Comments on: Teaching House

By: Ken Smither

Ken Smither — Wed, 07 May 2025 17:51:20 +0000

I came with 0% interactive teaching experience. I only had lecture experience as a career job. This was a whole new world. I appreciate everything Abeer and Judy (instructor) did to help us along and provide us with the tools to teach. I came into the course with a “will not fail” attitude.

A word of warning…this course has a lot of work. Many, many weekends and week nights working on lesson plans and language analysis work. This is not for those who can give 10 hrs a week to this. It’s very, very hard and should be for a level 5 certification. Worth it in the end.

Good luck and enjoy the ride.

By: Le Vy Vu

Le Vy Vu — Wed, 07 May 2025 15:17:52 +0000

I’ve made the wisest decision since I chose to take CELTA in TH! I hope this centre will gain more popularity in the near future.

By: Rebekah Loos

Rebekah Loos — Wed, 07 May 2025 14:01:17 +0000

Teaching House is an amazing organization and I am grateful I completed by CELTA certificate through them. I would recommend using Teaching House to anyone interested in ESL. The tutors were excellent and the teaching practice was very practical!

By: Phil H.

Phil H. — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 02:07:09 +0000

Overall, Teaching House’s CELTA course is excellent. I work full-time (unrelated to ELT), so I took the 11-week part-time mixed-mode course, which required 3 evenings of participation per week (sessions started at 5:30pm and would go until about 9pm). Besides those three evenings, a lot of time was required on my own for lesson preparation, written assignments, online Moodle Units (which introduced very helpful teaching concepts). Our two Tutors were absolutely fantastic guides! One started us off with a great foundation for the first couple of weeks (all Zoom), then the other the next four (Zoom then in-person), and then the first Tutor saw us through the last weeks (all in-person). Though they were unified in their commitment to preparing us according to CELTA’s standards, their individual experiences led to slightly different approaches, which was great for us since we got to see (and then incorporate) various tried-and-true methods of achieving the same teaching goals. Teaching House’s staff is friendly, and they obviously know what they’re doing in terms of getting the word out to volunteer learners, both online and in-person, because we were never without learners. My advice to potential trainees: If you’re doing the mixed-mode version, please make sure you take advantage of TH’s tutorial videos on how to teach via Zoom (especially on managing Breakout Rooms). Learning how to teach with Zoom is a huge plus because the reality is that teachers and students won’t always be able to physically meet and many jobs are for online teaching, only – and this is not a graded skill, so having the opportunity to learn it is purely a benefit. Also, although the course is well organized, success will still depend highly on your ability to manage very limited time, especially if you work full-time. So, *before* the course starts (maybe about a month or more before), I highly suggest reading the two recommended textbooks, and starting the Moodle Units (as soon as the Tutors give you access). When the course starts, it really takes off; so, the more you’re familiar with terminology and concepts before it starts, the less scrambling you’ll have to do and the better you’ll be able to absorb the mountains of material given to you at each session. Last but definitely not least, we fellow trainees supported each other emotionally and logistically, and I believe that made a big difference. Well done, Teaching House, for providing a well-structured program.

By: Ryan Heppy

Ryan Heppy — Sun, 22 Dec 2024 20:41:59 +0000

Great course! I feel like I learned a lot having absolutely 0 experience as a teacher going in. I feel confident in using what I learned in my career as a teacher and would definitely come back to take more advanced courses!

By: SOPHIA FIGUEIRO

SOPHIA FIGUEIRO — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 18:48:06 +0000

I took the CELTA course and my experience was wonderful from beginning to end. Everything before it started was easy to do because the staff are super helpful and kind. I learned a lot and super fast because the tutors are amazing, they give specific advice for everything, so I could deliver better lessons every time. By the end of if I was confident at delivering all type of lessons.

By: Jonathan Rhim

Jonathan Rhim — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 18:43:56 +0000

I had heard that the CELTA course given by Teaching House gave excellent training and was intense. I found both to be true. The input sessions (lectures) were very informative and practical–they were directly applicable to what you needed to do to prepare and and to deliver your teaching practice lessons, which for me were the most valuable part of the course. Preparing and delivering these lessons took a lot of time and effort and for me it was the main reason the course was intense and time-consuming. But the teaching practice was also the most valuable part of the course in getting me to learn the material and improve my teaching skills. I learned so much from the feedback I received on my teaching both from the tutor and my colleagues. I found my colleagues to be very supportive and fun to work with–definitely another major plus of the course. All of the tutors were very supportive–they want you to succeed in the course. They were very good at guiding you and very responsive to questions emailed outside of class hours. One thing that could have made the course less intense would have been to spread the course content over 5 weeks instead of 4. But overall I am very happy that I took the course, despite the intensity and how much work it ended up being.

By: Joshua Miller

Joshua Miller — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 16:32:47 +0000

Overall I felt the course was very useful and the certificate in and of itself will help me find more job opportunities. The opportunity to teach students in a live class was very helpful as well as practicing making lessons and lessons plans.

By: Andres Serina

Andres Serina — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 14:18:28 +0000

I took the online intensive course and found it very well designed. The tutors were very experienced, worked hard, and gave very valuable feedback. I learned a great amount in a short time.

The only thing I would recommend is to think carefully about choosing the intensive course. It personally worked out for me because I get to start that much sooner, but in hindsight I would not have chosen the intensive course. There’s no pressing need for it to be that serious, unless thats the window you can take off from your current job.

I’m very glad I chose this course however.

By: Kristen Dunn

Kristen Dunn — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 16:20:24 +0000

I learned a lot in my 10 week online course with The Teaching House, and both of my course tutors were excellent.

There were resources for creating Lesson Plans that were never reviewed with us, that would have made the first several weeks of the course much more straightforward.

The course took upwards of 30 hours per week of my time, which is not a reasonable expectation for a course billed as part-time.

Several times the information given to us (links, dates) were incorrect. No apologies or corrections were made.

Most disappointing is that all of the CELTA coursework, all of it, is geared toward teaching and learning face-to-face. TH should not offer an online course with only face-to-face coursework.