With this partially online master's degree program, develop the teaching skills and professional expertise needed to advance your career in English language education without leaving your current job.
For programs beginning in 2025
34
Part-Time Hybrid
January 31, rolling thereafter until April 1
November 1, no rolling admission
2 Years
United States
Education & Social Change
Drawing on more than 50 years of visionary experiential learning, this award-winning in-person and online master’s degree is recognized by the US State Department as one of the top TESOL programs in the nation. Through brief yet intensive summer residencies and immersive online coursework, attain professional expertise teaching English to speakers of other languages to rapidly advance your career and change the landscape of language education.
Your program will begin with an online class that is designed to help you build your learning community, think deeply about teaching and learning, deepen active listening skills, and develop goals for your learning in the context of majors shifts in the field including multimodal literacies, translanguaging, and plurilingualism.
Over the summer, you will travel to SIT’s beautiful Vermont campus for a three-week residency where you will meet your faculty advisors, continue coursework, network with other students, and further develop a learning community with peers who work as teachers around the world.
For the remainder of the summer and into the following spring, you will continue your experiential online studies in close collaboration with your cohort, completing 10 to 15 hours of coursework a week.
Throughout your studies you will apply what you have learned directly to your teaching context. During this time, your SIT faculty mentor will make an in-person visit to your place of work to observe your teaching and engage you in a process of reflection on and learning from your practice.
During your second summer, you will return to SIT’s campus for more coursework, to reconvene with your cohort, and co-organize a language learning conference.
During the second year you will pursue a specialization of your choice – teacher training, plurilingual pedagogy, or teaching refugees and displaced persons – and you will complete an independent professional project.
Since its inception in 1969, the SIT master’s program in TESOL has prepared countless graduates for highly successful careers across the globe, teaching English to people of all backgrounds at every age level and producing dozens of fellows sent by the US State Department to embassies abroad.
Students who have graduated with this degree have worked in careers such as:
English as a Second Language teacher
Applied linguist
Teacher trainer
English, ESL, linguistics curriculum developer
University faculty, teacher education program
U.S. Department of State English Language Fellow
Education consultant
Textbook writer, editor or publisher
Language school founder and developer
Visit the SIT blog to read more about SIT Graduate Institute alumni careers.
Vermont is at the forefront of sustainability, education, and regeneration. New England is a haven for start-ups, transition towns, community-owned forests, artisanal food and beverage companies, sustainable farming, eco-architecture, green energy, and many environmental and social justice organizations. SIT’s beautiful southern Vermont campus offers woodland trails, hiking, running, and cycling, as well as a private library, study rooms with mountain views, and an entertainment space where students often gather at the end of the day to socialize. You will be a few miles from downtown Brattleboro, which offers an array of shops, restaurants, and eateries.
Please note that in order to take advantage of dynamic learning opportunities, program excursions may occasionally vary.
Upon successful completion of the program, students will be able to:
Our student learning outcomes describe the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and awareness that we find essential to developing and internalizing a habit of lifelong learning. A teacher who completes the MA in TESOL program must demonstrate an integration of and growth in six dimensions of a teaching self as described below. These six dimensions relate to their own learning and to their teaching practice and represent the six student learning outcomes for the program:
(Five of the “six selves” headings draw on Gardner, H. (2006). Five Minds for the Future. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.)
With SIT’s experiential learning, you will learn how to put theory into practice and theorize your practice. In addition to core courses, you will have the opportunity to choose a specialization, allowing you to build key skills that will help you meet your career goals. Our part-time, hybrid format allows you to complete most of your coursework for the master’s in TESOL online so you can stay in your job and apply your learning in your community. In this program you will further develop an approach to teaching informed by self-reflection on your own past and present learning and teaching experiences.
This two–year, 34–credit program combines online and limited residential coursework and reflective practice within your ongoing professional activities and concludes with a final Independent Professional Project. In the first year of the program, students will focus on understanding teaching and learning and developing a learning community and lifelong reflective practice. In the second year, students will focus on a specialization (plurilingual pedagogy, teaching refugees and displaced persons, or teaching training and education). This work is done in small seminars with faculty mentors and is designed to help students become part of a network in the field and develop a deeper understanding of how classroom learning connects with the students communities they serve and their own role as advocates. The seminars also provide a foundation for the final element of the program, the MA thesis. Coursework is listed below.
Specialization Advanced Seminar (3 credits, online)
During your second year of the program you will choose an area of specialization for further in-depth examination and investigation in a faculty mentored process.
Choose from one of the following:
The Independent Professional Project, or thesis, is the final component of this program. The project is meant to be both a significant personal achievement as well as a body of publishable research of value to others in the professional community.
Projects may take a variety of formats, allowing you to focus on a topic that will benefit you in your development as a language teacher:
Review past Independent Professional Projects completed by students in our MA in TESOL programs.
A cornerstone of SIT’s Master of Arts in TESOL is the teaching practicum, which you undertake in your place of work. This lets you apply learning from the classroom directly to real-world settings while getting hands-on, professional experience you can put to immediate use when you graduate.
During the year following your first residency, you will work closely with a faculty mentor to develop your skills and reflect on your new knowledge and awareness in your own classroom. You and your mentor will communicate regularly through phone calls, email, and reports to evaluate your teaching competencies, assess strengths and weaknesses, and determine areas for improvement and growth. Your mentor will visit your classroom – wherever in the world – to observe your teaching and provide feedback and support to enhance and enrich your impact in the classroom.
To get the most out of this practicum, your teaching load during the semester of your practicum visit should include at least 100 hours of teaching. You should be the primary teacher and the minimum class size should be five students. If these requirements cannot be met, you may speak with the program’s chair to see if other arrangements can be made. Such arrangements must be approved in advance by the chair.
During the practicum phase, you’ll remain engaged with faculty and other students and receive course credit for documenting the integration of your knowledge and skills while working in a professional context.
SIT’s Student Financial Services Office provides guidance on all aspects of funding your degree throughout the application process and during your degree program. Tuition costs vary by program and scholarships are available.
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