Getting in to teacher training
In common with many professions, English Language Teaching has
established routes for entering it as a teacher and moving onwards
in terms of professional competence and mastery of the skills but
very little in terms of branching out within the profession to other
areas.
Management is a small exception insofar as there is an optional
qualification with the Cambridge Delta to focus on management in the
broadest sense but nothing similar exists for those wanting to
become trainers of other teachers.
The assumption is often that having a few years' experience and a
diploma-level qualification (such as Cambridge Delta, Trinity's Dip
TESOL or a Masters' degree) is enough to qualify you for a post as a
teacher trainer. It may be in some cases, but that does not
automatically open the door of the teacher-training department.
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Follow a course |
Cambridge English does have a train-the-trainer course and details
of that may be found by clicking
here. The claim is that following such a course
successfully will allow you to train other teachers on Cambridge's
CELT-S and CELT-P courses (for teachers in the secondary and primary
education sectors respectively). Both of those courses are
on-line courses with optional face-to-face elements.
Such a course is undoubtedly valuable but you cannot simply sign up
and take one. As Cambridge's website explains,
The Train the Trainer course is
offered to groups of teachers through employers and teaching
organisations so the organisation for whom you work
needs to apply (and pay) for the course to be run locally. If
your employer is reluctant to do that for any reason, you have to
consider other routes into teacher training.
An alternative is to take the six-unit course on this site.
It will not guarantee you a training position, naturally, but it
will prepare you and give you the tools you need to convert yourself
from an expert language teacher to a good teacher trainer.
You can access that course from any guide in this section by
following the link to Training to Train on the left.
What follows on this page is some generic advice which does not
attempt to take the place of that course but does act as an
introduction.
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The minimum background you need |
Informally, of course, for an in-house development programme, you
don't need any specific qualifications to share your expertise with
others. All you need in this case is the ability to present
and manage a workshop and select a topic that will interest your
colleagues (and about which you know more than them).
However, if your aim is to tutor on courses preparing people for
externally accredited qualifications such as Cambridge CELTA, the
Trinity Certificate in TESOL, Cambridge TKT, Cambridge Delta or
Trinity's Dip TESOL then there are certain qualifications and
background which are prescribed and / or recommended.
To be a tutor on any course preparing people for a
reputable qualification at any level, you need to hold a
Diploma-level qualification. That effectively means either the
Trinity Dip TESOL or the Cambridge Delta (all three modules).
If you want to be a trainer at diploma level, a Masters' degree in
Applied Linguistics is very helpful.
You will also need a track record and that will include:
- Considerable teaching experience (more than a few years):
- in a variety of settings, preferably including an English-speaking setting and a non-English-speaking setting
- at a variety of levels from A1 to C2
- with a range of learner types (ages, backgrounds, first languages etc.)
- on a range of course types (intensive, extensive, general English, English for Special Purposes, online etc.)
- Evidence of professional development shown by attending workshops, courses and conferences after obtaining your qualifications
- Evidence of the ability to present and manage training sessions (in-house workshops, on-line presentations etc.)
If that describes you and you want to get into one of the most rewarding and deeply satisfying areas of teaching, teacher training might just be for you.
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Other ways in |
- The traditional way
- The traditional route into teacher training is within your
own organisation. If you work in an institution which
already runs initial or in-service teacher training schemes, you
have but to demonstrate your enthusiasm, commitment and
abilities and wait for an opportunity to put them into practice.
In the meantime, show your commitment by volunteering to run internal workshops and training in your special areas of expertise (and if you don't have any, consider whether teacher training really is for you). - Mentoring
- The advent of on-line teacher training courses has led to a
demand for local mentors to help colleagues and guide them
through in-service training courses. The best known of
these are the distance training courses for the Cambridge Delta.
Responsible distance-training providers will train local mentors (or local tutors as they often prefer to call them) and this is invaluable experience.
You will learn how to assess written work, observe and comment constructively and apply external criteria to professional practice.
