The Gateway Teacher Training Secondary, Tertiary & Adult Education Programme 30 lessons per week

Course description

Our Teacher Training Courses aim to give teachers of English or any other language taught as a foreign language the opportunity to further their professional development as language teaching practitioners in their respective settings, whether among primary or secondary school children, with students from the same or diverse backgrounds, and even in a classroom with impaired learners. Whatever your training needs are as a serious teacher in search of self-improvement, we are sure that you will find something to whet your professional appetite in our selection of carefully structured and seriously thought out teacher training programmes.

In terms of methodology, participants on any of our teacher training courses can enjoy a combination of explicit instruction and direct teacher involvement. Following the format of a workshop, sessions are:

Interactive with plenty of ongoing group discussion and opportunities for participants to draw on their own experience and exchange ideas they feel are worth sharing;
Demonstrative in the presentation of teaching approaches, lesson planning and materials design;
Practical and hands-on when it comes to trialling some of the ideas presented in class, with the aim that participants will be able to take something tangible away with them (a specific technique, a particular activity, a general way of planning lessons or adapting resources, etc.);
Experiential in nature, so that participants can experience the content being presented and promoted (methodologies, teaching styles, lesson plans etc.) first-hand, from the perspective of students, through which they will be better positioned to make judgements on learning effectiveness;
Evaluative with opportunities for individual reflection, teaching practice, lesson observations and peer feedback.

The focus of this course is based on interactive, experiential learning that meets the needs of all teachers at these levels of education. Course participants can benefit from a hands-on approach in the practical workshops in the company of other teachers, while discovering methodologies which will allow them to evaluate their current teaching purpose and practices in their own teaching environment.

Who is this course for?

Practising or former teachers of English or other languages in secondary, tertiary or adult education;
Language teachers with a keen sense of their role as teaching professionals who would like to keep themselves up to date with the latest trends in teaching (in terms of methodologies, techniques, resources etc), and take responsibility for their own professional development, to continue reinventing themselves and becoming the best in their field;
Teachers who would like to improve their own language proficiency in English in a customised setting, by being given an opportunity to focus on the language areas (skills and systems) most relevant to them;
Participants with a B1 level of English (CEFR).
Objectives:

To develop participants’ understanding of language teaching and learning across the variables of students’ level, abilities, learning style, age and cultural background;
To refresh participants’ knowledge of English by helping them brush up on their practical language skills and extend their lexico-grammatical repertoire, based on their individual and collective needs, with particular attention to their specific areas of weakness. This component of the course carries a strong experiential element as it is an opportunity for teachers to momentarily benefit from being in their students’ position;
To motivate participants to take control of the choice of teaching materials they use in class, whether it is by creatively adapting their curricular resources, such as traditional course books, or by drawing on and exploiting the potential of authentic non-instructional materials taken from everyday life and popular culture (such as cartoons, comics, blogs, vlogs, TV episodes, TV / radio commercials, music, social media etc.);
To explore and practise new teaching methods while trainees revisit their own current practices and reflect on how they can improve and add to aspects of their teaching (delivery technique, lesson planning etc.), while sharing examples of best practice with peers from similar backgrounds;
To understand how best to design level-appropriate graded tasks while respecting the authentic language around which they are designed;
To unravel the mysteries of motivation and understand how it happens and sometimes fails to happen;
To debate the benefits of learner autonomy and peer projects (learner cooperation and collaboration), as well as the challenges presented in light of many societies’ increasing multiculturalism and the overall impact these have on language education systems at large. Reference will also be made to the Maltese (bilingual) setting and participants’ own socio-cultural contexts.