About the association
An association of people who teach English in monastic classrooms
The TEAMS exists because good English teaching in monastic schools is happening already, in scattered classrooms, and almost none of it is written down where the next teacher can find it.
What we are for
Monastic schools teach children who would otherwise not be in a classroom at all. English is one of the subjects that most changes what those children can go on to do, and it is also one of the hardest to teach well: classes are large, materials are scarce, and many of the people teaching it were trained for something else and are covering English alongside their own subject.
The association was formed to do one narrow thing properly. We collect what works in these classrooms, write it up clearly, and give it back to every teacher who wants it. Not a curriculum imported from elsewhere, and not advice from people who have never stood in front of sixty pupils with eleven textbooks between them.
Members are teachers in monastic schools, teacher trainers, volunteers and former students. Membership is free and always will be. It exists so that people working in the same conditions can find each other, and so that we know who to ask when we do not know something.
How we work
Written for the room, not the syllabus
Every resource assumes a large class, few books and no photocopier, because that is what our members have. If a lesson plan cannot be run with a blackboard and chalk, it is not finished.
Made with teachers, not for them
Materials start as something a member is already doing that works. We write it up, try it in other classrooms, and publish it once it has survived a school that is not the one it came from.
Free, and free to copy
Nothing here is behind a payment or an account. Print it, photocopy it, translate it, put your own school name on it. If it reaches a classroom, it has done its job.
Our accessibility commitment
A teaching resource that some teachers cannot read is not a resource. We hold this site to WCAG 2.1 level AA, and we treat a failure against it as a fault to fix rather than a nice thing to get to later.
- Readable at any size
- Body text starts at 16 pixels and the layout holds together when you zoom to 200 percent or set a larger default in your browser.
- Usable from the keyboard
- Every link, button, filter and form field can be reached and operated with the keyboard alone, and the focus outline is always visible.
- Contrast that survives sunlight
- Text and interface colours meet or exceed the AA contrast ratio, which matters as much for a phone screen in a bright courtyard as it does for low vision.
- Light enough to load
- No video, no heavy photographs and no third-party scripts. Access is also a question of how much data a page costs the person opening it.
If something here is difficult or impossible for you to use, please tell us and describe what happened. We treat these reports as the highest priority work we have.
A note on data and safety
Some of our members teach in circumstances where being identifiable carries a real cost. We would rather hold less information than have to protect more of it.
We collect only what you type into a form
Reading and downloading needs no account. The only personal information we hold is what you enter in the contact or membership form, and you choose how much that is.
Nothing is sold, shared or handed on
Member details are used to answer you and to run the association. They are not published, not shared with other organisations and not used for anything you did not write to us about.
No advertising trackers on this site
There are no advertising or social media trackers here, and no content is loaded from another company that could watch you read. Pages you save for offline use stay on your own device.
You can ask us to delete what we hold
Write to hello@theteams.org from the address you used, ask us to remove your record, and we will do it and confirm that it is done.
