CELTA: online study

Getting a CELTA Pass A: Example CELTA Lesson Plans & Assignments πŸ‘¨πŸ»β€πŸ«

Here’s everything I learned in the process of earning CELTA’s top grade, plus something you won’t find elsewhere: Pass-A-quality example lesson plans, assignments, and more.

Are you doing a CELTA course and shooting for an A? Or just want to learn more about what it takes? You’re in the right place.

I’ll start by being more pessimistic, but then I’ll dial it back. First, here’s Jo Gakonga with a short summary of the CELTA assessment guidelines:

Jenna Cody also has a great write-up about her experience getting a Pass A, and how difficult/intense it was.

Both Jo and Jenna want you to know that you probably shouldn’t be aiming for a Pass A. Jo starts out with this line: “The rather harsh truth that you might not want to hear is that you’re almost certain not to get a Pass A at CELTA. They don’t give that very easily.” And here’s Jenna: “I highly doubt that someone on the CELTA course with zero teaching experience could get a Pass A unless they were preternaturally talented or had some indirect experience.” Then there are Cambridge’s published grade stats, broken down by country and year. The 2019 results show that 6.5% of students got a Pass A, and in 2018 it was 5.4%.

So how hard is it? Getting a Pass A will take a lot of work, but I think everything above paints too pessimistic a picture. I got it without any teaching experience, and I don’t think I’m that talented. There are lots of things you can do to improve your odds, and I’m here to help!

My first advantage was that I did a semi-full-time six week course, and I wasn’t working while doing it. Four week courses are probably the most common, and the limited time is why CELTA is described by almost all students as intense. I was very grateful for the extra two weeks in my course, and it definitely gave me more time to polish everything I did. So for starters, don’t do a four week course if you can help it. However, in order to find a course with a longer schedule, you might need to shop around internationally…

Choosing a CELTA Training Center

It used to be that you had to do the course in person. Covid changed that. Now you can shop around internationally and attend online, choosing the center that fits your budget, ideal start date, course duration, and time zone. CELTA is highly standardized and teaching centers get close scrutiny from Cambridge, so I’m guessing that tutors in most centers are at least decent. And no matter where you take the course, your tutors and students will all be speaking English.

I went with International House Mexico. In addition to being one of the best priced centers in the world, their time zone is friendly for US students, and most of their instructors turned out to be excellent.

Note that many companies teach Cambridge’s CELTA course, which was confusing to me at first when trying to choose where to take it. The biggest players are International House and Teaching House, both of which have many locations around the world. But there are many other training centers and universities that also teach CELTA. Cambridge’s official site can help you sort through them all by country and city, but its UX is not great. StudyCELTA has an easier to use search that lets you find places based on CELTA course type (online intensive, online part time, online blended, full time face to face, or part time face to face) and course starting date, but they only show testing centers that they partner with. I used a mix of both websites to narrow down my choices.

Example Materials

Probably one of the more useful things you can do (even more than giving yourself extra time for the course) is to learn from high quality examples. CELTA tutors will conduct some demo classes and probably give you example materials for some (but not all) assignments, along with example teaching practice (TP) lesson plans from a prior student or two at their center. You should definitely learn from those! However, the quality of the written materials may vary. Some will definitely not be at Pass A level. So here I’m providing examples of my own work to give you ideas about how to approach and structure things and give you a sense of the level of work that will be needed. If this helps you, please let me know in the comments!

These are meant to be examples only. Don’t use any parts of them directly. Cambridge holds the submissions of all past CELTA students, including me, and they put assignments (and possibly other work) through plagiarism detectors. They’ll deny you a certification at the end of the course if they detect that you reused someone else’s work.

Hopefully, yours come out better than mine!

Although your written materials might help push you over the edge from a regular Pass into Pass B or Pass A, of course they’re not everything. Being an effective teacher during your teaching practices is the baseline, and is at least as important. So I’ve got more tips…

