Delta module 1 – first week

So here I am, half way through the first Delta Module One introductory week, and since yesterday I had the luxury of getting home earlier than usual, I decided to write down a few considerations and first impressions from these first few days.

First of all, I found out we are doing Module One over a luxuriously long period of time. This first intensive week is just a general introduction to the exam and the main topics on the Module One syllabus. The actual work will begin next week, with an online platform, over quite a few months. It will involve extensive reading, completing some tasks and familiarising with the exam format. The whole course will wind up next year, including more specific exam preparation and possibly another face-to-face week. So the good news is I’ll have plenty of time to read and digest the concepts and jargon necessary for the exam.

Apart from this, the general idea I’m getting from this first week is: CELTA was a nice introduction, but how can we look at teaching and learning from different perspectives? And this is great, exactly what I was looking for. On the other hand, I thought we would be doing more digging, that maybe the tutor would throw concepts and thought-provoking ideas at us to help us break free from the “CELTA mindset”. Which he partly did but not as much as I expected, I suppose.

I also hoped the whole thing would be much more interactive, whereas — as much as this sound contradictory — it is mostly… teacher fronted presentation! I find it really hard to sit for nearly seven hours a day listening to someone talk, no matter how interesting the topic might be. This of course tells me something about how my students can perceive such a lesson, especially late in the evening after a whole working day, but I suppose I didn’t need an entire week to realise it, did I? 😀

To be fair, we are getting quite a lot of input in the form of book titles, online resources and hinted ideas or concepts. I suppose once I’ll start digging onto every one of these sources I will start realising the scope of this first week.

In conclusion, I can say this first week is not as hard as I thought it would be in terms of the amount of information I am exposed to (CELTA was far more demanding on this level). But it is also a nice and slow introduction to what looks like a sea of books, references, methodologies and linguistic concepts which I will be digging into later on.

Before closing I must apologise if this post doesn’t make mush sense, I am quite tired (we are teaching as well as sitting the course this week) but I really wanted to get some ideas down while I’m still fresh.

If you’d like to share it in the comments, I’d be interested to know how your first Delta week was like. Did you enjoy it? Did it meet your expectations?