Overall Good Experience

The overall experience I found was good.

Here are the Pro's

First, I found the staff at the Teaching House and IH very friendly and helpful.

Second, teachers conducted engaging Teacher Input sessions, and provided constructive feedback and support.

Third, The location and the House itself is nice and controlled (you can't get lost or walk to far to come in and out).

Fourth, the overall program is good in that it is a hands on experience teaching. And it is good that the students in the class know we are being monitored, so that they can forgive our mistakes.

Con's or at least some things to consider improving.

Seating - while I understand that it is expensive to bring in bigger desks. My experience with seating is that my papers and books would constantly fall off the desk during input or trying to work on guided discovery planning. This would cause me to lose papers and important notes on occasion.

Printing - I'm sure I am not the first to say that we definitely need more printing pages (and maybe a lecture from teachers at the beginning of the class on ways to save space and paper when printing lesson materials.

Binders and Additional notes from each class - It would be helpful to have dividers in the binder that categorize each stage / category of the program, so that it reduces the time of organizing multiple papers handed out throughout the day into the appropriate section of the binder.

Language Analysis for Grammar and materials for lesson plans.
If someone is enrolled into the program I believe they should either be strong on their pre-interview grammar test, or in the beginning of the course be offered a separate or additional grammar analysis course to help them. Although our teachers taught briefly on language analysis, I feel the instruction wasn't focused enough here especially for those of us who needed it.

There were others in my class who like myself struggled with this task - us mature, professional working folk who graduated from college many moons ago (or who didn't have sufficient grammar teaching in our school days, were slightly at a disadvantage in this area). It was especially difficult completing this task at length when there are other materials to prepare and cover.

Computer (Lab) Rooms, in the lab students (especially in my class) were pretty loud in talking to each other. Their talking usually did not involve working together on their teaching projects. - In the evening, after class, I found it difficult to focus and get my work done while students were talking (non related to their work). I know there is a sign in there about talking, but I myself didn't notice this towards the last week of my being there. I know students should naturally be aware of this but a more prominent sign asking students to speak lower plus a word from the teacher themselves might make this more effective.

At times I felt one of our teachers was giving more praise to some students over others, during their feedback, which had more to do with the student's lengthy language analysis work than their actual lesson execution.

Schedule, The shift in the middle of the course from teaching Pre-Int to Upper Int cause discrepancies in our teaching schedules. What the teacher was scheduling us for (days and subject) conflicted with the schedule that was handed out to us in the beginning of the course.

Overall it was a good experience and I met some friendly people and learned a lot about teaching english, about people and myself.