Oh, The Places You’ll Go With Your TEFL Certification: Costa Rica!
Our TEFL certification in Costa Rica participant, Christine Stuart, is finishing up her 4-week certification course this Friday, and we wanted to check-in to see how her time has been! Christine stayed with a host family during her course and now plans to put her new certification to good use and get a job as close to the beach as possible.
“Costa Rica is amazing!”
My host family is incredibly sweet and I was placed with others in the course. The TEFL course itself is awesome. Our last day is Friday and I’m really grateful to have found this course. The instructors Luke and Melanie are excellent teachers with a ton of experience. They gave us 100+ activities on a flash drive, plus a ton of grammar lessons for our classes. The course is a reasonable amount of work and is preparing us well. The student teaching is SO helpful. By the end of the course, we’ll have planned and taught 6 lessons to local ESL students. I feel much more prepared to teach – they’re both really committed to making us great teachers.
What did you find most beneficial about the in-person Costa Rica course?
Student teaching in-person was invaluable. Teaching ESL sounds easy when you read about it and see others teaching, but actually doing it yourself is really difficult. Being aware of the words you’re using, how much you’re talking, and how engaged your students are is really, really difficult. Student teaching with real ESL students and receiving real time feedback from the instructors was amazing. I learned so much about teaching in such a short time!
Did you have any free time while you were taking the course?
The teachers gave us time to work on our assignments in-class so we could get feedback from the instructors, we actually had a lot of time leftover on the weekends. If you don’t mind doing your homework after class during the week, you can have your weekends off to travel! Otherwise, you should plan on staying in at least one day each weekend to do homework. They give you a 3 day weekend the first week, so take advantage of it!
What was your favorite moment outside of class?
A weekend trip to Puerto Viejo on the Caribbean coast. I stayed in a hostel with other TEFL students and we biked the coast, played on the beach, and ate local food. We danced all night to reggae and met new friends. It was amazing – so beautiful!
After she has had her fill of the pura vida, Christine’s next step is to head off to South Korea with Greenheart Travel next fall!
Interested in getting certified in Costa Rica? Check out our upcoming start dates!
