Beyond the answers: Writing Teacher’s Guides that make a difference

In this post, Niki Joseph summarises the key points from her talk at the Pre-Conference in Brighton on 20 April 2026. She discusses the expertise that Teacher’s Guide writers bring to their work, the role of Teacher’s Guides in teacher professional development, and key principles for writing effective Teacher’s Guides.

A few months ago, I remember sitting at my desk staring blankly at a reading text about astronauts. My job on the surface was simple: write the Teacher’s Guide. However, I wasn’t just writing answers. What I was writing was much harder: instructions for a teacher I would never meet; someone who teaches students I would never teach and in a classroom I would never see. And yet somewhere out there, a teacher would open that guide and think: where are the answers? 

Because that is (also) what we expect from a Teacher’s Guide: answers, a safety net, a script. But I wasn’t writing a script; I was writing a conversation. I was trying to take everything I knew about language learning, about language, about teenage readers, about differentiation, and make it useful to someone in the middle of a lesson, under pressure with 30 students or so in front of them. 

On the other hand, I am also conscious of another uncomfortable aspect of being a Teacher’s Guide writer. As a teacher and trainer, I’ve been in lots of staffrooms where the Teacher’s Guide is always mysteriously hidden – out of reach on the top shelf, buried in folders on a Google Drive, or simply nowhere to be seen. 

So, if teachers aren’t reading the guides, what are we actually writing for?

The expertise gap – what the room revealed

Let’s have a look at the opening question for the room: What is the author’s purpose when writing a Teacher’s Guide?  When participants submitted their answers via a Mentimeter, six themes emerged: Novice teachers, methodology explanation, cultural understanding, time saving, extra activities and background information. This was fairly predictable and yet no one said anything about expertise, the theme for the day. 

The Teacher’s Guide is one place where the material writer’s expertise, that is, deep knowledge of language, learning and classroom reality based on experience, can actually reach the teacher. The teacher becomes more informed, more confident and better equipped. I asked participants to keep that idea in mind throughout the workshop and also to think of a Teacher’s Guide that they had used or written and to think about how the expertise was shown or, where in fact it got lost.

What expertise actually looks like in a Teacher’s Guide

So, what does expertise actually look like on the page. Many teacher’s guides are written for imaginary classrooms: about 30 students in a room with a teacher at the front. But the teacher opening the guide might be in a completely different situation: online, managing a large class, or stretching one activity across different ability levels. Expertise then can be thought of as knowledge that is written into a guide. This knowledge can make a teacher feel seen, or invisible. 

Then there’s voice. In the workshop, groups rewrote the same prompt for a Teacher’s Guide in three different ways: For example, a directive tone is one that simply instructs the teacher whereas a more supportive tone provides guidance and reason. A flexible tone is probably the most helpful in that it provides options. The results were telling though not surprising. The more directive the instruction, the fewer the words – which matters more than you might think when a guide is printed and space is tight. However, fewer words could also mean less trust, less flexibility, and less room for the teacher to make the activity their own. Voice is not just tone, it’s also relationship. 

And then there are the extras, for example, tips, variations, warnings, rationale or shortcuts. Any guide can tell a teacher what to do with an activity, but expertise tells them why it works, what to look out for, and what to do when things don’t go according to plan. For me, that is the difference between a guide that is consulted simply for the answers and a guide that is read to find out how and why an activity has been included in the material.

What it feels like to receive expertise – the teacher’s perspective

A Teacher’s Guide can be a rich source of CPD for teachers. Not the formal kind that requires a conference lanyard and results in a certificate of participation, but the kind of informal CPD that happens as teachers learn why an activity has been designed and incorporated into the material. When a Teacher’s Guide invites the teacher to ‘put students into pairs to discuss’ this gets the job done. For example, if an instruction includes a reference to the technique of Think-Pair-Share, then teachers can learn why thinking time matters, and so understand more about the methodology behind the activity; they become, incrementally, better teachers. This is an example of transfer of expertise. A guide that has been written with care is not just a classroom tool but potentially a training resource that teachers can carry with them, often without knowing it.

Principles for writing guides that get opened

The workshop closed with a return to three principles. The first is that a Teacher’s Guide must be real. It should be written for an actual teacher, in an actual context with actual constraints such as crowded classrooms, patchy internet connection and 15 minutes for preparation time. The second is that it must be relevant and it should matter to the teacher opening it. The Teacher’s Guide should answer the questions that they are really asking not the ones the writer assumed they would ask. Finally, the Guide should be readable, so accessible in the first instance, and a work that teacher’s return to time and time again. These three small words have implications for how we write. 

Teacher’s guides are, at their very best, extraordinary documents. They carry methodology, expertise, lived classroom wisdom and genuine care for the teacher reading them. However, too many end up as books occupying shelf space, or files buried in a folder nobody opens. That is a writing problem that we can address. We can also encourage a more overt use of these valuable works.

Get involved!

If you’d like to take a look at your own guides, whether you write or are using them – I’ve put together a short audit. It’s a set of questions to prompt reflection as you write. Have a look and see what you think. I’d love to know if it’s helpful. https://eflwriters.com/audit-landing-page

Niki Joseph is an experienced educational professional with extensive classroom experience. A teacher, teacher trainer, examiner and curriculum developer, she is now a full-time materials writer. She creates engaging resources for learners and teachers, with a particular passion for writing Teacher’s Guides that support confident, effective classroom practice. She is currently the MaWSIG Coordinator.

> Back to blog homepage