Description
Cambridge Assessment English approved the opening of Teaching House in 2007. With the aim to expand quality English-language teacher training in the United States, Teaching House has opened over 15 center locations and trained over 3,000 new teachers. Teaching House is now the largest provider of Cambridge CELTA courses in the world.
Ensuring the high standards of education that are set by Cambridge English, all Teaching House CELTA courses have a maximum of only 6 trainees working with each trainer. To fulfill this trainer/trainee ratio, the Teaching House staff include over 20 Cambridge English-approved teacher trainers as well as a strong support team based at our headquarters in New York.
In addition to the standard four-week CELTA course format, Teaching House has developed two new formats:
- a 10-week part-time course run on two evenings a week and on Saturdays;
- a part-time blended course over 14 weeks allowing people to work online during the week and do teaching practice on Saturdays.
We also offer in the USA a two week compressed teaching practice option with online content, for those who are only able to take two weeks for their teaching practice component.
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Going in order of each ranking above and explaining my answers to hopefully give those looking at Teaching House (TH) and this program in the future an inside look. I was part of the 10-week, online, part-time course.
Overall rating: The CELTA course work itself is fine, having come into this program with TEFL certification from my college I was aware of a majority of the methods and that some of them are outdated. The most valuable part of this course is actually being able to teach students. Structures are expected to be followed rigidly but there is very little assistance on how to actually structure a lesson. I will stand by the opinion that we should not have been thrown in to teach during the first two weeks, we absolutely should have those sessions dedicated to the tutors showing us how to make a basic lesson. The beginning of this course was hell and it didn’t improve until my last 4 weeks.
Course Content: As mentioned above, the content overall is fine if a bit dry and outdated. You are given coursebooks and assigned pages to make lessons out of, some of the activities will require some creative thinking in order to make an interesting lesson. The low rating here mostly comes from the disorganization of the Sharepoint (which contained all relevant assignment, teaching materials, and lesson resources) which hadn’t been updated since 2020, and the Moodule (where you did lessons) not registering assignments fully. You’re given Moodule assignments to complete each week (though they are flexible) but they often don’t register as completed 100% due to tech errors. It was asked by my group if this was ok and we were told on multiple occasions that they just wanted to see if we “did” the lesson, actually completing it wasn’t looked for. So the homework is busywork you’re still expected to do despite no one checking it. Dates are often wholly wrong or mixed up from prior semesters, this often lead to both groups of teachers attempting to communicate with each other to find the correct date since it was like roulette if the tutors would answer your emails.
Practice Teaching: This was fine, generally students were easy to get along with and were excited to be present. The Upper-Intermediate level was a slight struggle only because there were often only 3-4 students when the minimum was stated to be 6, this is the only reason I’m taking off a point.
Quality of Feedback: This is a mixed bag. I was lucky that the other teachers I was with were very supportive and uplifting and my final tutor of the course was a gem. The beginning of the course was a different story, our initial tutor was confusing, contradictory, and overall terrible at motivating the teachers to do better. I don’t know if this tutor was planning to leave TH, but he really seemed like he didn’t want to be there. Additionally, he consistently had microphone issues that affected how we heard him and he refused to switch to the high quality mic he informed us he had on his final day. Going as far to blame one teacher’s keyboard for his microphone issues. He was impossible to reach outside of class, emails went unanswered entirely.
Lesson Plan Guidance: The two-star rating here should not be “fair” but rather “poor” with one-star being “terrible”. There is very little lesson plan guidance, you’re given about 15 minutes before class on designated days before the teachers teach. This was especially difficult for Monday’s and Tuesday’s teachers as they only had a day between teaching and planning enough to receive decent guidance on Wed/Thurs. Additionally, lesson frameworks (basic skeletons to help make planning easier depending on the type of lesson) weren’t introduced until almost 6 weeks into the course. These frameworks were very useful and it truly was a detriment to early lessons to not allow students access to these. I have no idea why they weren’t introduced sooner.
Instructor Competency: Overall, I only found one tutor helpful and that was Hulgo. He truly did his best to uplift students and teachers while they were struggling and learning. He had a very positive attitude and his criticisms all felt fair, especially since he offered guidance on how to fix them most of the time. I found everyone prior to paying for the course pleasant too, my interviewer was very nice and I enjoyed speaking with her. Everything aside from these, I would rather forget. If you struggle with a tutor that isn’t doing their job and is largely incompetent, the higher ups will simply tell you to suck it up or even laugh at concerns/comments when they call you over the phone. They do not care on that level at all.
I’m not applicable for the bottom two ratings, but overall I would call my time at Teaching House disappointing. Every week I ended up reminding myself how close I was to being done, I found very little of it actually enjoyable. If you are looking to take the CELTA course, please do not do it with Teaching House. Save yourself the headache.