Jim Scrivener

Jim Scrivener is a British ELT teacher trainer and writer whose books have trained a very large portion of the global CELTA- and DELTA-taking population. He has worked extensively with Bell Educational Services and has taught and trained in the UK, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere.

Scrivener's signature is a practical, unfussy, classroom-first prose style. Learning Teaching has been the default methodology book on introductory training courses for more than two decades. With Adrian Underhill, he launched Demand-High Teaching, a deliberately provocative attempt to push mainstream communicative classrooms out of friendly low-engagement drift and into sharper, more demanding interaction.

Career

• Long association with Bell Educational Services, eventually as Head of Teacher Development
• Worked in teacher education in the UK and internationally
• Co-developer (with Adrian Underhill) of the Demand-High Teaching initiative
• Regular plenary speaker at IATEFL and similar conferences

Published Work

• Learning Teaching (1994, 2005, 2011) — one of the most widely used introductory methodology books
• Classroom Management Techniques (2012)
• Teaching English Grammar (2010)

Influence

• Shaped how tens of thousands of initial-training candidates first picture classroom practice
• With Underhill, helped name and push back against low-challenge communicative defaults
• Provided a reference text teachers keep reaching for once their formal training is over