More Tips

  • Do a practice/dry-run of each lesson beforehand. If you have a longsuffering partner, family member, or friend willing to do this with you, take advantage of that! Otherwise, it’s still worth doing on your own.
    • This will mean an additional 45+ minutes of prep for each lesson, but I found it so beneficial that I stuck with it every time. During every dry run, my first pass was somewhat rough and I was able to make adjustments that made it better the second time around when I had real students. It helped me understand where things weren’t working and also where I needed to shorten things to stay within the available time.
    • Your first few dry runs will also be good opportunities to make sure you’re fully comfortable with any tools you’ll need like Zoom whiteboards/breakout rooms, Google Slides/Forms/Jamboards, etc.
  • After submitting a TP lesson plan, prepare a streamlined version that you can print in advance of your lesson (see the example I included above). This printout should be easy to read at a glance and exclude any fluff you won’t need during the lesson (references, detailed language analysis, etc.).
  • Incorporate any feedback tutors give you into your very next TP if possible, or as soon as appropriate. They want to see you show growth and responsiveness to feedback during the course. If your style or preferred teaching methodologies are different than theirs, that’s fine to go back to after the CELTA course. In the meantime, you should follow the opinionated approach that you’re paying them to teach you.
  • Participate at least a little in post-TP peer feedback, and write meaningful self evaluations. Both are expected for students with high grades. To make self evals easier to write, I waited until getting TP feedback from my tutors and incorporated parts of their feedback into what I wrote.
  • When preparing your first two TP lesson plans, it’s okay to ask your tutors lots of questions and ask for help. I even sent drafts beforehand to my tutor, after he offered to provide early feedback. But after the first two, try to avoid asking questions over email. They expect Pass A students to be highly independent with their lesson plans.
    • It’s okay to ask more questions about assignments since that’s not held against you in the same way.
  • Your instructor will have a one-on-one discussion with you as part of your stage 2 progress report. That’s a great time to ask what grade you’re on track for, and what the gap is between that and Pass B or Pass A.
    • For me, my tutor said that if I was scored then, I’d probably get a Pass B. He also gave helpful tips on where to focus to continue doing better.
    • After my next TP, I asked if I’d made enough progress on the areas he mentioned to be on track for Pass A, and I got even more advice.
  • I was told that Pass A students typically include lots of scripting in their TP lesson plans, including for any instructions, transitions between lesson stages, ICQs (instruction checking questions), and CCQs (concept checking questions). Make sure your scripts are concise and use appropriately graded language for the level of your students. I started out a bit wordy, and continually got feedback about reducing TTT (teacher talking time).
  • Learn everything you can about your language focus for the lesson, and make sure to include a language analysis table or section in every lesson plan. In addition to this being important for higher grades, the time I spent on this helped me several times with questions from students. I had solid answers for them as a result of the research I’d done beforehand, even when I hadn’t intended to include the more detailed coverage in the lesson.
  • Since all assignments are allowed to be resubmitted once, CELTA tutors stress that failing an assignment on the first try is no big deal and that you can think of the first submission as a draft that you’ll get feedback on before submitting the final version. But I wouldn’t rely on this. Based on what I gathered from them, getting a Pass B will be hard if you need to resubmit more than one assignment, and Pass A might not be possible with any resubmissions. Take extra time before submitting to get your polish in on the first try.
  • One of my tutors said assignments have a 10% word count leeway, so there’s no need to spend extra time e.g. shaving off a few more words if you’re over the limit. But you might want to confirm with your own tutors beforehand that it’s okay to rely on this.
  • Be organized and on time for everything. My recommendation: Prepare a detailed checklist each week of everything you need to do that week (see the example below). The schedule given to me by IH Mexico was kind of a messβ€”it was hard to follow and too high level for me. Partly as a result, my peer that I worked most closely with occasionally prepared for the wrong things or didn’t realize an assignment was due until the last minute. My checklists made it much easier for me and made me feel good about completing even small things that I’d then get to check off.

Following is my checklist for week five that I wrote in Evernote (which lets you easily create lists with checkboxes). I marked things to show up live for (Zoom calls) with πŸŽ™οΈ, and deadlines with ⏰.

  • πŸŽ™οΈ Monday 11am: Live group class
  • Read tutor feedback for LRT assignment
  • Prepare TP5 (speaking) lesson plan
    • Read guided lesson plan
    • Read examples and references
    • Read my prep notes from 12/04
    • Review demo lesson
    • ⏰ Wednesday 2 hr before: Submit final online
    • Prepare print sheet
  • Prepare TP6 (functional language) lesson plan
    • Read guided lesson plan
    • Read examples and references
    • Read my prep notes from 12/04 and 12/09
    • ⏰ Friday 2 hr before: Submit final online
    • Prepare print sheet
  • πŸŽ™οΈ Wednesday 8pm: TP5 (speaking)
    • Dry run beforehand
    • ⏰ Thursday: Write and submit self evaluation
    • Read tutor feedback
  • πŸŽ™οΈ Friday 8pm: TP6 (functional language)
    • Dry run beforehand
    • Guided lesson planning session for next week
    • ⏰ Saturday: Write and submit self evaluation
    • Read tutor feedback
  • Unit 14: Correction
  • Unit 18: Lesson Planning 2
  • Unit 19: Writing
  • Unit 20: Recording & Recycling Language
  • Observation: Task-based learning: Justin Vollmer (1 hr online)
  • Ask tutor about delta between my current performance and Pass A
  • ⏰ Friday: Submit 3rd assignment (FOL)
    • Read tutor feedback
  • Write 4th assignment (LFC)
    • Read instructions
    • Read suggested resources and examples
  • Fill in CELTA-5 info for the week
  • Finish draft of to-do list for week 6

If any of this helped you, let me know! And feel free to share your own advice.

