Let your TEFL course take you out of your comfort zone, into a new field and to a new land. Let it push you to new heights and to new accomplishments. For our trainees who are just out of college, let it show you the world of opportunities there are for you. For our trainees who have already worked entire careers, let it surprise you that you can still learn something new.
Many people enter into the TEFL course at Via Lingua thinking they are just coming to learn about and practice teaching, yet always end up learning more about life, culture, and themselves than they had ever expected.
The Via Lingua trainers often describe the course to trainees as “the shortest and longest course they will ever take”. The course has a full curriculum with many layers be it the grammar, the practice teaching, the theoretical teaching classes, and projects, therefore creating the perception of a longer course due to so much learning and yet the course is just four short weeks.
This four-week experience reinforces structure, consistency, and the necessity for time-management. It either reminds you or teaches you to organize your time well so that you can get your work completed AND have time to visit sights and have a social life. Since you, as a trainee, are in the classroom with others who are in a shared experience with you, you can band together with them to share strategies, to guide one another, and to even enjoy life outside of the classroom.
Being in the classroom with people from all different backgrounds and age groups also challenges trainees in different ways. Like in any classroom, you don’t handpick your classmates and when you take a course abroad, your classmates even more of a wildcard. No matter how you feel about your classmates during or at the end of the course, working with them, learning from them, and reaching goals with them makes the reward at the end of the course even more satisfying. This course teaches you patience, tolerance, and acceptance.
One cannot reach their goals in this course without self-reflection and self-awareness. Good teachers reflect on what they are learning, how they are performing, and what they can do to improve. Self-reflection and self-improvement can be challenging tasks, but the result is that trainees become better versions of themselves in and outside of the classroom.
Finally, no one can make an actual living as an English teacher without getting to know the English language. Courses like the one here at Via Lingua show you the “undiscovered” side of this language that you speak and show you how to navigate it with your students. The nuances and rules of grammar can be overwhelming to learn, but once you do, you won’t know how you went on your whole life not truly knowing your language.
Let your TEFL course push you and help you grow as an educator and as an individual. Let this course make you crave more learning and more growing, like it has for so many of our Via Lingua graduates.
