first observation - by Theo

Today I had my first observation by my University Tutor, a man who has trained at least one person in every English Department west of Reading (or so it seems - he's been at the University's Education Department for 25 years). This was a formal observation which would count towards my final grade. So no pressure then.

Actually I wasn't feeling too much pressure. I'd been observed by somebody in the 15 or so classes I had taught prior to today (plus loads as an EFL teacher), so wasn't feeling too unnerved at the prospect of having somebody commenting on my every utterance. Plus I always try to keep in mind that it is through being observed and reflecting on the comments you get back that you learn. So, bring it on.

I was teaching a Year 10 class that I had taught twice before. Their aim at the end of the unit is to write a review of the film, Jaws, and after two classes looking at how film makers use camera angles and sound to create tension, we were now looking at effective language use in reviews. The class went well. Not brilliantly, but a bit more than OK. It wasn't inaccessibly hard, but it wasn't a stroll in the park for them either. They behaved. They learned (something). We finished on time. It was alright.

I've still got loads to do. Both my Associate Tutor (who was quite nervous as it's her first year as an AT and she had to give her feedback first - so essentially she was being observed too!) and University Tutor were complimentary and thought I was doing better than they might expect at this point in the PGCE course. They were really pleased with my planning and consideration of the needs of individual students; I've my EFL experience to thank for that I guess. But there is plenty of room for me to improve, with a few of the things being:

• I need to think about how to get the students to reflect on their work, to realise what they have learned.
• I need to cut down the amount of Teacher Talk and build in more steps to the tasks so the students can guide themselves through with minimum input from me.
• Leaving space for individual work and only doing group work if there is a real point to it.

It's that last point where my EFL background isn't helping. "Discuss with your partner" is such a CELTA staple - language is communicative, and when teaching English as a Foreign Language, just getting students to talk to each other and convey meaning can be a learning objective and outcome all on its own. In contrast, times when EFL students write in silence for 15 minutes or more are rare. So changing what my view of what learning looks like is going to be crucial.

Student again - by Theo

As I took my seat on Monday it was impossible not to feel both a sense of nostalgia and of time standing still; after all, nearly 11 years previously I had sat down in the very same room (Chemistry Lecture Theatre 1) for my Undergraduate Philosophy lectures. Where did that decade go?!?! There I was again, a Bristol University student, for the third time, this time to begin a PGCE in Secondary English.

It's been a great first week; challenging, but not too intense. I seem to be in a reasonably privileged position of having a background in literature, a very solid grounding in English grammar and also teaching experience; few of my 29 course mates can say the same, it seems. I've been surprised at the range of backgrounds - some did degrees in Drama, others in Linguistics. They are a lovely bunch, though the demographics would surprise nobody - 1 male student to every 5 female ones, with only one student being obviously of a BME background. Across the wider PGCE course - 200-odd students studying to be teachers in Science, History, MFL, Geography, Maths, RE and Citizenship - this seems to be the case too. I've met a couple of other parents, though there are none doing English. However I did run into an old classmate, Susa, who is studying to be a German and Spanish Teacher - she only got a place on the course recently and it came as a complete, but very pleasant, surprise to met her at the lecture.

So far most of the lectures have just dealt with the 'admin' side of the course, plus getting to know you style activities within our subject groups. The real work begins next week I suspect, and already we've got piles of reading to get through. What work we have done - lesson planning, grammar analysis - hasn't seemed all that far away from techniques I'm used to in a TEFL context, all guided discovery and CELTA style planning proformas. We'll be in schools though from the first week of October and that will be a huge difference. I can't wait actually!

On Being Loved And Left

So, today we bid a fond farewell to our latest batch of trainee teachers.
In the UK overt physical contact with your teachers is generally discouraged, as they're mostly keen to keep their CAB records clean, or at least avoid gossip and disapproval in the institutions where they teach grown-ups.

Not so in Spain. A kiss on each cheek and earnest wishes of good fortune for the future are exchanged - and not even after all concerned have sunk a goodbye beer or two. Nope, emotional scenes of farewell happen inside the classroom itself.

I remember our tutor indulgently watching the hugs, kisses and wellings-up that accompanied our own partings with the unfortunate students we practised on during our CELTA course. Given the sometimes painful experiences we'd put them through in the name of teaching them English, their affectionate goodbyes were very heartwarming and possibly undeserved.

When I told our tutor I was genuinely sorry I wouldn't be seeing them any more, he smiled and said "Of course you are. They're special because they were your first." Which made it sound a bit like a collective loss of virginity. Which in some ways, it was. The nervousness beforehand, the adrenalin surge of excitement during, the anti-climax of an off-target attempt, the need for a cigarette or beer afterwards...

