Valuable experience!

The program starts on a Sunday night with an informal welcomes-get together, with all your new course mates and teachers. During the course (which takes four weeks) there are interactive classes about all the aspects of teaching English as a Second Language (ESL). One thing that I really appreciated was that the group of about 40 students was divided into 3 smaller groups for these classes. This gives you the opportunity to have a more personal relationship with the teacher and all your classmates, which in turn enables you to feel more comfortable, have fun and learn more, in comparison with a group of 40 students in one classroom. During the four weeks there are also 8 observing hours, in which you observe a teacher having a real ESL class. When these 8 hours are logged, you continue with 12 hours of practicing real teaching! This was quite exciting since giving a presentation had never been one of my strong skills. However the first of these teaching practices is before a small group of the 40 students, your peers. They were all very friendly, since they knew it is the first time of teaching ESL. The other teaching practices were all real ESL classes, varying in age from five till adults. Some of the remaining teaching practices were in our own school and others in other language schools in the neighbourhood. These teaching practices are really a valuable experience, which you do not get if you just do one of these courses online. Because an online course cannot teach you what 25 seven year olds can! (Yes in one of my teaching practices I had to teach 25 kids of seven year old, and surprisingly I enjoyed it!)