Dr Lindsay Williams has been an educator for 35 years, 16 of those as a Head of English, and five years working in teacher pre-service education. In that time, he was involved in many curriculum committees at a state and national level and served as panel chair for Brisbane Central. He received the Peter Botsman award from the English Teachers Association of Queensland for his contribution to English.
For the past decade, through his company Wordsmart Consulting he has worked in teacher Professional Development with a focus on helping students to become more effective readers and writers. In this world, he travels all over Queensland and makes occasional forays interstate.
Lindsay has also produced numerous materials to support the curriculum, including the activities for Lockie Leonard for the Australian Children’s Television Foundation, teaching activities for Screen Australia, and teacher notes for numerous YA novels for Allen and Unwin and Walker Books. Other commissioned work has been undertaken for Reading Australia, as well as AustLit for whom he contributed material to Teaching with BlackWords and Teaching with Fantasy.
He contributed a chapter to the AATE publication, The Artful English Teacher, which was runner-up in the educational publishing awards in 2017. He has also contributed to a range of textbooks and teaching resources, including the English Teaching Survival Manual (2009) and, most recently, English for Queensland (Oxford University Press, 2019), with Kelli McGraw and Sophie Johnson.
With a strong interest in linguistics and multimodality, he completed a PhD through the University of New England examining how performers (especially comedians) build a rapport with their audiences.