Thrown in at the Deep End: What My First Cambridge Summer School Taught Me About Teaching English

I was told summer would be busy.

I just didn’t realise quite how busy.

At the end of June, I had just finished CELTA and completed my first week of paid English teaching with a group of Turkish teenagers in Cambridge. I already had another job lined up with St Giles, starting on 6 July, so I thought I had a week in between to catch my breath, prepare myself and perhaps process the fact that I had actually become an English teacher.

Then, on Sunday afternoon, I received an email from Select English explaining what I would be teaching the following morning.

There was only one slight problem.

I didn’t know I was working the following morning.

Apparently, I had another week of teaching.

Welcome to summer school in Cambridge.

Cambridge in summer is a different world

Cambridge has a huge English-language teaching industry, and during the summer it seems to explode.

International students arrive in large groups. Temporary teaching centres open in schools and colleges. Teachers, activity leaders, academic managers and centre managers are brought together for a few incredibly intense weeks.

I had been warned that summer was busy, but as a newly qualified CELTA teacher, I had absolutely no idea what that meant in practice.

I soon found out.

My St Giles contract was for 22 paid hours per week: 20 hours of teaching, one teacher meeting and one hour of paid lesson planning for the entire week.

One hour.

As a new teacher, I could easily spend several hours in an afternoon preparing for the following morning.

This wasn’t because I was expected to spend that long planning. More experienced teachers had accumulated resources over years. They could open an activity book, find something suitable, photocopy it, adapt it and walk into the classroom.

I was still building that toolkit.

And I was about to build it very quickly.

When CELTA meets summer school

One of the biggest surprises was discovering just how different summer-school teaching felt from CELTA.

During my CELTA training, I had learned to think carefully about lesson aims, staging, timing, teacher talking time, student talking time, instructions, anticipated problems, monitoring and meaningful communicative practice.

Then I arrived at summer school.

Suddenly, the Wi-Fi wasn’t working.

The interactive screen wouldn’t connect to my laptop.

An activity I’d expected to last 20 minutes lasted seven.

Students were repeatedly having conversations in their own languages.

Someone didn’t want to participate.

Someone else wanted to run around the classroom.

And I still had another 35 minutes to teach.

We eventually started joking about TTT — Teacher Talking Time — with my fellow teachers, because sometimes mine was through the roof.

It wasn’t that CELTA had become irrelevant. Far from it. CELTA had given me a framework for thinking about teaching.

But I was discovering that real classrooms don’t necessarily cooperate with lesson plans.

Structure within the chaos

I should make an important distinction here.

Summer school sometimes felt chaotic to me as a new teacher, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t an academic structure behind it.

At St Giles, we completed weekly forward planners: one version for students and another for teachers and academic managers. There were assessments, end-of-week questionnaires and teacher reports. Every teacher was also observed twice during the five-week programme.

In some ways, that added another layer of pressure.

I wasn’t simply trying to keep a room full of students engaged. I was learning how to plan a week, assess learners, report on their progress, respond to feedback and teach while knowing that somebody would occasionally be sitting at the back of the classroom observing me.

Some of my feedback highlighted areas I was still developing, including lesson structure and monitoring.

And that’s exactly what I needed.

Behind what sometimes felt like chaos in the classroom, there was a system requiring me to think about what I was teaching, why I was teaching it and whether it was actually working.

The day I went home crying

My first week with St Giles was at their Family Centre, teaching younger learners.

I had deliberately not signed up for afternoon activities when I accepted the job. It was my first summer school, and I didn’t want to bite off more than I could chew. I knew I could commit to teaching every morning, and I was happy to help with additional work when needed.

At the induction, before we’d even properly started, the managers asked whether somebody could volunteer to teach at the Family Centre because they were missing a teacher.

I volunteered.

By that point, I was only in approximately my third week of professional English teaching.

One of those first days was awful.

The technology wasn’t working properly. We didn’t have access to the main school’s photocopier. I was teaching young children and felt completely underprepared.

I asked the centre manager for help.

“Just do a Hangman.”

