Techo Teacher

I am a CELTA qualified English teacher, with experience teacher all ages and english levels from all around the world, both online and in person. I've been teaching English in S.Korea and, currently, in Japan for a number of years, working across multiple year groups simultaneously — from junior high students taking their first steps in English to advanced learners preparing for professional qualifications. My timetable has always been complex: different classes on different days, double periods, fortnightly schedules, visiting support staff, and exam seasons that shift everything. That complexity is what pushed me to build my own planning tools rather than rely on paper planners or generic spreadsheets that never quite fit. Every resource I put upIi actively use myself and so comes directly out of that experience. Please do comment if you think of a way to improve them.

I believe in giving students genuine reasons to use English, not just exercises that simulate it. Students need to learn the natural way, developing their brain to use the language how we all acquire our first, and so jumping from translation to functional use. My lessons tend to combine structured input with meaningful output — whether that's debate, conversation tasks, exam preparation, or extended reading. I use game-based learning where it adds real engagement rather than just entertainment, and I think a lot about pacing: how a unit fits together over weeks, not just what happens in a single lesson. That long-view thinking is why curriculum planning matters to me, and why I put so much effort into building tools that make it easier for other teachers to think the same way.

The moments that stick with me aren't awards, though those are nice, too, but they're the students who started the year convinced they couldn't speak English and finished it presenting a debate argument in front of their class, or the student who emailed months after leaving to say they'd passed an exam they'd been working toward for years. Teaching in a second language is a long game. Watching a student's confidence grow over a full school year, lesson by lesson, is the thing that keeps me building better tools and better lessons. My absolute best feeling, was when one of my recent senior students coming to me asking for personal tutelage before going to university to become an English teacher. I built a full custom course specifically for her to build up her English even more, and to start engraining teaching practices. On graduation she wrote me a letter saying how grateful she was for my efforts...

I am a science student at heart. I studied Geology in the UK. I decided i wanted to teach, but also wanted to explore a little first (all my teachers told me to do something different before teaching, get experience.) I moved to S.Korea on a whim and became an English teacher in a hagwon. Then I moved to Japan, and am currently developing and delivery my own custom advanced English curriculum. I may upload the units of my textbook here, too. The more time I spent abroad as well as studying education I developed a strong interest in how language is actually acquired rather than just taught, and that shapes everything from how I sequence lessons to how I build assessments. I've continued learning professionally through classroom experience, curriculum development work, and, more recently, building educational software and digital tools alongside my teaching, which my students thoroughly enjoyed...in hindsight I should have introduced them at the end of the lesson not the beginning. I find the overlap between technology and pedagogy genuinely interesting, and most of what I make for TPT sits right at that intersection.

Outside the classroom I'm the usual suspect: gaming, technology, culture. I study Japanese myself, so I understand what it feels like to be on the other side of a lesson. I have been focused on game-based learning design, and building systems that run quietly in the background so teachers can focus on teaching. I have also developed an app that I use in parallel with my classes to give my students better focused revision. The teacher tools in this store are the ones that proved useful enough to be worth sharing, or at least not so specific only I would use them. If something I've made saves another teacher an hour a week but keeps their quality the same, that's exactly what it's here for.