How the College teaches.
Every lesson in the programme is planned before it is taught, and every planned lesson carries a record of what a teacher will need at each point in it. This page describes the method, the record, and the part of the record that is empty.
Four commitments that shape every lesson.
Not a philosophy of language teaching in the abstract — these are the four decisions that visibly determine what a AIPC lesson looks like.
Taught in English, from Level I
Including at A1, where it is done through restricted language, repetition, visual support and a teacher who slows down instead of translating. Teaching a language through the language is a method, and Level I was written on that assumption rather than adapted to it afterwards.
The assessment is written first
Each assessment exists before the teaching it tests, so that the lesson is built toward a standard rather than the standard assembled afterwards from whatever was taught.
Speaking is assessed by speaking
Recorded, marked by a person, with feedback written against a named pronunciation target. There is no automated pronunciation score, and none is claimed.
Every lesson plans for the learner who does not follow
A second explanation, the mistakes that point provokes, and what causes them, are written into the plan in advance — not improvised when someone looks lost.
What is written down.
The programme is not a syllabus with lesson titles. It is 60 modules, 414 planned items, and a teaching support record of 530 authored entries across 17 fields.
The authored support layer is complete for Level I; three further record fields hold no entries yet and are listed as not yet evidenced. The figures above are what exists, not what is planned.
Nothing here has been observed in a classroom.
This is the most important sentence in the section, so it is not in a footnote.
The College has taught no one
Every entry in the support record declares where its knowledge came from, and one of the four possible sources is a real classroom. That column stands at zero and will stand at zero until a teacher teaches a cohort and writes down what happened.
So that it cannot be quietly filled by something else
The easy version of this record would mark everything simply "our teaching experience". Keeping observation separate means the College can say precisely which of its claims a first term would confirm, correct or overturn — and cannot pass off design for evidence.
What every lesson carries.
A named prerequisite
What the learner must already hold for this lesson to work. Stating it makes the sequence checkable: a lesson whose prerequisite is not taught anywhere earlier is a defect, and it can be found automatically rather than discovered by a confused class.
Stages with declared minutes
Each stage has a purpose and a duration. The durations sum to the lesson, and the sum is checked. A lesson plan whose stages do not add up is a plan nobody has actually run through.
A named outcome and its assessment
What the learner can now do, and the assessment that would show it. Both are written before the lesson is delivered, which is the only order in which the lesson can be built toward the standard.
The learner who does not follow the first explanation.
Most lesson plans describe the successful path. These describe the unsuccessful one too, in advance, because that is where teaching actually happens.
A second explanation
A different route to the same point, for the learner the first route did not reach. Improvising this at the moment of confusion is what experienced teachers do; writing it down is what lets a less experienced teacher do it too.
The mistakes this point provokes
Named specifically, for this lesson, rather than as general advice. A mistake you were expecting is a teaching opportunity; the same mistake unexpected is an interruption.
Why those mistakes happen
The cause, not just the symptom — interference from a first language, an over-applied rule, an arbitrary feature of English that simply has to be learned. A teacher who knows the cause can address it; one who only knows the error can only correct it.
What to do with the learner who finishes early
An extension that is genuinely harder rather than merely longer. Otherwise the strongest learner in the room spends the lesson waiting.
The plan is verified against itself.
A programme this size cannot be kept consistent by care alone. Several properties are checked automatically and fail the build when broken.
Every prerequisite is taught earlier
A lesson that depends on something the programme never teaches, or teaches later, is a defect that no amount of proofreading reliably finds.
Stage minutes sum to the lesson
Checked arithmetically. It is the cheapest possible signal that a plan has been thought through rather than assembled.
Every module carries its assessments
Quiz, assignment and rubric, to one published policy, across all 60 modules. Consistency at that scale is enforced or it does not exist.
Not all teaching knowledge is the same kind of thing.
Blurring these is how a designed judgement comes to be cited as evidence. Each entry in the record is marked with exactly one.
359 entries
Read off the programme itself: the prerequisite a lesson names, the minutes its stages declare, the confusion its own self-check was written to trap. Not an opinion — a fact about the curriculum, and checkable against it.
19 entries
Attested in the international teaching of English and not particular to this College — that the third-person -s is among the most persistent errors for learners of every first language, that countability in English is arbitrary and must be memorised. Synthesis, and marked as synthesis.
152 entries
An authored judgement by the people who wrote the curriculum: how else to explain this, which analogy holds, how to stretch a learner who has finished early. Defensible, and improvable by anyone who teaches it and finds better.
0 entries
What actually happened in a room with real learners. This is empty, and it is empty because the College has taught nobody. It is not filled with the other three.
It began with three states and most of it empty, on the reasoning that a teacher’s knowledge comes from teaching and this College has taught no one. That was right about one kind of knowledge and wrong about three others — and the conflation left the Teacher’s Companion unwritable for a reason that did not actually apply to most of what it would contain.
