How Lewis turned his teaching expertise into a successful teacher training programme
Meet Lewis Jaquest, founder of the Emergent Language Toolkit
Based in Hamburg, Lewis is an English teacher and teacher trainer who helps teachers develop confidence in using emergent language and other deep-end teaching approaches.
https://www.wordsmitheryelt.com
The challenge: turning expertise into a successful teacher training programme
Lewis knew he wanted to build a teacher training business alongside his teaching, but wasn’t sure how to turn his ideas into a commercially viable programme. He had a clear vision for the course he wanted to create, but needed help bringing all the pieces together, from the programme structure and delivery model to the marketing needed to attract the right participants.
The results:
Together, we clarified Lewis’s messaging, designed a scalable programme structure and developed a more strategic approach to his marketing, from LinkedIn and email to lead magnets and workshops.
The result is that the Emergent Language Toolkit is now in its fourth successful cohort, his marketing feels intentional rather than random, and he has a repeatable framework he can continue building on for years to come.
Rachael was instrumental in helping me get the course off the ground, basically putting together all the pieces I had circulating in my brain
My name’s Lewis Jaquest. I’m based in Hamburg in Germany. I’ve been teaching for nearly 20 years, and I’ve been a teacher trainer for the last year and a half now. I’m particularly interested in working with deep-end approaches, particularly things like emergent language, Dogme, task-based learning, and all of these things led to me, starting my own teacher training course, which is called the Emergent Language Toolkit, in 2025.
And it’s now going into its fourth iteration, and Rachael was instrumental in helping me to get that course off the ground, basically putting lots of the pieces together that I had circulating in my brain.
What was your situation before doing Designed to Flourish?
Before I started working with Rachael, I’d been posting quite regularly on LinkedIn. I’d been mainly focusing on my own teaching offer. And I think I was, not really aware of my real underlying passion as well beyond that, which is teacher training. I’d flirted with the idea, but I didn’t really know how exactly to get into it or what exactly I needed to do to make it a viable arm of my business, as I wanted to continue teaching.
I think I’d come across Rachael’s, offer, the Designed to Flourish course, already in the first few months when I started actively posting on LinkedIn mainly. And I was particularly impressed that Rachael had got a lot of experience, in teaching, but also in teacher training, and that was one of the things that started to make me think about that as a route for me to go down when I started talking to Rachael in person as well at conferences.
So we also met face-to-face, at IATEFL. And all of these things led to me having that sense of Rachael being the, the right person who could guide me towards, putting the ideas I had into practice because I knew that she had the experience of doing this herself. And one particular concrete example would be, working with the loop approach, which I’d come across vaguely before, but, , this is something that I implemented from Teresa Woodward on Rachael’s recommendation, I went out and got the book, I read about it, and this is basically the, the kind of approach that underpins my teacher training course, the toolkit, and it’s garnered a lot of positive reviews.
How have things changed since doing the programme?
There have been several differences to my approach in how I go about my marketing, and also about the course structure itself. My marketing has become much more intentional and systematic, so that I feel like I know now more what every post is aiming at, and not that I feel like it’s more of a scatter gun approach, that it might be hit or miss.
Most things I feel that do work are because I did them with a specific intention, be it, how I frame a post on LinkedIn or how I write a email or even how I gather people onto the mailing list from a lead magnet or from a free workshop offering.
Another thing that I’ve noticed tangibly in the actual course that I’ve got off the ground is that doing Rachael’s course gave me a lot of food for thought in terms of how I actually build it.
I ultimately went for a part synchronous, part asynchronous course, which was something that we discussed in the coaching sessions. And when I reflected on it, I mean, it’s not only the fact that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel when you’ve got the, the recorded sessions already, the asynchronous sessions already in the can, as it were, that the people on the course can go through all of the material at their own pace.
But it also gave me the chance to reflect more exactly on what I wanted to put into each session, and it helped me to tweak these things then retrospectively.
Did you have any hesitations about doing Designed to Flourish
In terms of hesitations, anything that I hesitated about before deciding to join the course. Of course it’s quite a big investment in terms of the financial amount that you need to invest, but I would say for anyone who’s considering doing the course that it’s well worth it because it has given me, as somebody who is very much into frameworks and repeatable and iterative systems, it’s given me repeatable ideas, systems, frameworks that I can use again and again, and that will always be there for you when you need something to fall back on or where you think you’ve run out of ideas then, the course gave me so much different food for thought and really constructive ideas and frameworks that I could always go back to and rely upon when I needed them