Pilgrims Course Outline: Our April courses for Teachers

Mario Rinvolucri, Pilgrims, UK

From Monday April 2nd till Friday April 6th we have two of our most popular training courses run by our most senior and experienced staff. The two courses are:
Creative Methodology for the Classroom
British Life, Language and Culture.

What are the advantages to you of coming on an April course as against coming in our high period: July and August. Let me list some of them:

- If you are reading this in Thailand then these courses coincide with the main respite from teaching that you get in the year. Several other countries have their main break in April.

- If one of your main objectives is to brush up your English then these courses are perfect since you are lodged with carefully picked host families. ( In July and August you are on campus in the university village.)

- In April the focus of the tutors will be entirely on you and not diluted by the crowds of other participants who come in the high months. The atmosphere is perhaps less heady but certainly more grounded and cosier.

- Most people find that Aprile with his shoueres soote offers weather that is more conducive to serious study than sultry, globally-warmed July or grass-burnt August.

- A one week Easter course will often disturb family life a lot less than a fortnight's course in July-August.

( I hope my boss does not see the above paragraphs or I may get carpeted for defaming our ( Northern Hemisphere) summer programmes!)

Creative Methodology of the classroom, initially designed by my colleague Bonnie Tsai, is our most popular course. I love teaching it because it brings together teachers of primary, secondary and adult levels. These three very distinctly different teaching cultures have to mix and, in the process, they enrich each other's thinking.
The focus of the course is on teacher sensitivity, on teacher awareness, on self-reflection but equally on a thrilling number of innovative teaching techniques, scenarios, and ways of practically doing in the classroom. It is not by chance that Pilgrims tutors have written some 60 Teacher Resource Books over the past 30 years.

British life, Language and Culture course offers you three main things:
a) rich language contact with a wide range of UK native speakers of English
b) in-depth insights into central areas of UK culture such as the class system, the education system, the ways women and men relate at work and at home, the enrichment of UK life that flows from the waves of immigration from the Germans under Albert and Victoria right through to the last in-flood of Poles in 2005 and 2006.
c) a brief introduction to the ways anthropologists see the bizarre inhabitants of Europe's most densely populated archipelago. A key text is Kate Fox's Watching the English.

In my experience people coming on this course can sometimes be folk who have been on just too many methodology of teaching courses and want something fresh and new.

For full course outlines please visit www.pilgrims.co.uk and click on TEACHER TRAINING.

Hoping to welcome you to Canterbury in April when the orchards will be in full bud.

Mario