What is a CELTA course like?

Having interviewed three or four CELTA trainees who were actually in the middle of doing their CELTA course
[ interviews with Rob, Sara ], we thought it would be interesting to contrast their views with someone who had done the course sometime ago. Would we get the same positive feedback on the course that we'd got so far from someone two years out?

"Challenging!" was how Amy Collins (San Francisco, California) remembered her CELTA course, which she did part-time over four months, beginning in October 2002. Funny that, "challenging" is how virtually everyone seems to describe the course.

For Amy, it wasn't so much that it was academically tough as that it required a different approach to learning to what she had been used to when she'd been at college, 12 years earlier. "It was different to what I was accustomed to. At college you got presented stuff, you received it and all you then did was spit it back out. CELTA was a lot more active, a lot more learner-orientated. I found that tough at first ­ but I guess by about the second week I was cured!"

CELTA? An intensely wonderful learning experience.

"It wasn't note-taking, sitting there passively in lecture mode," Amy remembers. "I think it was a much more productive way of learning, actively participating, asking questions about what is happening, why it's happening, what the purpose of this is."

Two years on, looking back, how much did she think she'd learnt? "A great deal," Amy says, very emphatically. What, exactly? Hm, that one was harder. "Well, I expected to learn how to be a good teacher, I guess. But what I really got were the tools and resources to continually develop my teaching style - and to recognise the importance of different learning styles in a classroom. On the course they encouraged us to experiment with different teaching techniques that would be suited to particular learner styles... I guess that was probably the most valuable thing."

Learning about learning

The CELTA course looks quite extensively at "the learner" and at such things as different styles of learning and learners' needs. So, from what she was saying, perhaps she learnt more about learning than she did about teaching? "Yeah, I'd say that's right," Amy affirms.

All right, put it like this: two years on, and Amy had done CELTA and then acquired two years of practical classroom experience. Which did she think was most valuable...? I mean, could she just have gone for the experience and forgot about doing a course?

"Well, looking back on it, I'd say the course was invaluable," Amy says. "Of course the experience is important, too, but I think what they gave us on the course was the support we needed for us to improve ourselves."

Amy is obviously a great believer in teacher development: "It doesn't all end with the course," she says, "it's an on-going process. The more you teach, the more you learn how little you know ­ there are so many things you want to understand further."

She's been lucky, Amy feels, in that sense. After the course she got a job with International House, where she has been able to develop further with seminars and what she describes as "a library full of books, a building full of experts".

Amy comes across as someone pretty much bubbling with enthusiasm for her job; having done CELTA she then went straight on to do the Young Learners extension course
[ see sidebar ]. Why, she's even enthusiastic about her teenagers!

So, with the benefit of hindsight, what would she say to anyone thinking about taking CELTA? There it is, bubbling over again! "Be prepared for an intensely wonderful learning experience," says Amy ­ and you know she really means it.

Now, that's my kind of teacher.