Sustainable Teaching Workshops | Autumn 2026 

Teaching is good work.
It can give us meaning, connection, intellectual stimulation, money (also important 😄), and that wonderful feeling when you see a student finally make progress with something they've been struggling with.  I want us to be able to keep doing it.  

This autumn, I'm running four small, practical workshops designed to help you build a teaching life that works for you -- not just in the enthusiastic first weeks of September, but in November, December and beyond.  

These aren't really information-delivery workshops.  Yes, I'll bring my experience and knowledge of teacher wellbeing, burnout, teacher development and sustainable working practices. I'll introduce ideas and frameworks where they're useful.  But I don't want you to spend 90 minutes listening to me talk and leave with twelve pages of notes and seventeen more things you apparently ought to be doing.  

The important work will be thinking together.  You'll look at your actual teaching life, talk things through with other teachers, hear how other people handle similar problems, make decisions, experiment with solutions, and leave with something concrete that makes sense for your circumstances.  

I think this matters particularly in this day and age.
We have an extraordinary amount of information available to us. We can read, watch, listen, Google and ask AI about almost anything.  But thinking alone can get... lonely. And narrow.  Sometimes we need another human being to say, "Oh GOD, yes, I do that too." At other times we need someone else's question to make us see our own situation differently. And sometimes -- we just need to think in the company of other people.  

So that's what these workshops are for too: a little space to think about your work with other teachers who care about doing it well, and about having a life outside it.  

Each workshop is 90 minutes, online and deliberately small.

Want to know more? Here’s what we’ll actually work on.

September: Start as you mean to go on

September is full of possibility. New students! New classes! New projects! New routines!
THIS is the year you're going to keep immaculate lesson records, exercise four times a week, prepare every lesson three days in advance and finally organise Google Drive!

And then December You would quite like a word. Start as you mean to go on is about setting up the academic year with the person who'll later have to live it in mind.

This workshop might be for you if...

You get September overenthusiasm 
You say yes to new students, classes, projects and CPD. You introduce five new routines. You have energy now, so everything seems completely manageable. 
And then somehow you're still responsible for all of it in November. 

Your work doesn't have clear edges
You plan until a lesson feels "good enough" -- without having a particularly clear definition of what good enough means. A student messages; you respond. An email arrives; you answer it. You have 30 minutes between classes; instead of taking a break, you squeeze in a little admin. Work expands into whatever space is available. 

Your timetable looks manageable on paper... but isn't
You regularly have back-to-back lessons, five-minute breaks, early mornings and late evenings, and work scattered across six or seven days. 
This can be particularly difficult for freelancers: a 60-minute lesson looks like one hour in your calendar, but it isn't really one hour, is it? There's planning, student communication, homework, marking, admin, and following up afterwards. 
A 60-minute lesson is not necessarily 60 minutes of work. 

Money or job insecurity makes you say yes when you want to say no 
Maybe you accept every new client because you don't know when the next one will appear. Or maybe you take on another class because you need the income. Perhaps your manager asks whether you could just take responsibility for this little extra thing and saying no feels risky. 
Those are real pressures. "Just set boundaries!" isn't a particularly useful response when money and employment are involved. But we can look honestly at what those pressures are making you do, and whether there are places where you have more room to manoeuvre than it currently feels like you do. 

Teaching gets scheduled. Your life gets the leftovers
Lessons go in the calendar first. And then sleep, exercise, cooking, friends, family, hobbies, sitting on the sofa doing absolutely nothing, and the rest of your existence as a human being with a finite lifespan somehow have to fit around them. 
Except those things aren't distractions from teaching. They're part of what makes teaching sustainable. They recharge your teaching batteries just as, when the balance is right, teaching can recharge some of your batteries for life. 

What we'll do 
During the workshop, you'll look at the teaching term you're actually creating. We'll identify your predictable pressure points: where you tend to overextend yourself, what consumes more time or capacity than you account for, and which old habits you're carrying into another academic year just because that's how you've always done things. 
Then we'll look forward. What do you definitely want to keep? What could you let go? What needs protecting? What small systems, routines or boundaries could make the next few months easier to live with? 

You won't leave with my Perfect Sustainable Teacher Schedule™. 
You'll leave with decisions about your teaching life and a few experiments to try. 
The goal is to build a teaching term you can still keep at in December.

September workshop:  

Start as you mean to go on 

Build a teaching term you can still sustain in December.  

24 September 2026

10am CEST | 4pm CEST  

34€

October: Get it out of your head  

Teaching requires us to keep track of an extraordinary number of tiny things.  
You need to send that worksheet to Maria. 
Check whether Tomas handed in his homework. 
Reply to that parent. 
Find something for Thursday's lesson. 
Remember that one student is away next week. 
Follow up on the thing you promised someone three days ago.  

