4 years after my CELTA experience, I am adding to this blog.
First of all, I have to say my CELTA experience wasn't particularly positive. For example, all CELTA courses have to have a minimum of 120 contact hours. The course I attended had closer to 140, if not 150 as we were expected to stay from at least 9 to 5 every day. This was mainly because the school offered students free (reduced) lessons - i.e. the lessons the CELTA students taught - and told us they could only get students at certain times of day. In reality, they were trying to get these students to sign up to full-time courses, This led to an awful lot of wasted time, which could have been spent on preparation time. We also had to do a lot of observing our peers, then feeding back. Again, far too much time was spent on this as feedback lasted at most 20 minutes whereas we had to sit through around 3 hours plus of lessons each day. I had finished my teaching time by Tuesday of the last week but still had to sit through other students' lessons for two days. It would have been far better to timetable us so that we were staggered in giving feedback rather than a 'round robin' approach.
Some of the tasks of the last week were gap-fillers and very questionable. One session we had to write down everything we liked and appreciated about our fellow students, and decorate our paper so that they would have a positive memory to take away with them. Really?! I am not at primary school and this really wasn't appropriate. It was a time-waster as they needed to keep us there so that lessons would take place in the afternoons. Another questionable task was writing a letter of thanks to the teachers who we had to observe as part of our course. As I professional, I thanked those teachers on leaving their classrooms. I also have been observed many, many times at the request of management. It's part of teaching life and you do this because your line-manager tells you. It is not usually as a 'favour'. As this CELTA school is OBLIGED to provide staff for us to observe, and as we had paid MONEY to take part in the course, I am not sure a handwritten note of thanks was at all appropriate.
Long story short: check the number of contact hours you will be doing BEFORE you part with your cash and ask for a typical timetable. If it's way over 120, avoid, as they do not have your interests at heart.
I don't know anything about the on-line version of CELTA, but I have to say it looks much improved. 6 hours of teaching in 8 sessions looks good. One would hope that would also mean they would be able to stick to the required hours 'virtually' as the are not tied to classrooms. Perhaps!
On-line CELTA info is here
Interestingly, my course centre doesn't offer it - no doubt because they will lose their free student teacher time, and might actually have to pay teachers!
