Getting towards the end of your CELTA course? Is your Lessons from the Classroom assignment looming? Want to know how AI can help with it? Keep watching…
I’m Jo Gakonga, I’m a teacher educator and I’ve been a CELTA trainer and assessor for over 20 years. I’ve also got a website at ELT-Training.com where I make video based support material for English language teachers at all stages of their careers. Check it out and if you like this, give it a thumbs up and subscribe, I make a new video every week.
Before you go any further, as with any of these videos I’ve got on CELTA assignments and AI, MAKE SURE you check with your tutors before you use AI in any way- different centres have different rules for this and you don’t want to fall foul of them!
As well as that, as I’ve said in previous videos, there are always two important things to keep in mind:
Firstly, using AI is the same as using any reference material- you need to be transparent about what you’ve used- to cite it- and in order to show how you used it. To do this, make sure that you begin a new search and copy the share link, or take screenshots, to show your prompts and how you adapted the material you got through the chat.
The second thing is that, again as with any reference material BUT EVEN MORE SO, you need to make sure that you’re engaging CRITICALLY with whatever AI gives you. You can’t just take it all at face value because sometimes it’s WRONG. So use your intuition as a fluent speaker of English and do your research in other places, too.
With those caveats and provisos out of the way, AI is a helpful friend and will be in your teaching life, so it seems to me that it’s a good idea to learn how to take best advantage of it. Here are some ideas on how AI could help you with the Lessons from the Classoom assignment.
You can see a walk through of this assignment
here and it’s the one where you will reflect on your progress through the course- your strengths and your action points and how you can address them in the future and continue to develop.
This is a very personal assignment- in some ways the easiest of the four but in many ways the most important. It’s difficult to see how AI can help with such a personal topic but it CAN be a helpful brainstorming partner.
Try inputting your feedback from your most recent teaching practice into it and ask it HOW you should focus on these areas. Some of the ideas it comes up with FOR SURE will be nonsense but some of them will resonate with you so choose the ones that do. As with all of this, you need to choose critically and describe why you feel this will be helpful.
For example, where ‘teaching pronunciation’ was an action point, resources for this were shown here- I’m not sure how the interactive phonemic chart would be helpful for planning – although you could use this to develop your own knowledge of the symbols. Mark Hancock’s book, on the other hand, would definitely be a good source for games and activities to include in your class to improve your pronunciation teaching.
Don’t forget that in this assignment you need to make reference to the feedback you have had from peers as well as tutors and aspects of the teaching observations that have helped you, whether that’s on video, from watching experienced teachers or from your peer observation. AI definitely can’t help you here!
A part of the assignment that could be helped by AI is again as a brainstorming tool to give you ideas
for resources to help you develop after the course. If you ask this question, a range will come up including methodology and resource books, teachers associations and other useful things.
As always, be critical about what you choose and transparent about citing and reporting this.
So that’s it for this series- there’s quite a bit here and I hope it’s been helpful. Good luck with your assignments and remember that a CRITICAL and TRANSPARENT approach will mean that you are able to USE the power of AI both in your assignments and onwards into your teaching career where you might also find my course AI Powered Language Teaching helpful – check it out on my site!
Good luck with it all!