None of these things is enormous -- it's just that there are SO MANY OF THEM! 

Get it out of your head is about reducing the amount of your teaching life that depends on your brain remembering, tracking and repeatedly deciding things.  This workshop might be for you if...  

Your brain is your main organisational system  
You regularly think, "Oh God, I need to remember to..."  And then you keep thinking about it because somewhere in your brain you know that if you stop thinking about it, there's a decent chance it will disappear forever.  Your brain is wonderful. It is not, however, a particularly reliable to-do list.  

Your teaching life exists in seventeen different places  
Your calendar knows one thing and WhatsApp knows another.  There's something important in your email, a notebook beside your laptop, a Post-it somewhere, Google Drive, your school's LMS, screenshots on your phone and approximately 38 browser tabs you can't close because you might need one of them.  
You have systems. You may actually have many systems.  The problem is that none of them quite knows what the others are doing.

You keep making the same decisions  
What do I do when a student cancels?  
Where should I save this resource?  
When do I answer messages?  
How much preparation does this lesson need?  
What should I do with this piece of homework?  

We tend to think of workload in terms of tasks, but deciding is work too.  And if you're making the same small decisions over and over again, that's mental energy you don't necessarily need to be spending.  

You have too many open loops  
Something needs marking, someone needs an answer, a lesson is half-planned, tere's something you need to research, you still haven't quite decided what to do about that student.  
None of it is happening right now, but all of it is somehow still... there.  This is the kind of work that can follow you onto the sofa, into the shower and occasionally into bed. It's not that you're actively working, it's more like your brain hasn't been given permission to put it down. 

You've tried getting organised and accidentally created another job  
Maybe you've made the beautiful Notion dashboard (I love Notion <3), bught the planner, ceated the elaborate colour-coding system,  set up seventeen folders -- and a tracker and a weekly review.  And now apparently you have to maintain those too.  No thank you. 😄  
The point of a system is to make your life require less effort, not to become another needy little creature you have to feed.  

What we'll do 
We'll start by looking at what you're actually carrying around in your head.  What are you remembering? Tracking? Repeatedly deciding? Worrying you'll forget?  Then we'll ask a much more useful question:  Which of these things actually needs your brain?  Some things can be externalised. Some can become routines. Some decisions can be made once instead of forty times. Some things can be simplified.  And some things, perhaps, don't need doing at all.  

You'll leave with a small number of practical changes designed around your teaching life -- not my Perfect Productivity System™.  
The goal is to make your brain responsible for fewer things. 

October workshop:  

Get it out of your head  

Reduce the mental load of teaching.  

27 October 2026

10am CET | 4pm CET  

34€

November: Teaching alone without getting stuck  

When I worked face-to-face with other teachers, professional development happened almost accidentally -- it was great.  You'd talk after a lesson. Someone would tell you about something they'd tried. You'd complain about something that wasn't working. Someone would say, "Oh! Have you tried this?"  You'd steal each other's ideas. 😄  

And you'd grow.  

For many teachers -- particularly freelancers and people who teach online -- a lot of that has disappeared.  But you can also work in a busy school surrounded by teachers every day and still feel professionally alone.  

Teaching alone without getting stuck is about creating the professional connection and development that doesn't necessarily happen automatically any more.  

This workshop might be for you if...  

You don't really have anyone to think about teaching with  
Something strange happened in class, or you're struggling with a student, or you've got an idea you're excited about, or you're questioning something you've always done.  And there isn't really a teacher you naturally message and say, "Can I talk this through with you?"  
Quite often what we're missing isn't advice per se.  It's more like we want someone to think with.  

Your teaching works but you're getting a little stale  
Your students seem happy. Lessons are fine. Nothing is dramatically wrong.  But you've noticed yourself reaching for the same activities, the same approaches and the same solutions.  Without other teachers around us, it's surprisingly easy for our professional worlds to become smaller.  

You're consuming lots of CPD without feeling as though you're developing  
Articles.  Podcasts.  Webinars.  Books.  Newsletters.  Courses.  Saved LinkedIn posts you'll absolutely go back and read one day!!
Nowadays, there is more professional-development content available than any of us could consume in several lifetimes, but you're starting to see how consuming information and developing as a teacher aren't exactly the same thing.  

You have colleagues, but not necessarily community  
Being surrounded by people doesn't automatically mean you feel supported by them.  For example, you might not feel comfortable admitting that something isn't working or there isn't much time to even talk properly.  Maybe your staffroom conversations are friendly but never really get into teaching.  Colleagues are wonderful.  But what we sometimes need is a place where it's safe to think out loud.  

