10 cool tips from CELTA tutors

If you are reading these lines, congratulations because you decided to take the CELTA course. Or do you still have doubts about training? We understand that you want it, and it scares you at the same time. But we are here to help! 

Our experienced CELTA trainers know how to avoid sharp corners and can share really effective tips. We asked them to tell our future CELTA trainees how and what to do when the CELTA interview and the whole enrollment process is behind.

Both full-time and part-time CELTA courses require concentration and time before, during, and even after the course itself. 

Here are some useful tips on what you should do before starting the CELTA.

Reduce your working load

Limit the number of your classes if you’re a private tutor. If you decide to do a full-time intensive course, stop working altogether for a month.

Helen Taranenko, a CELTA trainer, says,

Therefore, make sure you are not distracted by countless working tasks and do not postpone completing your CELTA tasks until the last minute because you simply have no time for focused studying.

Concentrate on development, not the grades

However, CELTA it’s not an exam, it’s a very short period when you have a chance to learn a great deal of new information, improve your teaching skills and develop a large number of new ones.

Thinking about getting As and Bs will add more stress and challenge. Any mistake will seem to be pushing you away from your success. 

Whatever happens during the course: you teach a great lesson, or something doesn’t go the way you expected, is developmental, any mistake is the opportunity to learn and improve.

Chris Reese says,

How to avoid this, Chris tells in the following video:

Meanwhile, we are going to discuss the recommendations you’d better follow once you start your course.

Make your aims your priority

Very often, we plan some activities in our lessons because we like them, and because we think students will find them engaging. However, do the activities we like always help achieve your lesson aims? 

For example, you are teaching a grammar lesson, second conditional. You use coursebook materials and do your presentation as mentioned there. After that, you play Beyoncé’s If I Were a Boy song and use it to present the second conditional one more time. Why? The answer is  ‘because my students like singing, and because it is interesting.’ 

I seriously doubt that after such a lengthy presentation your learners will get to freer practice, which is of paramount importance in any language lesson since it enables the learners to really use the grammar or vocabulary in their language.

Make all the tasks contribute to reaching the main objective

If you cannot answer the questions, ‘Why do I need this in my lesson? How does this task help achieve my lesson aims?’, this activity is irrelevant.

When you have thought about each and every detail, teaching gets easier and you radiate confidence. 

But do we plan to teach the plan, or are students more important? Of course, planning is necessary but students with their needs are a priority.

Imagine you are a student

But what does it mean and how to do this? How to understand what might go wrong with tasks? Time? What problems might students experience and how to fix them?

This basically means that you put on a student’s hat and go through tasks by answering all the questions, and filling in all the gaps. And without peeping into the keys!

What might be troublesome and how to make things easier for your students. 

They often ask tricky questions in the lesson. 

So, equip yourself with the powerful tool of being first a student and then a teacher.

Plan backwards

How can we avoid this problem? There are several points to consider.

The most important stage in grammar and vocabulary lessons is freer practice. If you never get to it when you are teaching, you deprive your learners of immediately using the new grammar structure or vocabulary in a real-life situation, and if you don’t practice properly, you don’t learn.

Think of the speaking task you want your students to be able to do successfully using the new language properly.

Think of the speaking task you want your students to be able to do successfully using the new language properly.

Plan proper controlled practice to help students practice the meaning and form of the new language in restricted conditions. 

Think of a short but engaging lead-in that sets up the topic of your lesson and helps raise students’ interest. Make sure that everything you have planned helps students produce during the freer practice task.

Be ready for the challenges

We must always be prepared for the fact that something may go wrong rather than wondering whether we are going to face any challenges or not. In fact, everything may go wrong. 

Here the word ‘challenges’ may mean absolutely anything: starting with latecomers or files that can’t be opened and ending with a sudden absence of the connection or students avoiding the target language.

And here is Chris Reese, elaborating on this in more detail:

There’s definitely a lot to do on the CELTA course. Drafting a detailed lesson plan, analysing language to teach, and preparing materials takes a minimum of 3 hours for one lesson. 

You will also be attending input sessions and completing extended written tasks, all of which take quite a while. 

So how do you  manage the course then?

Plan your time wisely

First of all, plan time to work and study as well as allow some good time to rest.

‘Sleeping is a necessary luxury’ as we say on the CELTA course, especially before the teaching day.

Prepare by bits. If you do this an evening before the important day, a sleepless night is guaranteed, and teaching a lesson with low energy is extremely challenging and not really effective. 

So plan your time wisely and enjoy yourself on the CELTA course!

Start completing the tasks in advance

There will be 4 of them. Sounds like a lot of work, but don’t panic. You are going to have a lot of help from your tutors.  

You are going to have the setting up sessions when your tutor will familiarise you with how to do each assignment and special Q&A sessions  when you will have a chance to clarify everything before submitting your work.

Start working on your written assignment before the questions and answer session so that you can clarify everything that might become unclear in the process of writing.

Read your tutor’s comments very attentively and ask questions if something is still unclear. Remember that the tutors are always there to help.

Be open-minded

However, deciding to join your first CELTA training means remembering the very nature of learning. It’s OK to not be able to do something or do  something wrong. It can easily be changed as one starts to be open to recommendations and changes.

How? Find out in the video: