who always had something to say but the reality was that having done so much research and preparation I felt I could contribute to the conversations and I would get bored after ten seconds of waiting for the other trainees to contribute. That night was the only night in the CELTA course I stayed up past 1:00 am working on my lesson plan. It wasn’t that I’d never made a lesson plan but I’d never made one the “CELTA” way. I knew from reading the pre course material how they wanted us to do it but knowing the theory and actually writing it out is not exactly the same thing. Our tutor had given us notes for the first week on who was teaching what and very detailed outlines for the stages of the lesson and the content. My first class would be a listening class. Looking back, my listening class went fairly smoothly, especially for first teaching practice, as from Learning Teaching I knew the general stages for a listening class and I had no problem with teaching a class. What stressed me was my tutor in the back of the room writing out her observations. Since I generally work with large groups of kids, I often have to project a loud voice when teaching so I used my teaching voice, as I think of it, and apparently hurt a lot of innocent trainee ears. After the class I had to write my first self-evaluation. Before the CELTA started, I had been worried that after a class I wouldn’t have anything to say about why I was unhappy my teaching. Fortunately, this was not the case and I literally filled a page with self-recriminations.

      The fact was that I knew what the CELTA wanted from a teacher by week 4 and I had been trying for that on my first TP and I felt I hadn’t achieved that. Despite my preparation for the CELTA, there was a lot I hadn’t learned yet that would be covered in future input sessions and by the teaching example of the tutors. I felt I hadn’t lived up to my expectations of myself as a teacher and was quite depressed. My tutor told me I was being too hard on myself. The first week of the CELTA is about teaching the trainees classroom management. We had to teach a class too of course, and if you could do a good one then so much the better but the focus was on getting classroom management skills. After my first TP I decided to, while of course doing my best to teach each class, focus on what the current weekly criteria was or what my tutor said I should focus on. For my 2^nd TP on Thursday night, I had to teach a grammar lesson on second conditionals and I focused on classroom management. I felt more comfortable now. As a side note, the CELTA is not about being the perfect teacher at every class, that’s saved for the final TP 8 and even then they don’t expect you to be perfect. The point of the CELTA is to show that you are improving in every teaching practice and integrating the feedback from your tutors and the techniques learned in input sessions into your next TP. Once I had that figured out, it became a little less stressful as for each TP I would just focus on what the tutor had pointed out needed to improve from the TP before and work on that while keeping the rest of my teaching at the same standard. Of course you also have to teach the right content for your class and keep your stages in order but that too is a skill they teach you as the course progresses.

      Towards the end of the week we received the first two assignments. The closest deadline was the assignment were we had to make a language skills lesson out of an authentic material so I chose the main page of Jiashan Market’s website as my text. That one was due on Monday night. The second assignment was a grammar analysis and that one was due next Friday night. I was also slated to teach a reading class on Monday and a writing class on Wednesday. I wasn’t too worried as I had all weekend to prepare and I’d given up writing and gaming for the month so I had nothing else to do.      

To paraphrase Dwayne Johnson’s character from “Central Intelligence”: It’s easy to pass the CELTA; all you have to do is focus on the course fourteen hours a day for twenty-six days. Anyone can do it.

 A group of us also decided to start meeting for a few drinks every Friday night to relax a bit before the weekend grind, or that’s why I was doing it anyway.

Getting my grind on…

As a long time gamer, I’m especially good at grinding which means doing the same thing nonstop over and over for hours on end. I had felt this skill would come in handy for the CELTA and I wasn’t wrong. On the first weekend of the CELTA, I was at my computer by nine a.m. and worked all day till six p.m. I didn’t work in the evenings as I felt I would have enough time to do my assignments and lesson planning working 9 to 6 both Saturday and Sunday and I wanted to spend some time with my wife as she wasn’t seeing much of me throughout the week. My general goal every week for the CELTA was to get any major writing or lesson planning done on the weekend and spent the mornings tweaking them as I had ideas or got suggestions from the input sessions. Since the first assignment was on planning a reading class and my next class was a reading class, this went nicely together and I finished both on Saturday. On Sunday, I planned my Wednesday writing class and finished my first draft of the grammar analysis assignment.

Monday morning, I handed in my first assignment and my 3^rd TP went smoothly enough and while things were pointed out that I needed to improve on in the feedback, I was happy with my teaching progress so far. The input sessions by the tutors were interesting. A lot of it I had either heard beforehand from my CELTA prep or it was things I had noticed during my own teaching but hadn’t really been able to put a name on it so it was nice to see things spelled out. A lot of the CELTA training is modeled by the tutors during their own sessions so you have to watch the tutors and their actions almost as much as you listen to what they are saying.  

