Humanising Language Teaching
Year 4; Issue 2; March 02

Why Pilgrims Teacher Trainer Courses are better.*

Mario Rinvolucri

There are four main reasons why our Teacher Training courses in Canterbury are better than those of most of our competitors in the UK marketplace.

1. We get better participants coming on our courses.

Sometimes, to give themselves some fresh air, Pilgrims-connected trainers work for other training centres. They tell us that the calibre of trainees in some other centres is a lot lower than the average teacher coming to our Hilltop. I need to define what they mean by "calibre", an odd metaphor drawn from the world of gun-smiths: I am told that the typical Pilgrims participant

• has made a conscious choice to come on a humanistic training course
• is open-mind and attracted to student-centred teaching
• sometimes already teaches in an a imaginative and forward looking school
• is often a very clued up methodologist with pretty efficient English.

It stands to reason that, if the above is true, then our courses will be better, since any teaching depends in part on the calibre of the student.

2. We have a network of self-renewing trainers from around the World.

Pilgrims has a tiny handful of permanent TT staff. We run both our international workshops and our summer programmes with people who work here there and everywhere during the year. To give you some examples:

Bonnie Tsai ( Business Recipes, Pilgrims Longman) works across the USA, in Switzerland and all over Europe while not with us.

She comes to our summer work full of the ideas and energy drawn from elsewhere.

Paul Davis ( Dictation, CUP, 1988 The Confidence Book, Pilgrims Longman 1990, More Grammar Games, CUP 1995, and Ways of Doing, CUP 1999) works at Durham University, all over Poland and with Pilgrims in a variety of training roles. Paul comes to us with all the whoomph from his work in Durham and in Poland.

Our trainers are not routinised and bored. They live gypsy years and so keep Pilgrims fully aware of the ginormous outside world.

One of our main competitors, The Bell Schools, have some good trainers, but they work at Bell year-in-year out, and over decades. This has an inevitable routinising effect on their minds and hearts, however creative some of them are. A constant work environment, stable over many years, takes its ineluctable toll.

The International character of our training Network

While most UK TT institutions have a trainer role-call of mainly British names, this is not our case.

We are part of the new Federal Europe and over the last 20 years we have had trainers who are natives of these countries:

Greece : Luke Prodromou
Austria: Herbert Puchta
Austria: Ferdinand Stefan
France: Bernard Dufeu
France: Anne Pechou
Hungary: Jonai Eva
Germany: Silvia Stephan
Poland : Hanna Kryszewska
Spain : Ana Robles Fraga
etc …….

The decision to take on top trainers from all over Europe has hugely enriched what we can offer to our participants. It makes our Summer Institute a truly international place.

Internationalising their trainer teams is not something that our competitors have yet managed, or apparently wanted to do. Who knows, maybe they don't see the benefits of so doing?

4. The intensity of our two week programmes

Our courses are intense in two ways:

1. The days are longer than those on most other programmes. At Pilgrims you start work at 9.00 in the morning and, if you want to, you can work through till 9.30 at night.
   Occasionally we get people who think we are not giving them enough. On a course of mine ten years ago an Israeli and a couple of Austrians complained they were not working long enough hours. I immediately laid on an extra 1 ½ hours for them.
   By the start of the second week they were begging me not to continue the supplementary hours… they were drowning!
   In fact, at the start of a two week programme we advise people to pace themselves sensibly, so they still have energy for the work of the second week.
   
   
2. Our courses are affectively intense. Participants get to know each other in considerable depth since the nature of the work on most of the courses requires this. This obviously applies to course like the two week introduction to NLP, but it also applies to English for teachers and straight methodology courses.

You definitely should not come on these courses if you want an excuse for a "shopping holiday".

* the "hanging comparative" used in the title of this piece is a typical piece of ambiguous advertising language. The question that needs asking is " better than what?" Are our courses better than re-heated baked potatoes, than those of our competition, than our own courses ten years ago? If this sort of language thinking interests you,, then have a look at the appendix on "Meta-model" infringements at the back of Leslie Cameron Bandler's SOLUTIONS, maybe the best yet introduction to NLP.

You may have noticed that the juxtaposition of "re-heated baked potatoes" with " those of our competition" in the above paragraph is both ambiguous and naughty. The reader will tend to imbibe the implication without noticing he is doing so. Such is the power of language. The NLP "meta-model" calls the bluff of such weasel words.