Upcoming events

Check out the latest events on the Teacher Portal
Write your awesome label here.

Live lesson planning

Our monthly live event is designed to support you in your lesson planning.

Watch our latest 'Top tip for lesson planning' and see how this could benefit you. 

Then choose the time that works best for you and bring along questions, materials, ideas and experiments to share with colleagues and trainers. 

This is free to all members of the Teacher Portal. 

Insights from counselling to enhance your teaching

Lewis Richards
November 12th 2025, 4.30pm UK time

This webinar will look at a series of insights from the world of counselling that can be brought into teaching (and managing). It will take some theoretical and practical ideas from psychotherapy, and show how these can be used to enhance classroom practice and classroom management, to develop strategies for working with students on a 1-1 basis, and to be better able to understand and work with learners of a variety of backgrounds, learning styles and attachment patterns. These will be explored using a series of case studies taken from the presenter's own teaching experience, and the session will aim to provide a series of practical take-aways that can be used in everyday teaching practice and in relationships with colleagues.

Lewis Richards is Director of Studies and Head of Teacher Training at International House Portsmouth.  He has been teaching, training and managing in EFL for over 20 years, and has worked for IH in five countries.  He is a CELTA and DELTA trainer, and the author of two books on IELTS (IELTS Advantage Writing Skills and Build up to IELTS).   He holds a Diploma in Psychotherapeutic Counselling, and is a BACP-registered psychotherapist.

Mediation: A More authentic approach to language teaching

Adrian Webb
December 10th 2025, 4.30pm UK time

Mediation is one of four activities identified in the CEFR Companion Volume published in 2020 as being essential for expediting real life communication.

But what is meant by mediation and is it something that we can easily and effectively implement into our day-to-day planning and teaching?

This workshop will show how we can use mediation skills to help our learners approach language as an authentic whole rather than individual parts.

It will demonstrate how speaking, listening, reading and writing rarely occur independently but instead co-exist in meaningful communication.

I will argue that the best place to start is by interrogating the belief that language consists of four skills and two systems operating separately with grammar as the benevolent dictator.

My hope is that participants will leave with a better understanding of how mediation skills can facilitate a more authentic approach to achieving communicative competence with their learners.

Adrian has been working in the TEFL industry for almost 20 years as a teacher, teacher trainer and academic manager. He has worked in the UK, Malta and the MENA region for British Council, Stafford House and International House and is currently Director of Studies at Easy School of Languages in Valletta where he also leads the teacher training course Methodology for the Contemporary English Classroom.


Live session help

If you're having problems with our live events, don't worry, we've put together some advice to make sure you have the best experience possible. 

Let's talk about...

Each week we'll set a topic to discuss and have a very informal chat in three parts:
1. Question of the week
2. Let's talk about...(topic nominated by Teacher Portal)
3. Any questions about your classes, teaching, career advice, student management or just life in general. (Though we might not be able to answer the life questions, we'll give it a go.)

  Not sure what it'll be like? Take a sneak-peek inside