Advanced Practical Teaching (004X5B)

30 credits, Level 7 (Masters)

Spring teaching

This is a practical and experiential course, designed to give students with appropriate previous teaching qualifications and experience TEFL-Qualified status recognised by the British Council.

You will undertake five hours' supervised teaching practice (TP), and critically evaluate teaching methodology and classroom techniques through peer observation, feedback and discussion. You will keep a TP journal and undertake reflective tasks, and the course is assessed through the observed teaching practice and journal. The opportunity is presented to relate pedagogical theory to practice, experiment and develop their teaching skills. The learners are adult, multilingual groups of 'free students' arranged by the University, organised into approximate ability levels.

Key skills are lesson planning and pedagogical aims, designing and implementing appropriate lessons, adaptability and flexibility, using a range of teaching techniques and approaches, the ability to reflect on progress, giving and receiving constructive feedback.

You are expected to show a high degree of autonomy in preparing lessons, with support from your TP tutor and peers. A mixture of authentic, home-made, and suitably-adapted published materials should be used, appropriate to the lesson aims.

Contact hours and workload

This module is approximately 150 hours of work. This breaks down into about 33 hours of contact time and about 117 hours of independent study. The University may make minor variations to the contact hours for operational reasons, including timetabling requirements.

We regularly review our modules to incorporate student feedback, staff expertise, as well as the latest research and teaching methodology. We’re planning to run these modules in the academic year 2021/22. However, there may be changes to these modules in response to feedback, staff availability, student demand or updates to our curriculum. We’ll make sure to let you know of any material changes to modules at the earliest opportunity.