Super intensive course

 

Ending the IX Summer Course for Top Teachers of English.

Today is Project submission day for the participants in the IX CTS Summer Course for Top Teachers of English . These two past weeks have been such a delight with so much discussion and exchange of ideas. I am so proud of these teachers who are so concerned about getting ready for the school year investing time and effort in improving their teaching practice. So much to learn, so much to thank them!!

Announcing CTS Academic event

Planning lessons for "the new normal"

As part of the standards of practice for any teacher, being informed, aware and reflecting on the important issues and challenges in the profession as a whole is an essential part of all teacher education and development. In this event, we will exchange ideas of what issues need to be born in mind when planning our lessons in the “new” teaching context.

 

Summary of 2021

 Below there is a summary of the CTS activities  (second part) we had in 2021. It was quite a year!!! Lots of challenges and decisions, lots of love, caring and sharing. It ended with hope for a wonderful 2022. 

CTS´s IX Summer course (online)

 SMART is an acronym that is often used in business as a guide for setting business objectives, but can be applied to language outcomes. The "new normal" in our country is something blurred and although we were the last country in Latin America to resume in-person classes, we are not sure the conditions are the best to support teaching to a group of students who have been affected both emotionally and academically by the pandemic. 

However, I believe we can learn from our mistakes, improve the strategies we learned and used and get ready for whatever situation may come up. This is the rationale behind this summer course where we expect to exchange ideas and enrich our repertoire with what our colleagues have to share. 

B2 level of proficiency

 In this competitive world, we need to demonstrate qualities that make us better than other candidates whether we want to live, study or work in an English speaking environment or improve our academic skills. Knowing a foreign language, particularly English is, besides being computer literate, a very important asset.

To demonstrate the ability to understand the main ideas of complex texts, to interact fluently with native speakers and produce clear texts on a wide range of subjects we need to get at least a B2 level of proficiency.

In this chart we can see how useful it is to achieve this Independent level =Upper Intermediate (B2First) for the above reasons and also if you are interested in pursuing a good IELTS score. 

Summer Summary

 

Classes have started in Peru and in CTS we are happy to know that this time our teachers are better prepared to deal with the challenges that online teaching brings along. As we like to keep in touch with our CTS family and friends, we started 2021 with activities (courses and seminars) aiming at supporting teachers with closing the gap for those students who could not reach the same level of progress as their peers. Here is what we did from January to March.

Improving our Online teaching - August 2020

 More on Improving our Online Teaching

In Customized Training Services we consider our training students as family members. When the Pandemic made us change our style of giving instructions we were there to help teachers to learn the ropes of remote learning. 

Nowadays, when teaching online is a current way of teaching, we support our CTS family with more language and methodology activities. We care and that´s why we share. 

Here is a video with a list of the courses and workshops we ran in August.

Summary of VII Summer Blended learning Course

Dear CTS friends and family

We are going through difficult times where reaching the end of the tunnel is everybody´s responsibility so we need to abide by the rules and stay home.

In these times of lockdown, we teachers have even more responsibilities than before since we are expected to help our students learn in a virtual context they are not so familiar with because they use it more for entertainment and pleasure.

We need to prepare online teaching material that is – of course- different from the material we use for face-to-face lessons and we also need to use platforms and tools we are not so familiar with and with little time to master their use.

We know that little by little we will gain more skills at doing this and will manage to reduce preparation time while mastering the use of the Internet tools. It is at times like this when approaches such as Gamification , Flipped Learning, ICT and Web tools  can help us pass on knowledge, consolidate or even assess it.

At CTS we feel we have contributed  to support our teachers by having chosen the above approaches as modules for our last summer course both in its face-to-face as well as online modality. 

We are committed to keeping on offering practical courses and workshops (online modality) about tools and strategies for online context not only for teachers of English but for teachers of any subject. Thus, we can help our teachers in their virtual teaching practice until the time comes for meeting our students face to face without any health risk.

Please keep posted, we are working hard to support you and meanwhile take care and stay home. 

Below you can see some highlights of our VII Summer blended learning course.

Teaching is probably one of the most rewarding jobs although it may be the least well rewarded in terms of money in many countries.

In spite of that I am really happy to be a teacher and so today I need to thank my teachers for helping me to become who I am, I thank my fellow teachers for supporting and helping me to improve as a teacher. Last but not least, I am grateful to my students for teaching me how important it is to learn in order to teach.

Comments on the VIII Facebook Event: Latest Trends in ELT

How silly of me! I had written these comments so long ago that I forgot to post them.

What a pleasure it was to develop this workshop. All participants were so cooperative and eager to participate that it was a thrill to be there. When they were asked to complete the consensogram on how much they knew about The Flipped Classroom, Mindsets in Education and Creativity and Innovation, their responses provided clear indication that the choice of the topic had been well made.The participants who volunteered for leading teams were- to a large extent- very much responsible for the success of the event. My deepest gratitude to them.

More than once I have been asked why I keep taking part in these workshops, I always find the answer in the interaction with the teachers and in our sharing since we all come from similar backgrounds.

I am certainly looking forward to the next event.