Anyway, it's kind of nice to know you've booked yourself an eternally special little place in a language teacher's heart. Even after so much mangling of their beloved mother tongue. Besos y abrazos, as they say here in Spain.

(Correcto, mis profesuros?)

depressing things about teaching (no.53)

The lack of initiative, gumption and imagination in some of my kids' classes is quite astounding. (Only in the field of learning English that is - when it comes to cheating at tests, kicking each other under the table or disrupting the class they are incredibly imaginative, if not terribly subtle.)

This week in my kids' classes we have been revising the use of "going to" to express the future (e.g. I am going to play tennis this weekend.) They have already learned this point in class; they have already been tested on it in fact, and set copious amounts of homework on it. It should be relatively easy for them to understand - they have virtually the same expression in Spanish - yo voy a juegar tenis este fin de semana (although that does literally translate as "I go to play tennis this weekend"). However, they still don't quite get it, so I planned a 90 minute lesson to help them revise the area.

We did listening exercises, we did speaking exercises, we put the grammar points up on the board, we did reading exercises and even writing exercises. Up, down, left, right - every way we could use "I'm going to do/go/play/eat/etc" we did. Finally, to end the class I gave them the lyrics to Pink's song "So what" and asked them to fill in the gaps. The gaps - as astute readers might have guessed - were all linked to "going to" constructions.

Eg:
I'm __________ to drink my money,
I'm not going _________ his rent,
_____ going to start a fight

Now, even if you've never heard the song, you could probably guess the words that go in those gaps, and I was hoping the kids would also be able to fill in half the gaps before playing the song - just to make sure I had actually left the phrase "I'm going to pay" on the board along with the grammar rules for forming the future with "to go".

After two plays of the song most of the class had blank sheets and even blanker faces - if they'd written anything it was probably either "go" or "pay" (no "to"). It was fair enough if they didn't understand the song, or if they lost their place in the lyrics, but I just couldn't understand how, after 90 minutes, they didn't have the gumption to take a wild guess that "going" would be followed by "to" and preceeded by either "I'm" or "He's".

Fortunately I'd completed all their report cards the week before, or I might have written some very caustic comments.

Of Teaching And Beer

After five days of intensive training with a English teaching company based in Madrid, I sallied forth to the Spanish HQ of one of Europe's largest beer-sellers. My pupils are some of the company's top executives, which felt a tad daunting to begin with. Also, with precisely zero experience in teaching Business English and only a few hours of one-to-one teaching under my belt, I had to throw out the "discuss in pairs" and "compare answers" basis to my CELTA qualification and make some serious modifications. Oh, and there are no textbooks to act as a guide and conveniently provide me with off-the-peg lesson themes and exercises. I have to invent every lesson from scratch.

Given that it takes me around an hour to reach the office where I teach and most of the lessons are individually timetabled at an hour and a half, it's not proving very time-efficient so far. Luckily, the cost of the one-change metro-and-then-a-bus journey works out at 77 cents a time, so at least the travel is cheap. I'm getting lot of reading done on Madrid's public transport and sometimes I even attempt to improve my (slightly better than non-existent, but not much) Spanish. As an added bonus, I haven't yet had anything nicked by Madrid's legendary pick-pockets either - touch wood.

On top of the journey time, the lack of handy teaching materials means it's taking me around two hours to plan each lesson. Tot that up with the travel and it's costing me four hours of time for every hour and a half taught. Not what you'd call breath-takingly effective.

But these aren't complaints. Mainly because at the moment, I'm enjoying both the lessons themselves and the planning process. Fashioning a fully-functioning, interesting and bespoke English language lesson out of nothing actually feels rather creative. Also, I'm well aware that the more material I produce now, the more I can adapt and re-use in the future. As we're in the business world of teaching English, let's call it a time investment. Ah, that feels better already.

Then there are my pupils, who are all very likeable, very attentive, all do their homework and in one case, even give me a lift to the office on Friday mornings. Compared with the ten crazy nine-year-olds Theo does battle with, they're a breeze. And I'm learning all about beer, which just goes to show my students aren't the only ones getting a useful education.

Kate's CELTA blog

Personally, I've always found speaking English very easy. Being English tends to give a useful head-start and I did grow up in the UK with English-speaking parents, so I admit I've had some natural advantages in this area. I remember doing the occasional English grammar lesson at school - indeed, I have an O' level in English Language, which just goes to show how old I am. But most of the rules I learned about the building blocks of language were derived from French, German and Latin lessons. Especially Latin, god bless Mr Eddy.