You will not learn how to present training sessions but you may well learn a lot about language skills and systems to help you plan to do so. - Start a centre
- This may seem overly ambitious but until you try, you won't
know. It may be that your organisation has simply never
thought about being a training centre because somebody thought
it didn't have people experienced and committed enough to run
it. It's your job now to convince them that they have.
There are obvious benefits for the organisation in terms of:- Income
Nobody is ever going to make a fortune from training courses (and many make a paper loss) but training can be run at times when the organisation's facilities are underused and be made to fit around the current programmes.
There is also the question of a diversified income stream to tempt the powers that be. - Reputation
Being a training centre sends out a strong message about an organisation's credibility, seriousness and in-house expertise which is impressive in terms of attracting new business and new learners. - Development
The prospect for many teachers of being able to spend at least some of their time working on the challenges of teacher training is an attractive one.
Having opportunities like these will often have a positive effect on staff retention and staff recruitment. - Refreshment
An active in-house training programme can have lots of hidden spin-offs in terms of staff motivation, classroom innovation and awareness of alternatives and up-to-date research into language teaching.
Having trainees in the building who bring new insights and new energies to the whole process of teaching and learning can also be energizing and refreshing.
You'll need to do your research carefully because this is not a step taken lightly. There are costs involved in terms of:- People
If there is currently no in-house training department, members of the staff will probably have to go elsewhere to be trained by an established centre. That costs both money and time.
Initially, too, the organisation will have to import an experienced trainer to run the first courses while in-house people are trained and inducted into the process. That's not cheap either. - Resources
Depending on the level of qualification and the resources already available, considerable investment will be needed if teacher reference materials, online journal subscriptions and so on.
What will not be needed, probably, is any extra expenditure on rooms and equipment. After all, no organisation seriously intending to run training courses will be poorly equipped in this regard.
- Income
- Moving on
- If you are serious about getting into teacher training and
your current organisation holds out few prospects for
development in this direction, you should consider moving on to
an organisation that does.
You are in quite a strong position because you wouldn't be reading this if you weren't committed to the profession, properly qualified, keen to develop and ambitious. Just the sort of person many established training organisations are looking for.
Don't expect to be swept straight into the training department of any new organisation but do make it clear that the only reason you are considering moving (or the main one at least) is for the opportunities that working for an organisation with established teacher-training programmes provides.
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What you need to know
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Time for a little self-reflection.
The first issue is to be clear in your own mind that training
teachers is a very different undertaking from teaching English to
learners of the language.
Up to now, you have relied on having shared experiences with your
learners but differing languages to talk about them. Now, you
have to reverse the process. You will share a language (not
necessarily your or their first language) with course participants
but your experiences are not the same.
In other words, you are moving from teaching people how to talk
about things in a different language to teaching people how to do
things via a shared language and, at the same time, transferring
some of your knowledge to them.
- What you need to know
- You are the expert and the people you are tutoring will
expect you to know what you are talking about. Learners of
a language take it as a given that their teacher is an expert in
terms of the language and managing learning. Teachers in
training tend to be somewhat more sceptical and you will have to
show knowledge in particular and in depth of:
- The language forms
In the classroom up to now, you have needed a strong understanding of the forms of the language: structural, phonological and lexical. What you have not needed to do is explain the forms to others except by way of demonstration, exemplification and correction.
This is no longer enough. Now you need to be able to talk knowledgeably about areas such as tense, aspect and voice, characteristics of connected speech, places and manners of articulation, polysemy, morphology, hyponymy, collocation, colligation and much else.