My 4^th TP was a writing class. After the first twenty minutes I was in trouble. The time to teach the lexis (vocabulary) had taken twice as long as I had estimated and I could tell I didn’t have the time to go through all the stages of my lesson. The students were supposed to have ten minutes of writing before going on the next stage and having another ten minutes of writing but there was only ten minutes left on the clock. I gave the students five minutes to write their first task then pushed them on to the second one for another five minutes. I hadn’t realized that it would take the students two or three minutes to actually start writing so in the end, instead of the paragraph of writing they were supposed to do, they had only done a few sentences twice. I was angry with myself as I had been hoping to get in a good writing class and get the writing samples that I knew the other group of trainees would need for an upcoming assignment as no one had been able to have the students finish a writing task so far and I had failed. In the end our tutors came to our rescue and got us some writing examples during their demo lessons.

In my first self-reflection, I had listed every single thing that I felt I had done wrong. For my 4^th TP reflection, l limited myself to only talking about the things I knew for sure I had messed up and that were relevant to the 2^nd week, like the timing of my stages. My tutor gave me some feedback for the lesson and I had plenty of material to pick for my personal aims for my 5^th TP. Despite the fact that I felt bad about how my TP 4 went, I actually learned more from it then any other TP thanks to all the feedback about my errors.

With my 4^th TP done, I handed in first assignment on Thursday and on Friday we received our next assignment. With the second week done, my group of trainees would be leaving the intermediate students and our current tutor and moving over to the elementary students under the other tutor while the other group would be taking our place with the intermediate students. Compounding this movement was the fact that we were given our next assignment, a needs analysis of the learners, and told that the object of the assignment would be the new group of students we were transferring too.

On Thursday night I observed three of the trainees from the other group teach the elementary class and Friday night my group of trainees observed our new tutor teach a class and met the elementary students. While we were supposed to be observing the teacher in our new class environment, most of us were busy noting down any and every mistake the students made as well as their learning styles of our upcoming assignment. On the 2^nd Friday of the course, I had a good talk during my tutorial session with my tutor and I was happy to hear she thought I was doing well. After our usual Friday night drinking session, I worked Saturday and Sunday from 9-6 on my assignment and my lesson plans for the next week. For TP 5 and 6 I would be teaching another writing class and a lexis (vocabulary class). By Sunday night I was feeling happy with myself as I felt I had done a good first draft of the assignment and both lesson plans were done.

Under pressure …

      Despite the fact that I’d been feeling good about things Sunday night, I started to stress again Monday morning for various reasons. I’d be teaching a new level of students with a new tutor watching. I’d enjoyed the style of my first two weeks’ tutor and I didn’t really know how my new tutor would be. She’d given us input sessions but I hadn’t really talked to her at all. I think my group was quite nervous as we sat down with her. Her first question about who wanted to say something about the observation task from the Friday night demo made everyone panic as none of us had done it. We had been given a booklet of observation tasks at the beginning of the course but nothing had been explained to us about doing them for the lessons other than that they weren’t mandatory to do. Observation tasks hadn’t come up at all during our daily feedback sessions on the previous day’s TPs in the first two weeks with our previous tutor so we didn’t really know what to say other than to come up with a few general observations we’d made. Our new tutor’s next question sent my group into even more of a panic: Who wanted to show their lesson plan? With our old tutor we’d never shown our lesson plans and staging before doing the actual class unless we were asking for her help to plan the stages so again none of us knew what to say. We hesitantly went one by one through our plans and when it came to mine, I found that I hadn’t understood at all what I was supposed to be doing for the class and had to completely rewrite my plan, rendering all my planning on the weekend useless. My tutor suggested I have a look at the staging lesson done by one of the other group’s trainees but then we had to spend an hour and a half learning a foreign language from scratch to show us how beginner students feel. If I hadn’t been agonizing over the work I knew I had to do on my lesson plan it would have been interesting but knowing that I needed to write my stages all over again kept me from focusing on the lesson. Fortunately part two of the two-week tutorials was scheduled for the rest of the afternoon and I had already done mine on Friday so I had an extra ninety minutes to work on my plan. With the help of another trainee, I finished writing the lesson stages and language analysis sheet in an hour. TP 5 itself went off fine and when I saw that the new tutor was judging off the same criteria as the first one, I was less stressed and able to focus on just doing the TPs as they came. Of course the tutors had told us that they all used the same criteria and while I would not say I didn’t believe them, I will say that I wasn’t completely convinced until after the feedback from the 5^th TP. One of the comments on the feedback for the 5^th TP was that my plan had been a well-written plan which just goes to show you don’t have to spend hours on a plan as long as your stages are correct.

      During the 3^rd week I also had to resubmit my LRT (grammar analysis) assignment. When you get told at the beginning of the CELTA that if you fail an assignment you have to resubmit it, the image you get in your mind is of your tutor ripping your assignment in half and telling you to rewrite the whole thing. This is almost never the case as most trainees have put effort and research into writing their assignments and the tutors point out exactly what they think is wrong and what you need to fix, often to the exact wording they don’t like so it is really more a case of fine-tuning and a few little fixes. My LRT had a few errors and it took me about an hour to fix them and have it ready for resubmission. My 6^th TP went by and even though I was always nervous before each class, once they got going my teaching experience would take over and I wouldn’t stress that much. The fact is, it was never the teaching part that stressed me out but the fact that I knew there was my tutor in the back of the room making notes about everything I did. My goal for each TP was always to address whatever had been pointed out to me during the previous TP’s feedback and to integrate any new techniques or suggestions that had come up in the input sessions.

      Our tutor was also pushing us to work together and help each other. I was hesitant for several reasons but mostly because I didn’t want to give bad advice to the other trainees but I still tried to give advice or help when I could. On Wednesday of the third week, our tutors gave us our fourth assignment which was basically talking about our personal growth as a teacher during the CELTA. I’d been expecting this assignment and I managed to get my first draft done Thursday morning and by Friday I had it turned it in and received a pass. My third assignment received a pass on Friday as well so I now had all four assignments done and could concentrate on preparing my last two TPs for the final weekend. For my 7^th TP I had to teach functions and my tutor suggested that we make a video to use for the class. I wasn’t incredibly enthusiastic about this idea, mostly because I knew a lot of the trainees were busy working on their fourth assignment or resubmissions but a suggestion from a CELTA tutor is an order for a CELTA trainee so I got some volunteers together and shot a few different scenes and edited it on the weekend with the help of another trainee. I planned TP 7 on Saturday and TP 8 on Sunday. It only took a few hours for each, including the language analysis, so I spent the rest of the time giving advice to other trainees or watching movies.

      TP 7 went off as planned and the students enjoyed the video and had a good lesson. For TP8 we had only been given the general context and I knew what grammar point I had to teach, the rest of the lesson was mine to plan. Most of us trainees shared our stages back and forth and since I was confident in my plan, I spent most of Wednesday morning helping other trainees get everything together for their last TPs. On Wednesday, the trainees who weren’t teaching didn’t have to observe and we only had four students out of our usual 6-7 so the room felt a lot emptier than usual but I enjoyed myself teaching the last class and then it was over. I sat in on the Thursday night class and then the majority of the trainees and the tutors went out for drinks. This morning (Friday of the fourth week) we finished up administrative details and most of us went out for a lunch together and now the CELTA is officially over.

Did I achieve my main aim?

      Is the CELTA worth it? As a course and as an experience I would have to give a resounding YES!!! It was hard and stressful and reading back over what I’ve just written it might sound like I had a plan and knew what I was doing but it only looks planned with hindsight. In the heat of the moment, it was absolute chaos, with lots of bumbling from deadline to deadline and always another deadline. I only slept 6 hours a night for twenty-six days, I did nothing but think about the CELTA for twenty-six days. I had nightmares about my TPs. Most of the time, I only had a vague idea of if I was doing things the way they were supposed to be done. I used up all my summer vacation days and lost half a month’s salary to take the CELTA and it was worth it. I learned so much both about myself and about teaching English and even better; I learned what I don’t know about teaching and what I need to do to keep learning

      The tutors were awesome. During our last week there was an exercise where we had to talk about the best teachers we’d ever had. I told my partner that the tutors on the course were the best teachers I’d ever had and that is the truth. I was homeschooled as a kid and pretty much self-taught my last four years of high school. In university, my professors were all researchers not teachers and when not downright insulting, they were usually indifferent to the students. My CELTA tutors were the most enthusiastic teachers I’d ever met and you could see they genuinely loved their subject and wanted all the trainees to do well and they were definitely the best examples of teachers I’ve ever met and I’ve been around teachers since I was sixteen.

      So what do you need to do to pass your CELTA? Just do exactly what your CELTA tutors tell you to do. Prepare and study beforehand. Clear your schedule of all distraction and be ready to put the CELTA before everything else. It is an intensive course and you’ll have to do a lot of things at the same time, especially in weeks two and three. Make sure you know your English grammar and language already so you can focus on the teaching when you’re doing your CELTA. You don’t have to do everything I did to prepare for the CELTA, many of the other trainees didn’t prepare as much or even maybe at all, but it helps.

If you’re about to do the CELTA, my advice would be to focus on each day at a time, always read the feedback from your tutor and take it into account when you’re planning your next lesson and work with your fellow trainees from the start.

      Despite all the work and stress, I would say this is the most useful vacation I’ve ever had. Maybe not the most fun but it’s definitely the one that I’m the most satisfied with now that it’s over. I made new friends that I hope to keep in the future and most of all it’s made me excited about teaching again in a way I haven’t been for a very long time. I hope if you take the CELTA you’ll have as awesome an experience as I did and that you too will pass the CELTA!!!