Teach-The-Teacher Training
(FREE!)
Have you always dreamed of sharing your language and culture with others?
This could be your opportunity! At Indy Language Center we are always looking for enthusiastic and experienced language instructors to join our team and conduct language classes to motivated, mainly adult students who want to improve their language skills.
If you are passionate about sharing your language and culture, then we invite you to join us at one of our workshops where we work together to develop and/or improve teacher skills getting our students to conversational fluency in the language of choice.
Want to compete in the sport of Language Teaching?
(by our Education Director, Giancarlo)
How it all started…
My experience with being a teacher isn’t all that common: “Science teacher gets in front of a group of people to teach them Italian as a dare to himself, steals the entire curriculum used to learn French, and gets away with it!” Copying another program worked up to a point, and that point was when students began asking questions like why, when, and how the grammar rules worked the way they did. I couldn’t provide an answer.
Once I looked it up and could provide answers, I had to deal with the realization that, while I could explain the grammar and teach vocabulary, it wasn’t sticking. Rote memorization, dictation or lecturing wasn’t cutting it. Students weren’t getting closer to being fluent, so I looked for help, specifically from other teachers from whose classrooms I heard loud laughter and people actually having conversations in their target language! From them I saw how I could plan around an activity, one that would take some prep, but get everyone out of their seats, and interact in a way that was natural and productive. They were helping each other speak sentences into life and having a great time because there was a touch of competition in the games played.
The time I spent behind a desk trying to figure out my lesson plan versus actually teaching grew, and while I was frustrated because I was terrible at the activities, the students didn’t seem to mind. They liked being part of the whole process of learning to play a game with their classmates from a teacher not afraid to look silly. Bit by bit, I gathered more and more games and exercises to do with them and adapted them to learning words, phrases, grammar and life skills. No game was and is too simple.
Like anything learned, what matters is the balance of challenge to fun. When I started teaching, I wish I would have had a community of like-minded teachers that intentionally got together to talk about their experiences and challenges, bring what they knew worked, and workshop ideas amongst themselves by demonstrating how it would work, exactly like they would then do in class. This is the point of our Teach-The-Teacher course; to turn teachers into coaches for each other and hone their teaching skills.
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Module 1 – Time Management:
How to best divide and conquer conveying linguistic information, building communication skills, and delicately guiding students to express themselves naturally in a language new to them.
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Module 2 – Goal Setting
How to be an agent in student self-discovery and translating knowledge into self-fueling goals that jive with their true interests and values.
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Module 3 – Pronunciation [Part 1 - Part 2}
How to make a student confident in speaking any language by practicing Sounds, Syllables, Words and Sentences? Modify a student's native language accent by focusing on Phonetics, Articulation and Muscle memory.
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Module 4 – Materials and Texts
What’s your source material going to be? Can you find a didactic arc that would be supported by your chosen text and workbook? How will you adapt your class interactions and exercises to complement the source material?