At the time, I thought that was a terrible answer.

I went home crying.

Looking back now, however, I understand that moment very differently.

I didn’t need the perfect lesson.

I needed more rabbits in my hat.

Always have rabbits in your hat

That became one of the biggest lessons of my summer.

I learned about Baamboozle. I used Kahoot, Wordwall, crosswords, Hot Seat, Pictionary, quizzes, vocabulary games and simple speaking activities. I discovered sites such as ESL Brains and Twinkl and gradually started building my own bank of resources.

I learned to have something that required no printing.

Something that required no internet.

Something for when students didn’t have phones.

Something for when the touchscreen worked.

Something for when it didn’t.

Something for when an activity finished much faster than expected.

And something for when the carefully planned lesson simply wasn’t working.

Interestingly, I used far fewer PowerPoint presentations than I had during CELTA. During my training, PowerPoint had been central to many of my lessons.

Summer school forced me to become much more flexible.

By the end, the question wasn’t always:

What does my lesson plan say comes next?

It was increasingly:

What do these students need from me right now?

Not every online resource is a good resource

I also discovered that finding a ready-made activity online doesn’t necessarily mean the preparation has been done for you.

Kahoot is a brilliant example.

There are thousands of English-learning Kahoots already available, which sounds wonderful when you’re preparing lessons quickly.

Until you’re standing in front of a class and suddenly a question appears in Polish because the English Kahoot you selected was actually designed for Polish learners.

Or you discover a typo.

Or an incorrect answer.

Or a question that makes absolutely no sense.

That frustrated me enormously.

It is one of the reasons I started creating my own Kahoots. It takes longer initially, but I know exactly what is in them, what language they practise and what my students are going to see.

My collection of teaching resources started growing throughout the summer.

And with it, so did my confidence.

Summer school isn’t quite school

Another thing took me a while to understand.

These students weren’t necessarily coming to Cambridge primarily to make dramatic academic progress in English.

For many of them, this was also a holiday.

They were experiencing another country, making friends, going on excursions, doing activities and spending time away from home. Some stayed for one week. Others stayed considerably longer.

English lessons were an important part of that experience, but they were only one part.

Once I understood that, my idea of a “successful lesson” started changing.

Sometimes success wasn’t completing a beautifully staged grammar lesson.

Sometimes it was keeping a group of teenagers safe, engaged and communicating in English for 50 minutes.

I also began to understand why my previous experience working with children had mattered during recruitment, and why safeguarding featured so heavily in our training.

These were young people away from home.

Sometimes they were excited. Sometimes they were tired. Sometimes they were homesick. Sometimes they were testing boundaries.

And sometimes, after five weeks of summer school, they simply couldn’t care less about the present continuous.

Fair enough.

I still wanted the lessons to make sense

There was one thing I found difficult to let go of.

Sometimes I saw experienced teachers grab an activity book, photocopy a few pages and use them for a lesson.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that. In fact, after experiencing the pace of summer school myself, I completely understand it.

But I struggled with activities that felt disconnected from everything else the students were doing.

If the week’s theme was Global Cultures, I wanted the language and activities to connect to global cultures.

If students were going on an excursion, I wanted something in the classroom to connect with where they were going.

If we were studying Health and Wellbeing or Sports and Recreation, I wanted the vocabulary, grammar and communicative activities to fit into that context.

I wanted students to encounter language in one situation and then have an opportunity to recognise or reuse it somewhere else.

Perhaps that was professional pride.

Perhaps it was simply the kind of teacher I was beginning to become.

It also explains why my lesson planning took me so long.

Classroom management is learned in classrooms

I had difficult moments.

I had to repeatedly ask students not to have conversations in languages that other people in the classroom couldn’t understand.

There were moments when I became frustrated.

There were moments when I raised my voice.

There were young learners who needed to be told to stop running around and sit down.

And there were situations where I simply didn’t know what the appropriate response was, so I contacted the academic manager and asked.

That was another important lesson.

You don’t have to know how to deal with every situation.