So, while I was able to conjugate the latin verb, "amare", I was hazy at best when it came to explaining the things I do instinctively to someone who grew up speaking Spanish. Or any other language, for that matter. Enter the CELTA. Despite many years spent as a professional communicator in English, both written and spoken (I was a BBC broadcast journalist for more than a decade), until November this year (2008) I would have struggled to explain when and why you use the present perfect tense and what rules govern its formation.

Now, after four weeks spent learning-to-teach and learning-about-the-language-itself-so-I-can-attempt-to-teach-it at International House, Barcelona, I can make a fair crack at helping students of English through the maze of tenses, shwas and phrasal verbs that make up our wonderful and frustrating tongue.

Actually, one of the most important things I learned during my CELTA course was that we're not actually teaching at all. We are guiding discovery. Our worshipful tutor, Gerard McLoughlin was keen for us to take to heart the following quotation by a seventeenth century man called Von Humbolt: "You cannot teach a language, only create the conditions under which it might be learnt."

Thankfully, nowadays those conditions can include pop music, Youtube clips, lonely hearts adverts and celebrity gossip. Then, there are the old faithful grammar gap-fill exercises and True or False quizzes. Of course, you can teach English - sorry, guide the discovery of English - in more serious ways as well, but the point is, it doesn't have to be a load of dusty old writing exercises, translation tasks and verb-drills. In fact, the most important exercise at all involves the tongue, teeth, lips and jaw. It's called talking. The more your students do - and the less you do - the better. Probably the most important thing I learned doing my CELTA.

So - was gaining my CELTA hard work? Yes. Was it rewarding? Thrice, yes. Was it fun? Oh, yes. What was the best bit? For me, the teaching practice. The satisfaction of realising your students have gained some extra understanding of the English language and are successfully putting it into practice thanks to something you did is hard to equal.

When I began the CELTA course one thing I worried about was that I had misjudged my vocation and teaching was not actually for me - or that the course would kill off any enthusiasm I had for teaching. In fact, Gerard, Susannah, IH Barcelona and all our students have achieved the opposite - I can't wait to get myself in front of more students and start flying the flag for the English language. Now, I just need to elicit myself some paid employment (noun, uncountable).

Bye bye Barcelona

It's nearly time to go.....

Our fourth week in Barcelona and it's nearly time to move on. Our lovely landlady Ilse has already gone - she flew back to Germany on Tuesday - and on Saturday it'll be our turn to leave the house in Poublenou.

Kate taught her last CELTA course lesson this afternoon - a skills lesson based around lonely hearts adverts - and mine is tomorrow - I'm using "Money (that's what I want)" by The Flying Lizards and an article about the relationship between money and happiness. I'm the last up in our teaching practice group. The course has been great fun; sure it has also been stressful and frustrating at times, but we have both enjoyed the buzz of teaching, while our tutors, class mates and students have all been lovely. We've also learned a huge amount about the English language, and we're pretty sure the knowledge will be useful to us in our attempts to learn Spanish!
On Saturday we're driving to Madrid to stay with our friend Belen and hopefully see a few more of our Pueblo Ingles chums. Then on Sunday we're on the road again, this time to a plush hotel in Barco de Avila where we'll be spending the week talking English with Spanish learners at Vaughan Town. We're taking our Irish classmate Eoin with us, so we'll have some company on the road and lots of fun watching the Spanish learners try to get their ears round his thick Kerry accent!

Let loose on unwitting learners

Theo and I have both completed our first twenty minutes of classroom teaching. It doesn't sound like a lot, but when you have a class of expectant faces in front of you (at least I assume that was the expression. I suppose some of them might have had wind or something) and zero experience at the chalk face (it's a white board nowadays, but that doesn't seem to sound as good) it's a tad daunting. However, Theo and I reckon we both did okay - at least, none of our students nor ourselves felt compelled to run out of the room screaming - whether any actual learning took place is a moot point. Mind you, I think we both learned that it is better to appear fairly relaxed, even if you want to run out of the room screaming, so that's something. Perhaps in the next couple of weeks we may actually manage to teach our pupils to speak some English. Although they appeared to be doing a lot of that without too much assistance on our part, luckily.

But in all seriousness, the fact that we have just spent the last week helping Spaniards improve their English (when we weren't dancing, drinking or telling filthy stories to one another) certainly gave our confidence levels a huge head-start. We both quite enjoyed it, too.