Do you feel that courses such as CELTA and DELTA adequately prepare teachers of English? What would you do to change things if you could?

TOM

The short answer is no. However they serve a useful function. The CELTA was only ever designed as an introductory course but because of its ’success’ it is seen as a ’standard’ – which of course it is not.

DELTA – this has become a difficult course to complete when teaching a full load. I look forward to the revisions so that it can be more widely accessible to practising teachers. Like all courses they need constant review, revision and development.

SALLY

Under the circumstances yes they do. I find the CELTA scarily brief and the teachers that it produces frighteningly little prepared, but the good ones go on to train themselves and the not so good ones would not necessarily be that much better if you hung on to them for longer – just more resentful. If the course were longer it would have to be more expensive and we would just have a lot more totally unqualified people teaching English. It is as good a solution as we can get under the circumstances.

The DELTA, I believe in wholeheartedly. No course can be perfect, especially for something as multi-skilled and nebulous as teaching, but when you compare the DELTA with a Masters, which can be completed without anyone else ever setting foot in your classroom, the DELTA is about as good at targeting and developing the hands on practicalities of teaching as it can be (in it’s current form – I hope the upcoming changes do not try and make it into something more academic as well, it is just about right on the academic front – asking for understanding, but not immersion in theory.

BRIGID

In CELTA I would change the grading of the lessons during the course. It causes huge anxiety and seems to go against all the principles of teaching where we talk about affective factors being important. The list of generally obtuse criteria that keep growing – out!

DELTA seems to me one of the best courses going. The exam component is a bit antediluvian though.

Not enough good feedback on what constitutes ‘good’ assignments from C’ESOL point of view.

What things do you feel that you do that most benefit the trainee teachers at your organisation?

TOM

We empathise. We understand how difficult teaching is and we genuinely love teaching and want to help others.

SALLY

While there are sometimes peripheral changes, the underlying tutor base – combines a lot of experience with genuine enjoyment of teaching and training – no one is cynical, everyone has a variety of interests.

BRIGID

Our unassessed DELTA observations.
The flexibility of the tutors.
The course trainers.

What is the one thing that the ELT profession needs to do to progress in the 21st century?

TOM

Remember that teaching is done in a classroom and involves real people. Therefore it is unpredictable, creative, innovative and interesting.

SALLY

Remain curious and stay out of ivory towers.

BRIGID

To stop trying so hard to standardise these CELTA / DELTA courses that all life, spirit and enthusiasm gets killed.

Stop following trendy American pseudo psychology and concentrate more on in-service courses where the real teachers live and do more to cater to them.

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Do you think the demands in teacher training have changed in recent years? If so, how?

TOM

In the days when ‘methodology’ was considered ‘key’, training was more straightforward. Now, as in teaching, we realise that training is actually more to do with personality, identity and is context specific and there is no ‘right’ way.

SALLY

Not especially. I think all the things I’ve just written for question one (of the DELTA exam) would have been true twenty years ago (though I don’t know as I wasn’t training 20 years ago).

I do think some things are changing in education generally – both my trainees and my language students seem to expect delivery via technology – they (as Steve Darn said in one of the HLT articles this month) want everything written down and printed off for them, so having lost the interaction that they would have from making their own notes on content, one then ends up devising on line quizzes etc to make them go over content again. But that’s swings and roundabouts – the end amount of effort and the end result is probably the same (for trainer and trainee and for teacher and student).

BRIGID

Yes, with the online/blended courses, teacher trainers need better computer skills and need to be trained to give feedback online if that is part of the course. The latter seems to me incredibly important.