creating engaging classrooms

Back when I was a new teacher, I was having trouble motivating a class. My very wise mentor, Chris Campbell, told me to show them the success . I started doing this, and I noticed engagement go up, behaviour improve and students progressing. Now showing students their success can take many forms: displays of great work; cascading good practice through precise praise; messages home; feedback; peer reviews; and so on. I'll do blog posts about some of those at other times. What I want to write about here is showing them success over time .  You might call these progress passports, or assessment trackers, or success sheets . Whatever you call them, the essential part is it's a sheet that is easily accessible to students where they record their marks from assessments. Rather like this: For those classes using exercise books, I have them glue it in the inside front cover; for those using Chromebooks, I have them pin it onto their bookmark bar.  Over the course of the year, this beco...

OK, so I'm an English teacher, thus it's pretty easy to get drama into the class. However, I'm not just talking about acting out the texts we study.  Oh no.  Do you have to teach your students to use the passive voice?  OK, so after you have taught the form of the grammar point, set up a crime scene in class, and have them role-play being CSI, awarding points for every correct usage of the passive (e.g. "Buzz Lightyear may have been stabbed with the highlighter sir"). Yet, these kind of role-plays aren't limited to the Language departments. I was doing some training in a bilingual school outside Madrid and persuaded the Geography teacher to give this ago. Walking down the corridor the next day, he dashed out of his room, dragged me in and I was treated to a dramatic rendering of weather patterns: some students were playing the cold front, others area of high pressure, still more storm clouds. It was amazing! Forget the students: I swear I learned more about w...

 I love finding ways to get games into the classroom (if you've read any of my other posts, you may have noticed). It is a great way to immediately amp up the students' engagement and energy levels. Many of the others I've written about - beep, bingo, taboo - can work in any subject. This one, I'm afraid, is purely for those Literature teachers among us... Jenga is a tense game. Therefore, I use it as a metaphor for tension in a text. I literally get the students to play Jenga as we read a tense moment of a text. Favourite moments for this include: Romeo & Juliet Act 3 Scene 5; the bit with Candy's dog in Of Mice and Men ; and when Fi gatecrashes the wedding in KE Salisbury's the face that pins you . As I'm reading I call people up to take a turn. The other students will get massively distracted, but at this point you pause (maybe while a student has half pulled out a brick) and ask the students if they are enjoying the lesson. "Yes!" they ...

So you're probably familiar with the word game (not the hideous 1990's alcopop) where one player describes a word and others have to guess it. This is a fantastic game for the classroom, in any subject : it brings loads of energy to the class; practices students' communication and recall skills; embeds key terminology; and, most importantly, gets the students engaged in each other's learning. There's loads of ways to do this, but here's how I play it with large (20+) classes: - divide up the students into teams of 3 or 4; - one player from each team comes to the front; - I show them all the same word (this is important); - in silence, they return to their groups; - I count down "3,2,1,Go!" and they have to explain the word to their groups; - the first person to shout out the correct answer, wins a point for their group. It's worth you, as the teacher, standing in the middle of the room for this, as close as possible to all groups, to avoid accusa...

 Questioning is a core part of teaching. Yet, as you badger away at an individual student, drilling down to see what they know and how deep their learning goes, how do you involve the rest of the class? One finger = agree Students in agreement with the answer/statement/opinion raise one finger. Two fingers = challenge Students who disagree with or want to challenge an answer can signal with two fingers. This is great - how often have you asked another student (or a series of students) only to hear the same opinion as the first student you asked? This way you can immediately jump to the dissenting voice. Three fingers = extend (or build, as I've also seen it called) Students who agree, but for different reasons than stated, or who want to extend the answer, can signal with three fingers. Train your classes to do this as students answer. Suddenly, you can see where the whole class is, and suddenly they are all participating and thus have an even greater reason to invest in listening ...

 Obviously, you know how to play Bingo. So, how to use it to engage your students? Well, I like it for when I either a) have to show a longer video or b) have to read a long text with the class. Playing Bingo thus motivates them to pay attention and scaffolds them to identify key information. It's really no different than giving them a list of questions to answer, except that: 1. You are making a game of it and 2. By creating different Bingo cards you can actually increase the number of questions you can ask. There's loads of variations here: you could have students create their own cards or make them for them; you could have them listen for facts, quotations or types; the possibilities and combinations are endless. Just don't forget to reward the winners...

 Have you ever been on a training session or team building activity where the organisers have kicked things off with an ice-breaking activity called Find someone who...  ? You know, the one where you have to talk to the other participants to find out who has a tattoo, who has back-packed around Australia, who can play guitar. (Tutors, this is great beginning of the year activity, especially if you have vertical tutor groups.) Anyway, this is basically a version of that. I call it a mingle ; it could be called an information exchange. Maybe you know it by another name. Let's say you are planning a lesson and have to give the students a huge amount of information. You could give them a hand out, which they will promptly not read or simple lose; you could dictate it and have them take notes (don't get me wrong - there's a place for this) or you could try a mingle.  Give each student a list of questions and a piece of information. That piece of information answers ONE of the ...

For my first post, the ultimate time-efficient reading game: Beep! It's super simple. As you read a text out loud to the class, you make deliberate mistakes e.g. you say Calcium Oxide instead of Calcium Carbonate; you swap Chile for China; you muddle etre and avoir . The students must follow along in their own copies and shout "Beep!" if/when they spot the mistake. Keep a score (you can also deduct points for premature beeping). Any one student who dominates (e.g. that sole native speaker in a class of language learners), make them the scorer or even get them to take over the reading and mistake making. This works on many levels: for a start, it's fun in way that reading a large chunk of text often isn't. However, in order to play students must read along with you. How often do we suspect/know that half the class has drifted off while you read aloud, even if you get the students to take turns? Beep gets them reading word for word! Finally, you can of cours...