Building a Sustainable EFL Career

By Wesley Benito

Introduction

Teacher burnout is one of the biggest problems in EFL today. I almost burnt myself out before even arriving in the classroom. I completed my online CELTA just as the pandemic was beginning to brew, and when I accepted an offer to come and work for a school in Slovakia, I found myself under lockdown instructions at home in the US. I didn’t want to let down my new manager, so I agreed to teach as many classes as I could online. That meant getting up at two in the morning a few times a week – definitely not something I could survive long term, but it meant keeping my job, and when I finally moved to Slovakia and met my students in person, I realised that I’d done the right thing.

I stayed in Slovakia for three years, before then moving to an International House school in the south of Poland. But I kept a lot of my private students – in many cases, they had become like friends to me and I was loath to say goodbye – and that meant a lot of teaching. I don’t think that teaching in excess of thirty hours a week is sustainable. It isn’t healthy, I know that much, so at the end of the last school year I decided it was time to make a change. I needed to reduce my teaching hours to something more manageable, while also ensuring I was bringing enough money in to afford the luxuries I had grown accustomed to (such as a weekly curry lunch!).

Looking back, I realised sustainability in EFL comes down to three things: staying put long enough to build stability, investing in development that reduces effort later, and working smarter with the resources already around you.

Stay, Don’t Go

I’ve met a lot of teachers who spend a year at a time with a particular school before moving on to a different city or country. This, certainly, is one of the attractions of life in EFL, and while I like to think we’ve all moved on from the backpacker-teacher stereotype, there is still something quite dazzling about moving from Central Europe to South America – if that’s your thing.

But moving too frequently can lead to burnout in ways that I don’t think all teachers realise. Sure, there are the obvious things, like the costs and inconveniences of packing up your whole life and relocating it to another place. For some, these factors don’t count for all that much, as they practically live out of a single large suitcase anyway.

There are other things to consider too, though, and if you choose, like I have done, to stay in one place for a couple of years at least, you’ll find that you’re crafting a more sustainable career for yourself.

The first thing to consider is that if you are a returning teacher, your school is likely to see you very differently from the new arrivals. You will have used that first year to demonstrate your abilities in the classroom, and your school will likely be so keen to keep you that they’ll be more open to negotiating your timetable. My workload this year is much less varied than last year. I have repeat classes. I don’t have young learners, as I’ve never considered this my forte, but I do have a handful of exam and business classes.

I also know how my school works. The first year often involved me referencing the Teachers’ Handbook to see what the school policy was on filling out registers, dealing with discipline issues, writing reports – all the behind-the-scenes issues that can so easily eat into your free time. In my second year, I already knew the ropes and it surprised me how much easier this made my life.

There’s also the language issue. Students in Poland tend to make the same mistakes all the time. When they reach for a word only to grab onto a false friend, I now know what they’re doing and how to correct them. All languages have these issues, but they vary from language to language. Knowing just a little bit of Polish means that I can help my students quickly and seamlessly in the lesson, and that means my mind is free to concentrate on other things. I feel less tired after my lessons than I used to, because so much of what I’m doing is similar to last year.

Invest in Professional Development

This might seem paradoxical, but it really isn’t. If you want to build a sustainable career, make sure you engage in professional development as much as possible. I know the idea is to reduce the hours you spend working, and for many of us since time equals money, you might think the logical thing is to spend an extra hour a week teaching instead of learning about teaching. But the investment pays off – and it usually pays off pretty quickly.

For one thing, a good professional development session can make your next weeks easier in the classroom. I used to spend a lot of time thinking about why my activities weren’t always quite hitting the mark – our session on giving clear instructions helped me there. I spent an hour at that session, but it has saved me a few minutes in the preparation of all my lessons since, and if you add up how many lessons that includes, you get a sense of what the saving means to me.

In another session, we learnt some handy – and adaptable – activities that you can use when you feel things beginning to drag, or when you get into the last ten minutes of a lesson with nothing left to do. Again, this has helped enormously, as it means I no longer bother hunting for worksheet activities that I can keep as a backup. I just think how I might adapt one of these cool activities for use as and when it’s needed.

Looking more long term, investing in professional development is great if you’re hoping to specialise. There’s no substitute for direct experience, naturally, so if you want to be an exams specialist you need to teach as many exam classes as you can. But professional development with an exams focus can reveal things you never thought of before, and if you do a formal course with a certificate at the end, you can add that to your CV and demonstrate to your Director of Studies that you’re the right person for what you’re asking for on your timetable.

Spend Time Looking Around You

Forgive me for what must seem like a criticism of my fellow teachers, but it now amazes me how much time we all seem to spend on the computer looking for digital resources.

And yes, that was me until quite recently!

What changed? Well, I set some time aside in my busy schedule to look around myself. I explored the staffroom. How many times had I walked past the Young Learners’ corner before I stopped and actually inspected the shelves? I found a great resource there that works surprisingly well with my B1 students. It’s a silly little prepositions game – there’s a poster with a pirate ship and loads of pirates going about their day, and there are cards with single items taken from the main poster. You have to find the item and then make a sentence with it, employing the right preposition. I’m sure the kids love it – my B1 class loved it, and I now want to try it out with my adults.

I also spent some time browsing the bookshelves on the other side of the staffroom, and I can’t believe some of the buried treasure I discovered there as well. We all know Taboos and Issues, and of course there’s a copy there, but there are so many other resources that I had never imagined existed, and that I always thought I’d need the help of AI to create. Now, whenever I feel like taking something new into class, I go straight there.

The crucial element here, the part that makes it all the more sustainable for me, is that when I find something I like, I use the heck out of it. I use it in Every. Single. Lesson. It hardly seems to matter who I’m teaching. That snakes and ladders game I found? Every class that week suddenly found themselves playing snakes and ladders, and as well as having some great teaching moments, I also found I was using only a fraction of the time I generally needed to prepare my lessons.

Conclusion

There are other things that I think can help you build a sustainable career, but to be frank, I’ve only just started doing them so it’s too early to tell if they help. I was promoted to Senior Teacher this year – another benefit of staying in one place – but I’m not sure if that has made my life easier! Time will tell.

I’ve also only just started exploring the options that being a self-employed contractor brings. I can create invoices for anyone who needs them, so I might try following in the footsteps of one of my colleagues here who does a lot of proofreading. Proofreading and teaching – neither one of them is easy, but I think sitting at a computer for a few hours with music playing and a fresh cup of coffee in your hand is a lot easier than the same few hours chasing a bunch of kids around, or at least it can be!

So, to conclude – these are the things I’ve done lately to try to reduce the amount of time I spend actively working, without having to sacrifice too much of my income. What about you? Would these things work for you in improving your work-life balance, and keeping you in EFL for longer?

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