AI has become incredibly useful -- and you still miss people  
We can now ask AI to brainstorm activities, help us plan, suggest solutions, discuss ideas and respond whenever we want.  That's extraordinary.  And it still might not be enough.  You may have noticed that the more time you spend working and thinking alone --even with an extremely responsive AI companion -- the more you crave actual people.  My favorite: someone genuinely laughing at your joke. Some of you might miss someone disagreeing with you.  And I think we all love someone saying, "Oh GOD, yes. Me too." The strange, unpredictable, embodied business of being with other humans.  

What we'll do 
We'll look at what professional connection you actually have now, and what you might be missing.  We'll think about the difference between more CPD and professional development that genuinely changes something for you.  You'll identify the people, conversations, communities or practices that could help you keep growing without turning CPD into another obligation.  
And we'll practise some of it simply by being there.  
You'll spend 90 minutes thinking about teaching with other teachers: sharing experiences, hearing different approaches, asking questions and seeing what someone else's perspective does to your own.  
You won't exactly leave with a prescribed list of twelve communities to join and seven podcasts to listen to -- although suggestions are welcome!
Hopefully, you'll leave with a clearer idea of:  Who do I want to think about teaching with and how can I make that part of my working life?

November workshop:  

Teaching alone without getting stuck  

Connection, professional growth and sustainable CPD.  

25 November 2026

11am CET | 4pm CET

34€

December: Look back, build forward

By December, we're very good at knowing what we haven't done: all the things we meant to organise,  the boundary we didn't maintain again, the student situation we really really wish we'd handled differently, the planning system that lasted approximately eleven days (until it overwhelmed you and you ignored it until you forgot about it), the pile of marking staring at us accusingly from somewhere - the list could go on.

We're often much less good at noticing everything that did work.  
So before we make grand plans for January, we're going to stop and count your wins.  

Look back, build forward is about using what actually happened this term -- not what you hoped would happen -- to build the next part of your teaching year.  

This workshop might be for you if...  

You reach the end of a term remembering mainly what went wrong  
Teaching moves fast: you solve one problem and immediately meet the next one. A difficult lesson can occupy your brain for three days; the fourteen perfectly decent lessons around it barely register.  By December, you can end up with a strangely distorted picture of your own term.  
We're going to correct that.  

You rarely notice how much you've actually changed  
You're slowly realizing that you're handling something more easily now. Maybe a boundary that was difficult in September has become normal, or you've become better at planning, communicating, teaching a particular level, dealing with difficult moments or, simply recognising when good enough is good enough.
If you never stop to notice those changes, you don't get to learn from them or celebrate them.  

January tends to recreate September  
New term!  Fresh start!  Surely THIS TIME you'll answer messages less, plan earlier, stop working on Sundays and finally become the organised person you've always suspected is hiding somewhere inside you. Except if nothing around the intention changes, January gradually turns back into October.  
The problem is that we don't just need new intentions, we also need to understand the conditions that make them possible.  

Your resolutions are lovely and incredibly vague  
"I'll work less."  "I'll be more organised."  "I'll protect my time."  "I'll do more CPD."  Wonderful.  What does that mean at 6.15 on a Wednesday when a student messages you and you still have tomorrow's lesson to prepare?  
We'll turn vague intentions into things you can actually see yourself doing.  

You focus so much on improvement that you accidentally throw away what's working  
You're finding that not everything needs fixing!  Perhaps you've found a planning routine that genuinely helps. A colleague you now talk to regularly. A boundary that worked. A class you finally stopped over-preparing for. A way of organising your week that gives you room to breathe. 
Those things deserve just as much attention as the problems.  Sustainability isn't only about fixing what's wrong. It's also about protecting what's already right.  

What we'll do  
We'll work through four stages:  Notice. Celebrate. Choose. Systematise.  
First, we'll look honestly at the term you've just lived.  What worked?  What didn't?  What changed?  What are you proud of?  What surprised you?  
Then we'll look forward.  What do you want to keep? What do you want to change? And, crucially:  What would need to be true for that change to actually happen?  
Instead of creating a beautiful list of resolutions that Future You will have forgotten by January 12th, we'll build a few realistic intentions into the systems and conditions of your actual teaching life.  
You'll leave this workshop knowing what you want to carry forward, and having made it a little easier for yourself to actually do it.

December workshop:

Look back, build forward

Count your wins and build the next term from what you've learned.  

22 December 2026

11am CET | 4pm CET  

34€