17 of them, in two groups.
3 can be read from the curriculum itself. 14 cannot, and are authored or synthesised — which is why each one carries its source alongside it.
| Field | Source |
|---|---|
| Prerequisite concepts | Read from the curriculum |
| Time usually required | Read from the curriculum |
| Next concepts unlocked | Read from the curriculum |
| Most common learner mistakes | Authored or synthesised, with its source recorded |
| Why learners make those mistakes | Authored or synthesised, with its source recorded |
| Typical misconceptions | Authored or synthesised, with its source recorded |
| Teacher intervention | Authored or synthesised, with its source recorded |
| Alternative explanation | Authored or synthesised, with its source recorded |
| Faster explanation | Authored or synthesised, with its source recorded |
| Visual explanation | Authored or synthesised, with its source recorded |
| Real-world analogy | Authored or synthesised, with its source recorded |
| Extension challenge | Authored or synthesised, with its source recorded |
| Common assessment errors | Authored or synthesised, with its source recorded |
| How to remediate | Authored or synthesised, with its source recorded |
| How to differentiate for weaker learners | Authored or synthesised, with its source recorded |
| How to stretch stronger learners | Authored or synthesised, with its source recorded |
| Concepts students confuse with this lesson | Authored or synthesised, with its source recorded |
Complete for Level I, and honest about the rest.
19 teaching lessons, supported in depth
The eight authored support fields are written for every Level I teaching lesson — the level a beginner meets first and the level where a teacher has least room to improvise. Three of the seventeen record fields hold no entries yet, and the record lists them as not yet evidenced rather than hiding them.
Partially written
The fields readable from the curriculum are populated across the programme; the authored fields are being written level by level. What exists is what is published; nothing is projected.
Openly countable
530 authored entries today. The figure moves as the work proceeds and is generated from the record rather than typed into this page.
What it contains.
All 19 teaching lessons of Level I
Each with its stages and their declared minutes in the running head, so a teacher can see the shape of the lesson without turning back to the plan.
Marked with its provenance
DERIVED, ESTABLISHED or DESIGNED, printed on the panel itself rather than explained once in a preface. A teacher disagreeing with a panel can see immediately whether they are disagreeing with the curriculum, with the field, or with the authors.
OBSERVED
The fourth mark does not appear anywhere in the book, and the front matter says why. A companion that quietly dropped the category would be claiming a kind of authority it does not have.
Generated from the record, not written alongside it.
The book cannot disagree with the curriculum
It is composed directly from the same record the platform teaches from. A companion maintained by hand drifts from the programme within one revision, and every teacher who trusts it then teaches something the College no longer says.
The figures in the front matter are measured
The number of panels of each kind is counted from the pages as composed, not from the database that fed them — because some entries render in a running head rather than as a panel, and a front matter that said otherwise would be wrong in a way nobody would ever check.
How to obtain a copy.
The Companion is a typeset volume produced by AIPC Press, and the whole of it is here: the Teacher’s Companion, Level I — 51 pages, 0.7 MB, PDF. No account, no request, no form.
One thing to know before you open it: every volume the College has produced is currently unreviewed by anyone who did not write it. If you teach and are willing to say where the book is wrong, that is the most useful thing anyone can do with it, and info@worldwencollege.co.uk reaches the editors who would have to act on it.
Stated at the top, not at the bottom.
No lesson has been observed. No continuing professional development has been recorded for anyone — the record that would hold it contains 0 entries. No teacher has taught a AIPC cohort, because there has been no cohort. Any page describing teacher development at this College as a running programme would be describing something that does not exist.
One term of teaching is worth more than another year of writing.
This is the College’s own assessment of where it stands, and it is uncomfortable enough to be worth publishing.
A complete, inspectable programme
60 modules, 414 planned items, every assessment written with published criteria, and 530 entries of teaching support. All of it can be examined by anyone.
Any of the fourth kind of knowledge
What a real class does with a lesson, where the plan breaks, which explanation works with which learner, how long a stage actually takes. None of it can be reasoned out. It can only be observed.
The single most valuable appointment is a practising teacher
One teacher, one cohort, one term generates evidence the College cannot obtain any other way — and would immediately improve material that is currently designed rather than tested. It is named as a priority on Careers.
What the first term will be written into.
A field on every support entry
When a lesson is observed, what was learned is recorded against the specific entry it revises, marked as observed rather than designed. The revision is visible as a revision instead of replacing the original silently.
Per member of staff
A record of continuing professional development exists per person and stands empty. It will be filled by what is actually undertaken, not by what is intended.
Where marking and feedback happen
Built and tested, and it has marked nothing, because there is nothing to mark yet.
When observation begins, what it overturns will be published as an overturning. A record in which the designed judgement always turns out to have been right is a record nobody is actually checking.