Celta - Blog Posts

⚪️⚪️⚪️ Del Latín “triketra”: tres esquinas. . Vida, muerte y reencarnación. Físico, mental y espiritual. Cuerpo, mente y alma o espíritu. Tierra, agua y aire. La triple dimensión de la divinidad femenina: doncella, mujer/madre, anciana. . El círculo significa “un ciclo”. Todo lo que comienza, debe acabar, para volver a empezar. . ⚪️⚪️⚪️ Fron latin "triketra": three corners. . Life, death and reincarnation. Physical, mental and spiritual. Body, mind and soul/spirit. Earth, water and air. The triple dimension of the feminine: maiden, woman / mother, old woman. . The circle means "a cycle". Everything that begins must end, to start over. #triketa #triquetra #triqueta #celta #celtic #illustration #ilustracion https://www.instagram.com/p/BtjLFbmHro1/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1b4fdp7r2xhe5

Story #62 "My best learning experience"

Originally written as a CELTA admission essay.

It’d be fair to say that one of my best learning experiences was the one I gained being a member of the “Teachers Teach Teachers” project. In a nutshell, that’s a program created by a teacher trainer and business coach Anita Modestova, where teachers are given a unique, almost once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be taught by their fellow teachers, teach their peers themselves, discuss the methodology aspects of the overall teaching process, as well as receive the extended detailed feedback.

As a basis, we used Hugh Dellar’s “Outcomes Advanced” coursebook, implementing both the communicative and the lexical approaches. Every month, one of the participants, was nominated to teach their colleagues and Hugh, himself, hosted workshops for teachers of the month. We discussed strategies, shared our ideas for exercises, planned the whole lesson together, and in the next meeting exchanged good and bad outcomes and what needed to be improved.

Having lessons weekly, it took us roughly three years to go through the whole coursebook. Not only I became more confident as a teacher, but I got plenty of insights as a student, especially on teaching online. It was a safe place for me to implement new ideas and experiment with my own teaching style as well as test out any unconventional methods. For instance, at one point my third-year mentor Ben Brooks pointed out how much better it might be to let all students stay in the main room for an active discussion instead of dividing them into pairs. That was when I saw that sometimes the MR works better than break-out rooms, and later that year I gave a speech at the “Meaningful Weekend” conference about the whole thing and how beneficial it could be.

All in all, I’m extremely grateful for that experience and believe that it is partially responsible for what kind of teacher I am now.

Story #61 "What is a good teacher?"

Originally written as a CELTA admission essay.

What is a good teacher? What qualities one should possess to be considered a poster child for teaching? And who is to tell a good teacher from the bad one, and make the final decision? They say “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Perhaps, to an extent, it’s fair for a good vs. bad teacher as well.

When I did my TESOL course a year ago, I was asked to write an essay on my teaching philosophy, and at some point, I started contemplating what a good teacher was in my opinion, and whether I, myself, met those standards. I might repeat myself here with what I wrote in the past, but thinking back now, I stand by my words. 

I’m firmly convinced that a good teacher is a teacher who knows how to convey the information they prepared for the lesson and is able to present the material in a practicable and entertaining way, as well as be capable of engaging students in different communicative activities to provide them with vocabulary and grammar sufficient for successful communication. That kind of teacher knows the ultimate goal of any exercise they give and sets short-term and long-term aims for themselves and their students.

A good teacher knows how to encourage a student to use actively the learning strategies such as asking questions, making notes, and not being afraid of making mistakes. They can explain that experimenting with the language is impossible without mistakes, and get sure students feel confident enough in a classroom. As a rule, a good teacher sticks to the 80/20 strategy and knows how to reduce teacher talking time and increase student talking time.

They want to pass on not only their knowledge but their passion for languages and sow the seeds of the idea that any learning indeed is an exciting process a student can benefit from. A good teacher strives to show their students that there is no extrinsic motivation they need to study as they can find it within themselves. As a teacher, I try to be that source of motivation and enthusiasm for my students.

Story #43, CELTA weeks 7-8

I believe I owe you some more insights about Celta!

Week 7 was so hard that I dreamed about sending it all to hell so I could indulge in sleeping 🛌 . Which I did the moment the second session was over. Literally. I was in bed 10 minutes after the tutor bid us goodbye 😅

On Monday I had my lesson 3 - listening - and it was relatively easy.

On Thursday I had a language focus lesson - Vocabulary. Usually, you are supposed to expose students to 10-12 new lexical items at once. In my lesson I had 23😱 I couldn’t choose the materials at that point and had to navigate my way through what I was given. So I decided to do TTT over PPP. I’ll share a post in a couple of days with some details about that particular lesson.

The trickiest thing about it was the language analysis sheet I was supposed to compete along with my lesson plan. 23 words and collocations. Definitions. CCQs for all of them. What to draw students’ attention to in terms of form? Pronunciation? Where will I need to cover an appropriacy aspect? That sheet was total shit. Took me about three hours.

On top of that, there was another live class, three more modules on the Moodle platform, a stage report one, then a personal tutorial and a stage report 2. Along the way I also conducted an interview with a student for assignment 1 I have to submit at the end of the month.

Phew. Shoot me now 🔫

Week 8 started and we were given a new group of learners - Uppers. They are cool, have been together for a while, come from different backgrounds, curious, ask dozens of questions and have established nice rapport.

Since for the first lesson with the new group we only had to cover a short “getting to know you” activity and observe our new tutor, it felt like having a breather.

Lesson 5 was Grammar - it’s time, I’d rather, I’d better.

I also completed two modules on the platform, and had gotten a “pass” for assignment 2.

Lesson 6 tomorrow! So far so good, but I’m definitely not gonna miss it when it ends!

