Does anyone out there know of any tools to ‘diagnose’ or test for who might become a good teacher e.g. before starting a teacher training course?

I did some initial research with colleagues involved in teacher training. See anonymised responses below.

Has anyone else got further tips/pointers?

Request for ideas on talent spotting potential teachers:

 

First, the replies that say ‘You can’t’.

 

I have been involved in interviewing potential CELTA candidates, in teaching CELTA and also in recruiting teachers for about 15 years. I think there is no way to spot potential good teachers before they take the CELTA.  It is, of course, the purpose of the application interview to weed out those who would almost certainly fail a CELTA, and at the same time an interviewer can make a guess as to whether those applicants will pass well. However, it is my experience that there is no strong correlation between those guesses at this stage and CELTA grades, let alone future performance as a teacher.

 

As a CELTA, CELTYL Ext. and DELTA Trainer I have experience in teacher training. Although we no longer run CELTA here in Milan, we did in the past and the interview for acceptance on the course was fairly comprehensive. We did individual and pair interviews which consisted of questions and tasks that covered the areas of language awareness, teamworking skills, and ideas about and attitudes towards teaching and learning. This was followed by a short written task feeding back on the interview process. Questions were adapted and changed over the years based on what we thought worked or what we thought needed improvement. The interview + written task took about an hour in total.

 

The result? Over the years I can honestly say that in my personal experience, neither the interview nor general first impressions ever gave us a consistently good idea of who would turn out to be a good teacher by the end of the course (if one assumes one course makes a teacher which is another story…). Sometimes we may have predicted good performance on the course and we were right, other times we were completely off the mark. All was revealed during the course. Interestingly though, we were often convinced that some of the “average” trainees were destined for greatness and that once they got out in the “real world” and were able to gain experience in a more natural and less stressful context, they would probably turn out to be a teacher that we would like to receive a CV from.

 

And now the replies that say ‘You can’ and other general replies.

 

We should do more of our own CELTAs. We run them here, partly as PR (teaching training and all that) and as a recruitment ground. We grill the course tutors getting feedback over the course on the candidates. We find out the high achievers and those who would be good self starters who don’t need hand holding. We then offer them 1 class on a course, observe them and help with lesson prep. If that goes well we up the classes and see how they take the pressure. If feedback from fellow teachers, admin, managers and students is good we then propose they apply for a FT position,

 

I think a large part of any teacher we should have is their people skills. In all honesty many students come because they like the atmosphere created by the teacher and want to come back. Question is how we can effectively talent spot this highly necessary skill.

 

Overall, if we are doing more teacher training we will get to see likely candidates in the situation we want to employ them for.

 

In a meeting to look at ways to get enough good teachers for institute 'x', we have considered going through UK employment agencies to look for PGCE or BEd kiwi and Aussie teachers on their working /travelling years abroad who would like to extend their time in Europe by working in country 'x' for a year or ideally 2 years.  Lets see if it works!

 

Very interesting and, I suspect, much needed project.

I would be interested in hearing from you and colleagues around the network on a similar question but focussed on ensuring future Teacher Trainer/Trainer Trainer supply. This is more on the ‘English’ or ‘projects’ side but is also sometimes an issue for teaching centres running CELTA/DELTA/CELTYL and for teaching centres which bid for ministry TT contracts.

 

We’ve got a huge demand for English in 'region 'x' and are looking to build projects in our regional English programme which ensure a more sustainable and systemic change in national Education systems i.e. mainly targeting the trainers, inspectors, supervisors etc and working at ministry level. Even focussing at this level, we anticipate having limited capacity to deliver through dedicated projects staff and will need to draw on internal resources through staff in teaching centres as well as external resources through partnership with UK and local providers, consultants etc.

 

Don’t know about other regions but we have been finding it somewhat of a challenge in our region recently and for a variety of reasons to draw on teaching centre talent.

 

 

Any innovative ideas from colleagues on how we build capacity for delivering teacher/trainer training internally and externally would be welcome…

 

Interesting topic. Just some thoughts off the top of my head. We interview for CELTA  frequently and you can pretty much tell at the interview stage whether a candidate is going to just pass or be a B or A candidate. We obviously wouldn’t accept anyone who we thought would fail. I'd say 90% of the time the prediction is correct. We don’t actually have criteria as such written down for selection so I'm not entirely sure how we can tell but here's what I think.....

 

We use a group interview style, with a series of tasks that candidates do in country 'x' or groups. This tests both their language/methodology awareness and their ability to work in groups. I am never very concerned if they don’t have the language or methodology awareness as they will get that on the course. However I am looking for active listeners, people who can encourage others to communicate, people who are empathetic and people who can summarise the points the group have made. I'm not looking for people who dominate, or who don’t listen to each other, only include their own ideas when asked to summarise for the group, or are only concerned with their own performance. I'm also looking for near native speaker level of English. The more positives they demonstrate the more likely they are to be potential Bs and above.

 

The candidates also have to 'teach' some vocabulary to ' a group of elementary learners' (ie the interview group). Here again not really looking for awareness of the vocabulary item as such as again they will get that from the course but rather their teaching presence and how they approach the task. Are they aware that they have to grade their language? do they use visuals? do they use the board? do they interact with the learners? do they elicit from the learners? do they get the learners to practice the language? are they aware of pronunciation? all of those would be positive. The following would not : monologue of explanation of vocab item in non graded language; lack of interaction with learners; teacher doing all work -- learners doing nothing; freezing; incorrect English. The more positives again the more a potential B.

 

Another indicator of potential good teacher is someone who is concerned about the students that are being used in TP. Some candidates will ask about who these students are and if they will suffer from bad teaching on the course. This obviously shows concern over students and not just concern over their own performance.

