Welcome to 2010! ITI was established by Tom Godfrey in 1989 so last year we were able to celebrate our 20th birthday! We have grown from a small office on Kallavı Sokak, to our present location on Istiklal Caddesi, thanks to all those who have trained with us over the years. Better still, we recently received the highest rating possible from the Cambridge ESOL exam centre inspection programme.
2008/9 was another very successful year for us thanks to the hard work of everyone here; students, teachers, trainers and staff alike. We’d especially like to say thank you and good luck to Nicky Salmon who spent 9 months with our CELTA training team and we'd also like to thank Sebastian Tennant for the great work he's done on the technical side of the school. He's built our website (helping us raise our profile and making us more accessible), the ITI Job List (helping employers find teachers, and vice versa), an in-house applications database interface (making organising and advertising our courses much easier) and he's now hosting our Moodle installation (providing us with unlimited use of Moodle for all our Cambridge ESOL courses and allowing us to create blended and distance learning programmes).
Looking ahead, we’re pleased to be able to welcome Claire Young and Steph Korucu onto the CELTA training team, and Aaron Abrook, Liz Aykanat and Amanda Yücel onto the ICELT training team. It’s also a pleasure to be able to welcome Jitesh Patel (who is currently doing the DELTA with us), Seth Richardson, and one of our recent CELTA graduates, Eleanor Clagett, to the teaching team.
We successfully trained 123 teachers in 2008/9, over 10 courses. The November 2008 CELTA course was our first group of more than 12 trainees, and we went on to run 4 more courses with more than 12 trainees before the year was out! 2008/9 was also the first year in which we ran 3 intensive CELTA courses over the summer.
A total of 27 teachers completed the ICELT with us in 2008/9. Most (but not all) of the teachers we trained were from Istanbul universities such as Beykent and Bahçeşehir.
We are very proud to be able to say that ITI is currently one of the biggest DELTA centres in the world, having trained 60 teachers in 2008/9 alone. We were one of the few centres worldwide that offered the new, modular DELTA, the same year it was introduced by Cambridge. We would also especially like to congratulate the following teachers-in-training on their excellent results:
The award you've all been waiting for! Congratulations must go to Jonathan Sayers, whose meteoric rise through the Cambridge ESOL teaching award roster serves as a great success story for ITI too — he just happened to do all his training with us! After completing his CELTA in 2007 (Pass A) he began working with us as a full-time teacher. By the summer of 2008 he felt ready to do the Young Learners CELTA extension, and by the summer of 2009 DELTA Module 1. He’s now back in the UK and planning to take DELTA Module 2 soon. We wish him every success!
Other contenders for the award were Petek Şirin, Pelin Güney, Henrieta Kupova, Anita Kwiatkowska and Barbara Fucile, all of whom did their CELTA with us and are now doing (or have done) the DELTA.
As a CELTA trainee at ITI, I primarily learned about teaching English by observing experienced teachers, participating in lessons on various aspects of teaching English, doing assignments that tested my teaching knowledgeable, and preparing for, carrying out, and then reflecting on lessons for groups of adult English students. I got to work with cool and interesting people from around the world and was often learning how to teach while laughing or doing something fun. Yet all told, the course was quite demanding. In fact, it was exhausting. It made all the difference that the tutors at ITI were clearly extremely talented and aware teachers themselves who were working very hard to make sure we had all tools we needed to succeed. I'm glad that I now know how to teach many different kinds of English-language lessons, have a collection of teaching tricks and classroom activities to draw from, and am aware of my own teaching strengths and weaknesses.
I'd again like to thank all the tutors in ITI for the training you offered us last year. It was a priceless experience and helped us a lot; especially learning how to construct an effective teacher’s role in class and different feedback techniques made me very confident while teaching. We are also receiving very nice compliments from our very satisfied students about our teaching thanks to you. That's why we sent three new colleagues to have ICELT this year. I hope our paths will cross again soon for DELTA.
We are happy to announce the success of our free seminars which started in December 2009. As well as offering practical and theoretical teaching ideas to participants, this is another way that we have extended our training profile. Seminar presenters are observed and given feedback by one of our training team or by representatives from Cambridge University Press and Macmillan. If you haven't attended any of the seminars yet then please come along in 2010.
Happy New Year, from all of us here at ITI. Good luck in 2010.
