Who might you work with on one of our Teacher Training Courses?

Mario Rinvolucri, Pilgrims, UK

Let me start with negative definitions of a very Western sort: You will not find yourself in a group led by :

- a woolly-headed "applied" linguist
- a person who has lost all touch with the language teaching classroom
- a researcher who cannot teach
- a person whose self-esteem depends on her place in a university pecking order
- a very good language teacher without trainer skills, who wants you to do in your classroom just what she does in hers.
- A person who thinks that teacher training is simply information transfer.

All your trainers at Pilgrims are, first and foremost, language teachers. There is no sense in the Pilgrims network of trainers of having "risen above the language classroom". The greatest act the Catholic Pope performs is to say mass. He is, at heart, a priest. We are, at heart, passionate language teachers.

All your tutors are also carefully prepared in-service teacher trainers. This means that they fully understand that you bring vast skill and experience to the training room. In a group of 15 people there may be 150 years teaching experience, 150 years of people-management experience, a 150 years of grammar explanation work, experience reaching back to the time of Captain Perry, Queen Victoria and Napoleon III!
The Pilgrims tutors take it that their task is to foster a development of your own resources, and a development of the sort that that you choose. The skilled trainer has a respect for the colleague's specificity which a good language teacher may not always have.

The Pilgrims trainer network have drawn sustenance from a wide variety of fields that bring remarkable wealth and depth to their EFL work.

If you were to train in Richard Cooper's group you would benefit directly from the major work he has done teaching presentation skills to senior business folk and from the extraordinary knowledge he has of the world of video and cinema.

If you were to work with Bonnie Tsai you would find yourself imbibing the ideas of Lozanov, the creator of suggestopaedia; through her you might enter the world of NLP, and find out in depth about the Multiple Intelligence thinking of Howard Gardner. The long training Bonnie took with Bernard Dufeu, creator of linguistic psychodramaturgy, is another of the influences that has transformed her into a super-rich language teacher and trainer.

If you were to work with Simon Marshall, our DOS, you would be in the presence of an obsessively linguistically brilliant mind. Simon used to teach at International House Hastings, one of the beacon teacher training Institutes in UK . He brings with him the richness of the work done at IH Hastings during Adrian Underhill's period as director and has been strongly influenced by the thinking of Caleb Gattegno ( Silent Way). A person of huge focus and massive dedication.

If you were to learn from Hanna Kryszewska , you would benefit from her extra-ordinarily broad TT experience. She has worked for Pilgrims in Vietnam, in Austria, in Greenland, Croatia and Bulgaria etc….. Her mind brings together many strands from many fields: the thinking of Vigotsky, influences from psychology, rather than therapy, and the work, in language, of Nattinger, Lewis etc… Her interest in practical classroom techniques is that of a major exercise choreographer.

I could enumerate many more colleagues, such as Paul Davis, with five excellent, eminently practical books to his name , Sheelagh Deller who wrote that classic, Lessons from the Learners and who is our specialist trainer form CLIL etc…..but I guess enough is enough.

If you can prove to me that there is another EFL teacher training centre in UK that brings together teacher trainers with a diversity of intellectual and technical background as broad as ours, then I will buy you Michael Hoey's Lexical Priming and send it to you as a gift. ( He is a real linguist, not a woolly headed "applied" linguist!)

To my knowledge the nearest candidate would be NILE in Norwich, who have sometimes taken on trainers who have also worked at Pilgrims like David Hill and Nick Owen, whose excellent books on using stories you may already know, eg: The Magic of Metaphor, Crown House.

Why not come on our January 2006 course?
Why not come on our Easter courses 2006?
Why not join the thrilling maelstrom of July and August on our Canterbury Hilltop and choose one of umpteen courses on offer then?

See you then,

Mario