 

Not sure if this is the kind of thing you are looking for or not but hope it helps. Any queries please get back to me. It is uncanny how closely you can predict final grades from candidates' performance in CELTA interviews (even on the phone funnily enough where a lot of the above don’t apply). Never had to write it down before and have probably missed some criteria.

 

Just to let you know that we have the same difficulty in this region too, basically we just need more teaching expertise.  Institute 'x', who run one of the new university foundation years here, and who are currently advertising for about 250 men teachers and a good number of women for the women’s new foundation year, have now decided to take on women with degrees and train them up as they go (with no initial training qualifications).  They are hoping that this training will be recognised by Cambridge but I don’t think it will.

 

I am not advocating this as an approach! – but it is symptomatic of what does seem to be a general difficulty.

 

As a previous CELTA and Trinity Cert. Trainer, I found that those likely to do better on the course were: 

• Personable
• Pro-active
• Inquisitive
• Committed 

In my experience, where more than one of these qualities were missing, the candidate usually did not do well on the course. I realize this may be a bit 'woolier' than what you're looking for, but I hope it helps.

 

I think one answer would be to employ highly-qualified and motivated non-native speakers.  I have written an assignment on this for my MA and really believe it is they way forward.

 

They have the concept of “super-teachers” in Scottish state schools – idea being to try and keep really good teachers in the classroom and not to move into management positions.  You might want to get in touch with the SED Scottish Education Department to see how they manage this.

 

I am involved in recruiting candidates for CELTA courses in 'x' country. Basically, strong candidates usually fall into the following (somewhat stereotyped) categories:

 

• young - often pick things up quickly
• older (40s etc) - more confidence and experience in various matters
• female - women almost always do better than men, but you do get the occasional male high flier
• experience of another language / culture - helps to put themselves in learners' shoes (L2 English speakers often do very well)
• experience of people-oriented profession e.g customer service, health care
• friendly
• communicative
  

 

To answer your question, I don’t select for CELTA courses, but I’ve worked in schools which employ relatively new teachers and train them intensively. A few things often mark out quality teachers early on, in my experience:

·         accurate and wide vocabulary

·         reflects on experience of teaching

·         willingness to try new approaches

 

I’ve been thinking about this - not just snoozing.  But it seems that every time I articulate a criterion for spotting a good teacher, six more crop up.  I guess that the number of possible characteristics which indicate a potentially good teacher/trainer is as large as the number of different kinds of teachers that exist.  However, some sort of tick-list is always useful in selecting people for training courses.  (There could also, usefully, be a twin-list of things that a good teacher is certainly not.  Believing that bringing back the birch, not smiling till Christmas and raising your voice helps foreigners to understand might indicate the kind of teacher that you are not looking for.)  Here are a few suggestions for a tick list.

 

1. CELTA interviews always have a section on language awareness.  This is all well and good except that the exercises are often a bit dodgy because interview tasks are necessarily designed by former CELTA Passes and potential participants are therefore often quizzed on matters which they might realistically only expect to know about once they have already completed the course.  Instead, devise exercises that check for a genuine interest in and sensitivity to language rather than a knowledge of verb tenses, adjectival word order and all the rest.  How does the candidate feel about punctuation?  Is s/he interested in the death of the word “whom”?  If an applicant is not interested in the mechanics and quirks of English, they might be better off teaching something else. 

 

2. Training-course interviews also enquire about background.  TEFL frequently attracts people who are looking for career changes, recovering from broken marriages or feeling bored with idle lives and there are no rules here, although anyone who has had anything to do with working with children often proves to be a good EFL teacher.  Ex-primary teachers, for example have a good record if you can knock the patronising tone out of ‘em (“Now let’s open our books and read our little story” etc.)

 

3. Background might also show the (often innate) ability to empathise with a learner or, in fact, with anyone else.  The ability to see things from someone else’s point of view is a characteristic of good and permanently creative teachers.  Has the person ever taught anybody to do anything? cared for anyone with a disability? worked with old people? thought about how they would live if they had no legs?  If so, draw the potential teacher out with questions about how they identified the other person’s difficulties, felt about them and dealt with them.  Find out about how they felt at school themselves both in classes in which they were considered strong students and more especially in classes in which they were thought of as weak – best and worst memories and so on.

 

5. Check on a person’s sense of the real time it takes to learn a language (often described in practice as “patience”); on what they expect the strains and stresses might be; and on what characteristics they think might make a good language-learner.  If they have ever tried to learn another language - or any other challenging skill - themselves, it’s a good sign, even if they haven’t succeeded in doing so.

 

6. Try to find out how the potential teacher sees the relationship between knowledge and power.  If s/he sees the teaching situation as a way of wielding power over other people either personally or culturally, then the teacher persona, cultural sensitivity and the subsequent teaching is probably not going to be what you are hoping for, no matter how good the pyrotechnics.

 

7. Check for a sense of humour.

 

8.  Check on a sense of modesty of purpose: just how important do they really think English is in a learner’s life?   How would they feel if they had to do their own work or social life in Chinese?  Where do they think, in a list of life’s most important things, most students would place an English language course.

 

9.  Check how ready the person is to reflect on his/her own performance of a task.  (A good way to do this is to give the person a task e.g. a choice  between a word and a number puzzle.)

 

10.  Check that the person is quite happy to accept a lifetime of pauperdom.

 

Hope some of this helps, or at least causes a brawl.

  

From 1- 10  I would give good sense of humour and enjoying teaching as the key factors ( in addition to all the skills needed, of course)

 

In all my experience there is one over-riding factor – and that is enjoying it.

 

The very worst teachers are the ones who don’t

 

I am not quite sure how one would work that into a formal procedure in terms of enquiry, but it is true.

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