Does the Online CELTA Prepare You for Face-to-face Teaching?

This is one of the most common questions I get from candidates who are considering taking the online course. I usually respond by sharing anecdotal evidence with the future candidate, by relating how candidates who only teach face-to-face—including those who only teach young learners and very young learners—regularly tell me about how the CELTA has transformed their teaching practice in the physical, and not only in the virtual classroom.

Rarely have I had such a powerful testimonial as to the usefulness of the online CELTA for face-to-face teaching as I received from Pam, a young teacher who is currently taking our fully online course with us in China. She is simultaneously a teacher in a young learner classroom.

Pam had just finished working on the CELTA skills-related task (one of the four assignments to be completed on the course). In this assignment, she had to select an authentic text around which to design a receptive skills lesson.

Before she had even received feedback on this assignment from her trainers, she had gone ahead and used it with her class. Here are the enthusiastic (not to say excited) messages she sent to me immediately after teaching that lesson:

It goes without saying that her excitement and pleasure were matched by my own.

Indeed, as trainers (just as with teachers), we are constantly seeking validation that what we are doing is actually worthwhile and working. Unlike the language classroom, though, feedback is always secondary: language teachers can see their students using the language, but teacher trainers don't often see real-life applications of what we are teaching our trainee teachers.

This is an amazing exception to the above, and proves without a doubt that the CELTA online teacher training format yields probing results in the bricks-and-mortar classroom.

Well done, Pam! We're proud of what you've achieved!