Or: what to actually check before you pay for a teacher
Anyone can put ‘English teacher’ on a profile. The online market makes this worse, not better: no shared classroom, no colleague down the corridor who’d notice if someone was winging it, just a webcam and a price per hour. If you’re C1+ and serious about closing the last gap to fluency, it’s worth knowing what actually separates a good teacher from someone reading off a script.
A few things worth checking before you commit:
The certificate should be real and specific. CELTA and Trinity CertTESOL are the two that mean something, both require assessed teaching practice with real students, not just a multiple-choice exam. Ask for the certificate number and issuing body. Mine is a CertTESOL from Trinity College London, 2013, if you want to check what a real answer to that question looks like.
Experience should match your level, not just accumulate. Ten years teaching beginners doesn’t prepare someone to work with a C1 executive drafting a board proposal. Ask specifically about their experience with students at your level, doing what you need: exam prep, academic writing, business communication, whatever it is.
Native speaker status matters less than people assume. It’s a nice-to-have for pronunciation and idiom, not a substitute for actually knowing how to teach. A C2-proficient non-native speaker with real pedagogical training will get you further than a native speaker with neither.
The lesson should be mostly you talking, not them. At C1+, real progress comes from communicative and task-based work: role-plays, negotiations, discussion, actually doing something in English rather than being lectured about it. If a trial lesson is 80% teacher monologue, that’s a teacher who hasn’t updated their method since 2005.
Feedback should be specific, not just ‘good job’. At this level, the errors that matter are the recurring, subtle ones: collocation, register, the difference between technically correct and actually natural. A teacher who can name your specific patterns is worth more than one who just corrects each sentence as it comes.
If a trial lesson leaves you unable to answer ‘what did they actually change about how I speak’, that’s usually the answer.