Greetings, my name is Timothy Higgs.
I’m a Canadian living in Germany with my wife, daughter and dog.

I’ve been a language teacher ever since I left Canada about 12 years ago when I set out searching for adventure and found teaching English to be a suitable way to fund my travels.

How I came to English Designed is short-ish story:

I studied Sociology and German in university.
This meant that I learned a language as an adult and was taught to understand how groups think and act together early in my career…and I absolutely loved both.

The jump to teaching languages was a natural one for me, but by no means was it easy.
Learning to be a better educator took a lot of research, work and paying attention as I watched colleagues.

My teaching history went like this:

  1. Germany – Nordrhein Westphalia
    Year 1 at a business college
  2. France and England
    Short 6 months in summer camps
  3. Taiwan
    5 Years teaching kids, tutoring professionals and eventually consulting for the two biggest textbook companies in Taiwan
  4. Germany – Munich
    Since 2012 teaching business English In-Company

But the think I loved most about teaching, was that it afforded me enough time on the side to do other projects. And this is the other half of my professional education.

I founded an enviro NGO in Taiwan that worked with the United Nations Youth Climate Change Conferences and evolved into campaign consulting for local groups.
I founded a small tutoring company in Taiwan with a friend of mine.
I took over a small kids soccer club that gave instruction in English and Chinese Mandarin. Two years after I’d taken over we won our first national tournament.

And finally, in Munich I’d founded a startup that tried (and unfortunately failed) to bring an app to the restaurant industry that would help insert more speed and efficiency into table service .

This is not meant to impress, but to tell a story of how my experience in and outside the classroom brought me to the idea of English Designed.

One problem I’d always seen in teaching languages, was that I could never know how well my students were doing. I had a feeling that I was a good teacher because my students liked me. But was I really being as good as I could be?

To that end, English Design was born and the English Design Way became a major focus in how I taught and experimented with classes.