🥱

Story #42, CELTA weeks 5-6

These two were quite intensive, but after my second lesson, I seem to catch the flow and start enjoying the process.

Week 5.

✅Teaching practice started. Two 4-hour long sessions. Not the real practice though. Just a tiny part of it, where we designed a short “getting to know you” activity, observed our tutor and under her careful guidance planned our first lesson.

✅Another live session about phonology and pronunciation. One cool insight I took from that session: phonology is actually FUNology!

✅Assignment 2 was submitted.

✅Assignment 3 returned and resubmitted and now it's a pass.

✅3 more modules on the platform.

Week 6

Teaching for real.

✅ my first lesson was reading. No big deal (ha-ha), 16 students(😱), and your typical lead-in-prediction-pre-teach vocabulary-reading for gist-reading for details-follow-up productive skills task type of reading.

It was a blast. Seriously. The tutor gave me a few suggestions, but, all in all, she said it had been a success for the first lesson.

✅ my second lesson was grammar. The Present perfect vs the Past simple. I struggled with my timing, as the MFPA analysis took longer than I planned, and I felt like I had to give them all and everything in terms of Meaning, Form, Pronunciation, and Appropriacy. It wasn’t a failure, I got “to standard” for it, but looking back at it, I’d have changed a number of things. The most valuable advice from my Tutor was - prioritize.

✅ 3 more units on the platform

✅ started planning my assignment 1, which includes an interview with one of the students👌should be interesting!

Tomorrow I have a listening lesson. I’m well-prepared and pretty confident.

✅2/8 done. 6 more to go. 2 more with my pre-intermediate group, and then 4 more with Upper-Intermediate students.

Wish me luck ✌️🍾

In the photo, things I'm going to do right after I give my last lesson 😂

Story #41, CELTA weeks 2-3-4

Considering teacher’s practice still hasn't started, both these were relatively easy.

During the second week a student is supposed to cover 4 modules on the platform, each takes from 40 minutes to 2 hours.

✅ Dealing with language ✅ Classroom management ✅ Using the coursebook 1 ✅ Lesson planning 1

Week 3 modules: ✅ More about the learner ✅ Checking understanding ✅ Anticipating problems ✅ Coursebook

Week 4: ✅ Listening ✅ Lexis ✅ Practice activities ✅ Correction

There were also a few tasks to submit on discussion forums both individually and in small groups about the theoretical material.

Apart from that, there’s only live session a week (2-2,5 hrs):

📚”Classroom management, online vs offline lesson”. 📚 “Eliciting and concept checking questions.” 📚 “Lesson Planning”

At the end of the 4th week we also had to submit one of our written assignments.

📝 Assignment 3 is a reading lesson based on authentic materials, designed for a particular group of students. The list of possible articles to use, as well as the class profile are provided by Cambridge. No stages and procedures should be included, it’s a lesson in prose, where each activity should be described and the rationale stated (references and appendix with designed handouts included).

The revelation of the week: when it comes to lexis, CELTA promotes (however, not explicitly), the Lexical Approach and encourages students to study words in chunks and collocations, notice grammar patterns and check linking and connected speech features.

That’s it 👌 Off we go to week 5, where teaching practice starts.

This week I have on the plate:

✅the first lesson with a pre-intermediate group. ✅ assignment 2 ✅ two live sessions ✅ lesson plans ✅ sweat, tears and a lack of sleep.

But.. I will survive ❤️

Story #40, CELTA week 1

And that was… a piece of cake. Let’s see what I’m gonna say when they ask us to write those long-ass lesson plans😂

Anyway, what did we do that first week:

🦋 Cambridge platform online tasks 1. Orientation module; 2. Unit 1: learner’s first; 3. Unit 2: designing tasks (reading).

🦋 Design a lead-in activity for a reading lesson (in a group of three); 🦋 Design an initial reading task and then a detailed reading task (the text was provided, work individually).

🦋 A compulsory live session with a tutor (2 hrs long);

🦋Observation practice of 2 different lessons taught by two different teachers.

There’s an interesting detail I noticed about one of the lessons I observed. The teacher chose to talk about the British Royal family (sans Kate and Megan, and in a moment you will understand why). While showing the photo of the Queen, he asked the students if they knew how old she was. And she was…. Tada!

79!

❓So here is the puzzle for you to solve.

If the Queen was 79 then, and in 2022 she died at the age of 96, what year was the lesson recorded in?

Story #39, CELTA 2022

I’ve been wanting to take the course for the past three years or so, but somehow I couldn’t answer to myself “to what end”? And then it just clicked. So here I am.

I didn't want to do a full-time 4-week offline CELTA. Since we live in a digital age where people Zoom this and that, you don't even need to leave your apartment. Maybe even your bed.

My CELTA is a 12-week online course in ITI Istanbul.

We have a multinational group with people from Turkey, Iran, Russia, Japan, and even Argentina!

The workload is pretty heavy, but all the tasks are quite doable, and if you manage to organize your time properly, there’s just the right amount of time for work, side projects and family errands.

All the tasks mentioned below are compulsory; however, only the first two are assessed.

What it consists of: 🦋4 written assignments (up to 1000 words); 🦋8 45-minute lessons; 🦋6 hrs of teacher practice observation (including your tutor); 🦋7 weekly sessions; 🦋30 units of coursework on the Cambridge platform; 📛nerves, sweat, tears unlimited.

My teaching practice is starting at the end of November and finishing somewhere around December, 30. (Alas! no teaching after the New Year’s Day). The last week is dedicated to wrap up all the loose ends.

This should be the first step for taking DELTA afterward… so we’ll see.