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Some details about Teaching in Poland [51]
I feel the same about the CELTA course. The interpersonal element is far more important in teaching. I've taught a range of styles and the CELTA was just an expensive foot-in-the-door type qualification.
As for Callan, I agree up until the 5th stage. Stages 5 and 6 are useful from a grammatical perspective and the student should gain from successful completion of those stages. The first 4 stages are all about rythm.
The training is piecemeal oftentimes, Davey. I took part in forming a realistic timetable, allocating more time to things which teachers should see as more of a priority. The worst was the OJT in Japan, 3 days of dumb foreigners teaching me how to teach the NOVA method. Truth be told, teaching was just a means to an end there. I picked up the tenses and learned to be comfortable in front of groups (VOICE/convo classes). The maximum NOVA group was only 4 people.
Contrasting that experience with Poland, my Callan training back in Sep 2004 was actually fairly thorough. The sessions were led by an Irishman and an American woman, both FB friends of mine to this day. They covered all the bases very well.
Observations are just a relatively pointless formality. Rather ironically, I wasn't happy about their sporadic nature. If you want to get close to forming a true picture of a teacher, you need to observe more than once in a while. Otherwise, false impressions are created.