Sometimes good judgement means recognising when you need somebody more experienced to step in.

CELTA can introduce classroom-management techniques, but there is something very different about being responsible for an actual group of children or teenagers.

You learn classroom management by managing classrooms.

Six weeks later

By my final weeks at St Giles, something had changed.

Not the students.

They were still unpredictable.

In one of my final groups, I had mixed A1/A2 levels, students who had already been at summer school for weeks and had completely lost motivation, a Japanese learner with very limited English, and Chinese students who repeatedly slipped back into speaking Chinese together.

But I wasn’t panicking anymore.

We needed to review the present simple?

Fine.

Present continuous?

Fine.

Let’s practise it.

Let’s play something.

Kahoot won’t work because not everybody has a phone?

Fine. Baamboozle.

The technology isn’t doing what I expected?

Fine. I’ve got something else.

That, perhaps more than anything, was what summer school taught me.

Not how to create the perfect English lesson.

How to adapt when the lesson isn’t perfect.

The reality of a short-term classroom

Towards the end of my summer, I also taught at the main St Giles school.

That gave me another glimpse of language-school teaching, but I still found the short-term nature of summer frustrating.

Sometimes I would meet a class and discover that the level wasn’t quite what I had expected. I had to learn unfamiliar classroom technology quickly. Students came and went, and some were only there for a very short time.

What I missed was continuity.

I wanted to know the students.

I wanted to understand what they could do when they arrived, teach them, see what they struggled with and then notice what changed.

That is difficult when you might only teach someone for a week.

And it helped me understand what I wanted to experience next.

So, did summer school teach me how to be an English teacher?

I’m not sure it did.

And I don’t mean that negatively.

Summer school taught me something different.

It taught me how to think on my feet.

How to manage groups.

How to keep students engaged.

How to abandon something that isn’t working.

How important safeguarding really is.

How to ask for help when I need it.

How useful it is to have a growing bank of resources ready to go.

How to walk into a classroom without knowing exactly how the next 50 minutes will unfold — and trust myself to deal with it.

Most importantly, it gave me confidence.

At the beginning of the summer, I had CELTA and very little professional teaching experience.

By the end, I had taught children, teenagers and adults at different levels. I had worked in different centres, with different equipment, different managers and constantly changing groups of students.

I had been observed. I had written reports. I had assessed students. I had dealt with technology failures, classroom-management problems and lessons that simply didn’t work.

I had also survived one of the hottest summers imaginable, teaching in classrooms full of fans, sweaty teachers and equally hot and exhausted students.

And yes, I was quite glad when it was over.

Would I do summer school again?

Actually, yes.

Next time, however, I would know what I was walking into.

And I might even volunteer for the Family Centre again.

Not quite a blank page anymore

Since finishing summer school, I have had time to reflect on what comes next.

I prepared for two interviews with year-round language schools, gathering the enormous collection of qualifications, certificates, safeguarding documents and employment history that seems to come with working in education.

During those interviews, I found myself trying to explain how CELTA and my summer-school experience fit together.

I told them that I still saw myself as a blank page.

I wanted to focus on teaching.

I welcomed training.

I wanted to work within a syllabus, understand assessment and progression, and teach students for long enough to build relationships with them and see their English develop.

But perhaps I’m not quite a blank page anymore.

There are already a few things written on it.

Eight weeks of classrooms.

Students of various ages from all over the world.

Lessons that worked.

Lessons that absolutely didn’t.

Feedback.

Mistakes.

Kahoots.

Baamboozles.

Crosswords.

Broken technology.

A lot of lesson planning.

And considerably more confidence than I had when the summer began.

I’m now looking forward to the next stage: teaching within a year-round language school and discovering another side of the profession.

I still have a lot to learn.

That’s exactly what I’m looking forward to.

Summer school didn’t teach me everything about teaching English.

What it gave me was the confidence to know that I can walk into a classroom and teach them anything. Full stop.

CELTA taught me the strokes.

Summer school threw me into the deep end and taught me that I could stay afloat.

Now I’m ready to work on my technique.