Video transcript - What Qualities Do You Need to Do CELTA?
Do you need to be confident to do CELTA? Super knowledgeable? Naturally brilliant in the classroom? Not exactly.
I’m Jo Gakonga. I’ve been teaching English for over 35 years, training teachers for around 25 and, as a tutor and assessor, I’ve seen thousands of people come through CELTA. And in my experience, the people who do best are not always the ones who look the strongest at the start.
They’re usually the ones with the right mindset.
So in this video, I want to talk about three qualities that really help on CELTA. Not because you need to have them perfectly already, but because if you understand them before the course starts, you’ll probably cope better and get more out of it.
The first is openness to feedback.
One of the biggest things to understand about CELTA is this: it involves a lot of feedback.
After every teaching practice, you’ll sit in a room while your tutor and your peers discuss what worked in your lesson and what didn’t. That feedback will be constructive and supportive, of course, but even so, it can still feel pretty uncomfortable.
You were up until silly o’clock planning this, you’ve just put your heart and soul into teaching it, you’re slightly exhausted and now a group of people are calmly discussing your boardwork, your instructions, your timing, your grouping, your grammar clarification and that example sentence you thought was going to be absolutely brilliant but lost it a bit in the telling.
It’s very hard not to take all this personally.
So one quality that really helps is being able to hear feedback without immediately defending yourself, explaining why they misunderstood, or taking it as a judgement on you as a person.
Because if your instinct when someone critiques your work is to say, “Yes, but…” or “That wasn’t my fault,” or “They just didn’t get what I was trying to do,” CELTA can feel quite painful.
The fastest way to grow is to be able to say, “OK, I see that. What would be a better way to do it?”
We’re not asking you to be perfect. If you were, you wouldn’t need the course. We’re asking you to be teachable.
Openness matters in another way too. You need to be willing to try things in a way that may not feel natural at first, especially if you already have some teaching experience.
Maybe you’re used to explaining everything in great detail, but now you’re being told to simplify your instructions. Maybe you love jumping in to help, but now you’re being encouraged to step back and let students struggle productively for a moment. Maybe you think your lesson was fine, and then your tutor gently points out that although the learners were busy, they weren’t actually practising the target language very much.
That can be a bit humbling.
But the people who make real progress are the ones who can think, “Interesting. Let me try it that way next time.”
The second quality is resilience.
Because not every teaching practice will go well.
Sometimes a lesson you spent hours planning just doesn’t work as well as you hoped. Sometimes your instructions are not as clear as you thought. Sometimes- often in fact- your timing goes wildly wrong.
That doesn’t mean you’re not cut out for teaching. It just means you’re learning.
CELTA is intense partly because the learning is so compressed. I see people making such fast progress but sometimes it doesn’t feel very nice while it’s happening. So it really helps if you can bounce back, reflect, and come back the next day ready to try again.
You do not need every lesson to go well. You do need to keep going. Chin up.
The third quality is honest self-reflection.
And I mean honesty with yourself.
Can you look at a lesson and say, “That stage was too long”? Can you admit, “I didn’t really check meaning properly there”? Can you notice, “I was doing a bit too much of the talking”?
That kind of self-awareness is the way you’ll grow and I don’t only mean during your CELTA course, either. It’ll always be important in your career.
As a tutor, it’s a lot easier to help a trainee who can see what’s happening than one who is constantly trying to prove they’re already doing everything right.
So get curious. Think about why something worked or didn’t. Ask questions. Experiment. Stay interested.
Now, none of this means you have to arrive on CELTA already calm, reflective, resilient and wonderfully coachable at all times. Most people arn’t. Most people find feedback uncomfortable. That’s normal. You’re human. I find it uncomfortable, too.
But if you can start thinking about these things before the course begins, you’ll give yourself a much better chance of coping with the pressure and actually benefiting from everything CELTA is trying to teach you.
And if you’d like help preparing before you start, do have a look at my CELTA preparation materials. They’re designed to help you go into the course feeling more confident, more realistic about what to expect, and much better equipped to deal with all those things CELTA tends to throw at you.
You’ll find the link above.
