Ghosts of the NILE

These past few weeks I have had the stressed pleasure of doing the Cambridge CELTA at the Norwich Institute for Language Education (NILE), a school that I do warmly recommend for it’s professionalism, beautiful setting and really nice staff – that sense of being in a small old village library really took the edge of the intensity of the course.

It has been an exhilarating experience and if we assume that Cambridge in any way represents a solid cutting edge of language teaching, cooperative learning is not a way to teach language – it’s simply another word for language learning per se.

Here I have been forced to realize that – for all my insistence on cooperative learning strategies to every tired colleague – I  need to radicalize what can and what should be done with group interaction.

From Day One’s tutor observation in an upper intermediary English class, I scribbled BE A GHOST! across my notes and in every single Teaching Practice Lesson since I have been struggling to give that phantom a form. Hopefully with the course now winding down, there will be an opportunity to share some of these processes here at cooperativelearning.works.

By the way … is languageteaching.info available…?