John is an experienced educator, writer, and editor with a diverse background and a passion for language, education, and culture. With more than 15 years of teaching experience, John has comprehensive expertise in various fields, including English language and literature instruction, creative and academic writing, critical thinking, and exam preparation, particularly for IELTS and IGCSE.

John has a BA in English Literature with Theatre from Sheffield University, UK, a Postgraduate Diploma in Journalism from Strathclyde University, Glasgow, and a Postgraduate Certificate of Education from Plymouth University. His career has combined teaching, journalism, and writing for a number of large publishing companies, schools and universities. He has been a newspaper columnist, academic copywriter, and editorial consultant alongside his teaching.

John has taught students of all age groups up to tertiary level, in a wide variety of cultural contexts. He worked at EF in Shanghai and Foshan, PRC, and was senior tutor at the Australian Centre for Education in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. He is a former AQA GCSE examiner in Citizenship in the UK and proficient in a range of languages including French, Portuguese, Thai, and Shan.

On becoming a teacher:

I became a teacher because it is the most direct way to have a positive and beneficial input into society. As such, it brings rewards few other professions can boast of. Teaching is about communicating concepts, ideas, and knowledge, and what I enjoy most is figuring out new ways of transmitting and communicating knowledge and ideas – something I have always done both as a teacher and as a writer.

Other interests that reflect on my personality as a teacher:

I believe that there is no end to learning, and that virtually every subject is interesting, so I enjoy discovering new things in a very wide variety of disciplines, from history to geology to aspects of the natural world around us.

A person I find inspirational and why:

Daniel Dennett, the American philosopher and writer. In his career he has never been afraid of asking the biggest, toughest questions, such as ‘What is consciousness?’

Top tip to younger self:

Take more risks!