(At the top of the in-service training index (link on the left) you will find a link to a 50-item grammar and usage test and a 100-item terminology test. You should be able to score well over 80% on both of those before you venture into a training room as the tutor.) - Skills
You already have a good understanding of concepts such as gist, receptive vs. productive, scanning, monitoring and so on as well as an understanding of the variety of ways there are to teach skills in the classroom. Your task now is to be able to bring this knowledge together in a way that allows your trainees to understand and apply the concepts.. - Methodology
In your own training, you encountered a good deal of methodological ideas about how languages can be taught and how they are learned. Now you need to know a bit more, in particular, about the differences and supposed similarities between first- and second-language acquisition and be able to cast a well-informed and sceptical eye over the claims of various methodologists.
You may have strong views about how languages are best taught and learned but your job is objective informant, not advocate. - Classroom management
If you are setting out to tutor on initial training courses, you can take nothing for granted and need to remember what it was like not to be able to decide how to groups students, how to give instructions, how to get feedback and so on. By now, you probably do most of these sorts of thing ritually without very much conscious effort. Now, however, you need to analyse how classroom management tasks work and give people the opportunity to learn how to do it.
At levels above the initial, you may assume (not always safely) that the course participants can already handle most aspects of classroom management but when things go wrong, as they sometimes do, you need to know why, not just what.
- The language forms
- What you need to be able to do
- We noted above that not all the classroom behaviours and
skills you have laboriously acquired will be relevant to teacher
training and those that are will need amending and adapting to a
new set of demands.
The ability to motivate, involve and inspire, of course, remains an integral part of what you do.
The skills required of a teacher trainer overlap with those you need to be a good teacher of language but they are not the same. There are some new skills that you'll need to acquire very rapidly. It can be a steep learning curve.
In particular- Arranging and editing
Most teacher-training courses are really rather short (typically between 100 and 200 hours of training). In that time, it is unrealistic to suppose that you can teach what needs to be known. So, besides knowing lots about language structure, phonology, skills and methodology, you need to be able to select what is relevant now and provide a road map for your trainees showing them where to go next and how to extend the edited information you have managed to get across.
You also need to know how much is relevant to the course participants you are working with and their level of knowledge. - Balancing theory and practice
In your teaching of language, you have learned to balance the amount of information and modelling you have provided with opportunities to apply the data to the real (or a simulated) world.
Now you need to take that same balancing skill and apply it to balancing information (i.e. theory) with the opportunity to engage with it and apply it in the classroom.
You need to know when to lecture, when to lead a workshop, when to set a task and when to hand over and let your trainees run with ideas.
That skill does not come all at once but the process of gaining it can be accelerated with the application of a bit of thought. - Presenting
In the language classroom, you are adept at presenting new language in context. Now you have a different task: presenting new data against a background of what people already know. Unless you are alert to the opportunities that are presented by people's ability to acquire new information by assimilating it into data they already command (rather than trying to grasp wholly new concepts) you will not succeed as a teacher trainer (or any other kind of trainer).
In addition, you need to acquire the skill of presenting data rather than models of language in a way that allows people to engage with the topic and see its practical application. You need to be able to intrigue and motivate. - Develop
You will no more become a master of teacher training quickly than you became a master practitioner in the language classroom overnight.
Being a teacher trainer does not mean you have reached the pinnacle of the profession and can learn nothing more. It means you are now even more aware of what you don't know and can't do. The difference between you and your trainees is that you know where to go next. - Mark
On almost all courses for teachers there will be some written work which needs to be assessed and that is done through the application of criterion-referenced marking.
You will need training in how to apply the criteria at the right (i.e., standard) level of strictness and severity. That's what standardisation means. - Observe
Apart from the Cambridge TKT (which is assessed purely through an examination), all credible courses for teachers involve a certain amount of assessment of practical teaching skills through observation.
For this all the recognised schemes have clear criteria which are applied objectively (by you) and duplicated wherever the course takes place with whatever training staff.
To be able to apply the criteria for assessment, it is essential that you are properly trained and standardised.
- Arranging and editing
Now might be a good time to go on to considering the differences
between initial training (which is where most people start) and
in-service training (which is what you have had) and where most
people go next.
To do that, click here.
Otherwise, click on the left-hand menu to move on.
Thanks for staying with us.