CELTA Input Sessions

If you didn't read my prior post, I did an intensive CELTA  course in July of 2015. I was fortunate enough to take the course at  the school I was teaching at through Target Language Services in Sao Paulo.  I had three tutors who were responsible for giving the input sessions for the CELTA  candidates. 

Our input sessions happened every morning throughout the Intensive course. We were in a room with one or two tutors and all of the candidates together. We discussed one topic during the session. The topics ranged from teaching practices to classroom management, to phonology, etc. If you have never had a professional development course or you've never engaged with the style that the University of Cambridge has when delivering courses I would recommend that you take a look at some information from the TKT test. This is something that I was unfamiliar with when I took my course, but it would have been very useful for me to understand how the University of Cambridge prefers to deliver its course content at least in terms of terminology.

During the sessions, the tutors go through the subject and they teach you about different aspects of that specific subject. I would recommend that you always have a notebook, of course. But also that you are prepared to and skilled at taking notes. Everything that the tutors say and teach you about in their input sessions will be instrumental in completing the tasks for lesson planning and your writing assignments. So, if the tutor is teaching you about phonology for example and they go through a section on how to drill proper pronunciation in class. They will give you a few options for drilling pronunciation and the expectation is that you use their recommendations in your teaching practice. Of course not every recommendation or discussion topic is possible to include in your teaching practice, but you should try to implement some techniques and some of the ideas that the tutors are giving to you. I recommend that you use those techniques during your teaching practice in some way. The whole idea of the CELTA course is to allow novice teachers to use techniques that the University of Cambridge deems essential in teaching practice. Now, I am not saying all of the techniques and ALL of the approaches that they teach you in the input sessions NEED to use or that they're the ONLY way of doing something... however, you need to be able to implement these ideas successfully in your teaching practice. The CELTA course is not teaching you that there are exact rules, a perfect lesson plan, and a perfect lesson. The CELTA course is exposing you to different techniques and approaches that you might be unfamiliar with so that you can experiment in your class and decide what is successful and not successful. If something is not successful, reflect on how you could modify it or how you can deliver the material in a better way to meet your lesson objectives. So, remember, CELTA is not teaching you exactly what the perfect lesson is, because the formula of a perfect lesson doesn't exist. The input sessions that you attend are simply to give you a variety of ideas and expose you to new techniques, approaches, or aspects of the language that you have not seen before.

 Going back to taking notes, make sure you do because you must try to use what they teach you in the sessions for your teaching practice and your writing assignments as well. One thing that I wish I had done and didn't in my course was dividing my notebook into different sections. So, when you're doing the input sessions my recommendations of good directions for your notebook would be by topic area, terminology, classroom ideas, and reference materials. Now, however, you like to take notes in class. But, what I found was I needed to have messy notes during the sessions where I wrote any and everything down. Then I would take a few minutes when everything was fresh in my head and make notes on my notes. For example, Circle something or highlight something in a different color or something along those lines. What I didn't do and I wish I had done was after my input session had a clean notebook that I would transfer the really important information to for example transfer all of the terminology for a specific topic. That way when I needed to speak about that topic in a writing assignment or justification in my lesson plan I would be able to use the appropriate terminology and have a reference for it. Or another example would be to have a section about references. In that section, you could - by topic or focus area - right down articles and books that you could refer to while you're preparing your lessons or writing your assignments.

I think one misconception that candidates have while doing the CELTA program is that they need to be perfect teachers to be successful, that is untrue. In my opinion, it is designed to allow you to try new things, to understand when and why you use specific techniques, and to make you feel more confident as a teacher in the classroom. Some of the candidates in my group that struggled significantly with the course were people who had a very rigid and inflexible view of what teaching should be. If you fight against what they're trying to show you in the course, then I guarantee you will leave frustrated in the end, possibly without a certificate. One of the best things that I got from the CELTA input sessions was a variety of ideas. I took those ideas and tried to implement them in my lessons. If the idea was successful I made sure to include the reasons for success in my reflection. If I used an idea from the input session unsuccessfully in my teaching practice, then I also had the opportunity to reflect after the lesson about why that specific technique or approach was unsuccessful and what I could do in the future to guarantee success. My final thought for anyone trying to take the CELTA is to understand the objective of the input sessions. My recommendation is that, and I cannot say this enough, you view input sessions as an opportunity to see and experience new ideas that you can then implement and your teaching practice. If you have questions, ask your tutor… they're there to help you. One thing that I did not take advantage of was asking enough questions because I was too embarrassed. I thought that I was being tested all the time and that if I had a question on something I would look lesser than my peers, which is not the case at all. If you have a question, more than likely someone yourself in the group has the same question. So, raise your hand to ask questions and be open to the new possibilities that they're trying to teach you in the input sessions.