The JACT Latin Camp – as a trainee teacher

After completing the PGCE in Latin with Classics at Cambridge, I wanted to use part of my summer to extend my knowledge and skills set in preparation of my ECT year at Fettes College in Edinburgh. Attending the JACT Latin Camp turned out to be a very good decision for this purpose. With this article I intend to champion the course as an excellent CPD experience for both prospective and current Classics teachers.

Firstly, the lessons consolidate and increase subject knowledge very effectively: valuable and wide-ranging discussions emerged from our extensive reading sessions of the set texts, discussions which not only touched on the content of the texts themselves but also on the classical world more generally. Often we also discussed intertextuality and authors’ different styles and voices.

The result? In my experience, it did a lot for my self-confidence as a teacher: these sessions reminded me of all the things I already knew and also of the reasons why I love Classics. This self-confidence in my subject knowledge and enjoyment of the discussions in a friendly environment strongly reaffirmed my drive to teach and develop my practice as much as possible.

Secondly, the course is thorough and rigorous. This meant that student teachers got very well acquainted with the ‘bread and butter’ of Classics teaching in terms of textbooks and content: by the end of the week, we all felt confident in our knowledge of the CLC as a textbook. Equally important, if not more so, was our extensive study of the GCSE OCR and Eduqas and OCR A-Level exam content. We practised some of the analysis questions ourselves which gave us insight into how we might prepare our future students for these questions; in other words, it allowed us to imagine in more concrete terms what the pitfalls might be.

An up-to-date knowledge of the exam requirements has focused my purpose as a teacher and consequently has made lesson-planning and formulating tailored  learning objectives a lot easier. Plus, during my PGCE course there wasn’t always as much time to spend on delving into the particulars of the OCR and Eduqas exams; from an ECT’s perspective, I found this a particularly valuable aspect of the teacher course at Latin camp.

Thirdly, the course offers daily grammar clinics, which were very useful to see how grammar and language can be taught. We observed high-quality lessons by various tutors over the two weeks. The clinics provided us with many ideas about resources, about what words to use in order to demystify a complicated topic (eg. gerundival attraction), and about the range of ways to engage students in language lessons.

Because some clinics were aimed at beginners or GCSE students and others at more advanced students, we had the opportunity to observe different teaching practices, ranging from the delivery of fundamental grammar points to the more challenging constructions in Latin. In short, the grammar clinics gave me insight into delivering lessons that not only include students of all attainments but also challenge Gifted and Talented (G&T) students.

Finally, to see the tutor team at work was a valuable experience when it came to thinking about many other aspects of school life. The day trips to York and Hadrian’s Wall gave me a glimpse of what is required of staff in order to ensure a smooth running of preparations as well as the trip itself. The team spirit and good-humoured attitude of the entire tutor team demonstrated to me the value of collegiality in the workplace. Again, the tutors at Latin camp modelled how important it is to communicate and socialise with colleagues at school: especially when starting out as an ECT at a new school, it can be easy to feel alone and isolated at first. Establishing contact and familiarity with colleagues helps to dispel this feeling of isolation: rather, the idea that ‘we are in this together’ takes hold.

For this reason, the staff play at the end of camp was a very enjoyable and informative experience: the collegiate atmosphere amongst the staff was palpable on stage, and I also loved the fact that the staff modelled to both teacher students and language students (the majority of whom were teenagers) that it is okay and, quite frankly, healthy, to be self-deprecating. Indeed, the audience’s enthusiastic reception of the staff’s theatrics was a strong reminder that students appreciate teachers who remain true to themselves and not always take themselves too seriously.

I would thoroughly recommend the JACT Latin Camp to any aspiring Classics teachers. Not only do the lessons provide teacher students with invaluable guidance about textbooks, literature set texts and approaches to teaching literature and language, but the wider activities of camp demonstrate how fun it can be to work with both students and colleagues in a thriving school community.