Earn your TESOL degree and be finished with professional development seminars. It's time to put meaningless certificates in the past so that you can just teach.

Teaching is both an art and a science. Teachers love to teach. People become teachers because they have a genuine love of helping students learn. Teachers are instinctively creators, innovators, and leaders. Teachers create lessons that engage students’ minds and hearts and emotions. Teachers know how to hold the attention of 25 teenagers on a Monday morning; not many adults can do that! Teachers stay up to date with current news, trends, and technology. During a single lesson, teachers make hundreds of split-second decisions about how to respond to pupils, and how to adjust instruction, both now and next week, to meet the needs of the learners in their care.

Language teachers are especially skilled in using language to teach language. In a microsecond, teachers hear a student’s language production, and the teacher chooses to recast, to review, to rephrase, or to reallocate the response to another student. Language teachers are constantly juggling their own authentic vocabulary and comprehensible vocabulary at the appropriate level for the students. Language teachers strike a delicate balance between accuracy and fluency in every unit of lessons. Language teachers decide when to initiate or complete conversations and how to lead the discussion for the benefit of critical learning. Language teachers teach pronunciation and punctuation in the same breath. Language teachers begin and end the day creating an atmosphere of challenge and safety, lowering the affective filter to promote language acquisition. 

Very few teachers learn about the “craft” of teaching by attending yet another “professional development” seminar. Teachers don’t need to collect certificates. 

Yet, teachers are life-long learners. There are sustainable ways that teachers can learn to improve their practice. Teachers become better after personal, reflective practice. Teachers improve by understanding the theories behind what they do instinctively. Teachers gain insights by learning from prior research. When teachers study their own classrooms (action research), they learn more about what is actually happening in their own settings. Teachers gain in-depth information about topics that are important to them when they dig deep into their own research. 

MA TESOL programs are designed to deeply improve the quality and craft of English teachers by walking along side teachers as they think critically, read theoretically, reflect seriously, interact with other teachers collegially, and research meaningfully. A MA TESOL degree is the only and final degree that active language teachers need to teach English anywhere in the world. 

Stop attending one-day seminars. Enroll in an MA TESOL program.

Author: Robin Gingerich, Ph.D., MA TESOL Program Director at LCC International University.