The transformational experience of being taught how to teach

I have done my teacher training and got what I’ve come here to get: the CELTA CERTIFICATE!  Four weeks of intense training. It was such an empowering experience.

We were three in my class (!), Cat, a 28 year old woman from Idaho who already taught in South Korea and is intent on moving to Taipei in Taiwan, and Jenny a 57 year old woman from California who already taught English literature at university in the US, is willing to volunteer in Tibet and seeked effective tools to teach English as a second language. Two great women ! We were in position of teaching the very third day or our course. It was something both highly useful and dreadful - scary to teach in front of a class almost from scratch -  also the best way to learn, by making mistakes which is part of the learning process. Every afternoon we were teaching “free classes” to “real” students of the school. They were approximately 8 to 14, from 20 to 60 years old, from South Korea, Japan, Brasil, Russia, Europe and were elementary to upper intermediate level.

My two classmates: Cat on the right Jenny on the left

My great teachers: Sezgi, 2nd on the right, and Jenny far right

I have entered a new world.

I realized I was not wired correctly with regard to what is required from a teacher. I realized I had to shed all those automatic processes I’ve been used to dealing with for years, to relearn a new way of expressing things. We – company workers - have been used to studying a topic, gain an expertise on it to be able to tell about it extensively to our colleagues and managers. And now we have to reverse the process and ask our audience - our students -  to tell us the good way, to elicit their skills, their mind, their speaking ability, to find the answers by themselves. It is a new philosophy we have to adopt : We enter the dialectic method of enquiry of Socrates . And as our renowned friend Wikipedia says : “the Socratic method remains a commonly used tool in a wide range of discussions, and is a type of pedagogy in which a series of questions is asked not only to draw individual answers, but also to encourage fundamental insight into the issue at hand. This is perhaps Socrates’ most important contribution to Western thought”.

No wonder this training was baffling. The overarching principle of our teaching hinges on this student-centered methodology. I am entering a new world, I need an overall rebooting of my mind.

The paramount concept of our training lies on the CCQ  - Concept Checking Question - and its infamous enemy the TTT - Teacher Talking Time! The CCQ is a clever way to elicit students understanding rather than “spood feeding them” - quote from our teacher Sezgi-. And that might be the most difficult part for us trainee teachers because as previously said we are wired differently. That is when we are required to have a thorough analysis of the grammar point, the vocabulary or the functions we are supposed to teach. And we know we have done a good job when we’ve almost been silent during the class.

The interesting part of this course is that we’ve been taught the way we are supposed to teach our students, with this same discursive process.

Praise is the first tool of class management we’ve been told about. Surprisingly, as far as I can recall, it seems to me that the word praise does not belong to the lexical set of the educational system in France. As a tool of class management it is yet so positively obvious, because our students need confidence to be able to speak a new language! The use of interaction patterns such as working in pairs is also meant to foster confidence and encourages the student to practice the language in a “safe” environment, not being exposed directly to the teacher or the entire class. This is also the spirit of the“check in pairs” stage, in which the student can check their answers whith their classmate and thus be sure of themselves before giving an oral answer to the class.

The very scaffolding of our teaching was the lesson plan frameworks and we’ve internalized - or still are in the process of internalizing -  these while teaching ourselves or observing our peers teach. A good lesson is planned with a clear aim. The lead-in serves as an icebreaker, we then introduce a context to what we’re going to teach, we then set up a “treasure hunt” to make the students guess the rules or the meaning of what they are being taught, then we process to a controlled practice to check their understanding, then we set up a freer practice to give them a free way to practice the new language they ‘ve learnt. That is in a nutshell the guidelines to the Language lessons: vocabulary, grammar, functions. Nothing else but a logical way to get acquainted to a new language.

Observing and being observed by our peers with a time of constructive feedback  was a very empowering process and a time of self awareness thanks to our professional and empathetic teachers. And ultimately establishing a rapport with the students was a wonderful experience.

I feel like a whole new world is opening up for me. I AM so GRATEFUL!