Are you preparing for CELTA? Then check out my post on the best English teaching books to help you prepare.

19 thoughts on “Getting a CELTA Pass A: Example CELTA Lesson Plans & Assignments πŸ‘¨πŸ»β€πŸ«”

  1. This is amazing! Thank you so much for your insight and all the detail you included! I start my CELTA this coming Monday! I’m also doing it with IH Mexico City, but I’m taking the part time course, so it will be spread out over 12 weeks. Fingers crossed!

    1. Hello Steven,
      I suddenly came across your website. This is really helpful information for those who want to pass the test, especially that you have included all your assignments and TP points.
      I am doing myself an intensive Online CELTA course, and boy, is it intensive? Maybe at times, way too much intensive. So, your site was a gem at the depth of the dark ocean. I was feeling so stressed and anxious about the preperation of lessons, TP, and assignments and viola, a nice relief to have just found your action plans and papers to help me. It is could you made all of this public. Thanks and very useful for many CELTA google doodlers anxiety freaks.

  2. Hello! Cheers, i took my CELTA with IH Izmir i just completed my TP8 today im just hoping for the best although i must say the assignments really did my braincells dirty

  3. Hello Steven!

    I cannot adequately express how thankful I am to you for writing this article and including the resources above. I have been looking for an encouraging article from a CELTA graduate who passed with an A but had no prior teaching experience.

    I saw your comment on Lao Ren Cha’s Blogspot page, and it nearly brought tears to my eyes. It has been so discouraging to continuously read about how one must settle for a ‘pass’ if they have no prior teaching experience.

    My goal is an A pass as well, and I will religiously follow the advice here.

    Thank you, thank you, thank you!

  4. Thelma, it’s great to hear this was helpful! Clearly, you’re highly motivated and ambitious, and I’m sure you’ll have great advice to share with others after you’re done. Wishing you the best!

    1. Hello Steven!

      I hope you are well.

      I have returned to thank you for providing examples of your work. It really helped me to put my best foot forward during the course. I have just received my recommended grade and it’s a PASS B. What was that saying about the best laid plans of mice and men? πŸ˜€

      Nonetheless, thank you so much for this helpful article and the examples. Much appreciated!

    2. Congrats, Thelma! Pass B is dope! I know you were hoping for the A, but I think B is equal to A in terms of opening a few more doors for people without prior teaching experience. You’ll be a badass teacher. πŸ˜€

  5. Thank you so much for the tips and details of lesson plans. I am doing Celta and it’s taking a toll on my health. I can’t grasp evrrything,it’s just too hectic to do TP today and then prepare for next TP the day after next plus not forgetting assignments etc.. i am sure if one can learn all in 4 weeks ?

  6. Hello Steven!

    Thank you so much for writing this article! It’s absolutely fantastic and filled with a lot of extremely useful information. I’ll be starting a 4 weeks CELTA program in April 2023 (didn’t have the option of a semi-full time unfortunately) and was wondering about the TP sessions for each skill…will the course tutors give us specific topics to teach or do we get to select which texts/books to teach students for these sessions? For example, for planning and teaching reading skills, do we get to decide what to teach within this for the teaching practice session to fulfill the language skills related task?

    Thanks in advance!

    1. Thanks, Babloo! In my case at least, the reading class was TP1, and because it was earlier in the course there was more guidance on the topic and what to include. I was given a section from an English coursebook to extract the reading material from.

  7. This is so useful, thank you. Apologies if you’ve already said elsewhere and I missed it… how much experience did you have with the English International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) before starting CELTA? Thanks!

    1. None. I learned it as much as I needed to during the course. You indirectly raise a good point, though, that it would be very helpful to gain at least basic knowledge of the English IPA beforehand.

  8. Heyaaaa, just wanted to say that 2 years later this post is still very extremely much… SUPER helpful!! Especially the attached samples, carried me through. I’m in my final two weeks of (part-time) CELTA. (fingers crossed).

  9. Dear Steven Levithan,
    I would like to express my deepest gratitude for sharing your valuable experiences regarding the CELTA course. Your approach and the exchange of ideas and information reflect your distinguished and noble character, which is highly appreciated and deserving of recognition.
    I have a few questions about the lesson plans you’ve designed. Firstly, are the topics of these plans requested by teachers, or do you select them personally? Secondly, after designing these plans, is it necessary to execute them live in the classroom? Lastly, during the live execution of these plans in class, is it permissible to use the template of the lesson plan, or should they be presented from memory?
    I would appreciate a comprehensive explanation, as well as any additional advice you may have for the first and second weeks of the course that I should implement or observe in the classroom.
    Thank you for your guidance and support.
    Sincerely,
    Hamid

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