A great way to become a teacher

My friends and family are still a bit surprised by my sudden decision to go into teaching and even more surprised that I seem to be good at it! A great program that taught me to be an effective teacher in a few months. I came into it with a liberal arts degree and no background in teaching. I had never taught at all before, and I have found that I love it, it is my calling! The great part about what ABCi does and what really sets it apart from others is the large amount of assessed and unassessed teaching practice that you get. You are teaching in real classrooms in state schools alongside experienced teachers and teacher trainers. The classroom experience each morning is supplemented by theoretical training in the afternoon. In general, these match up pretty well so that you can apply what you learn each afternoon in subsequent morning sessions. They tell you in advance that the course is intense and that the days are long, and it's true: you leave most mornings between 6am and 6:30am and the theory inputs end most days at 4:30. It sort of feels like a boot camp for teachers because even when you get back to the apartments, you're generally doing lesson planning with each other and discussing the teaching that you did that day and will do tomorrow. But that's a good thing! I think it's safe to say that I learned nearly as much from my peers in the evening as I did from the course tutors on the course during the day. Ultimately, it is really is the sort of thing where you get out of it what you put into it. If you go into it with unrealistic expectations or a bad attitude, you’re probably not going to enjoy it. If you want to be spoon fed, if think this is the kind of course where you can get drunk and not show up, if you think that you can just show up and be handed a certificate for doing the bare minimum, than save yourself the disapointment and go and do an online course instead. Unless you have a doctor's note, you need to show up each day and do the coursework to get the certfication. I think the other people in your group have a real impact on your experience as well. One thing that I didn't realize at first was that the Welfare team at the college is genuinely willing to help, but you need to speak up and say that something is wrong: some of the stuff that went wrong between individual students, bad blood or whatever, they had no idea about until we told them. In terms of learning by doing, where you really learn a lot is from watching experienced teachers teach, watching your peers teach, and getting feedback from experienced teachers who have watched you teach. The hardest part for me personally was being filmed and watching myself teaching (or micro-teaching) to reflect on my own teaching, but it was a great way to really quickly realize what I could do better. Plus, it's free: they provide a "scholarship" that covers course fees, the apartments, and travel to and from the schools. This thing didn't even exist 6 years ago and now it's a resource for tens of thousands of young Austrians who want to learn English and hundreds of native-speakers who want to become proper English teachers. All so Austrian kids get free English projects and native speakers can free teacher training... What a great idea and a cool thing to be a part of! If you're willing to put in the time and do the work, you will come out the other end a great teacher.