creating engaging classrooms

 My PE colleagues are constantly griping at how student fitness is way down, especially since COVID, so here's a fun activity to help your students boost their cardio!  This is an old one (I got it from the legendary Gerard McLoughin at IH Barcelona) and it's great for waking your students up.  Put students into pairs (maybe threes, but big teams don't really work). Around the room (or at the end of the corridor, or outside) put up small pieces of key information you need the students to know. One partner runs to the first, memorises it, runs back, dictates it. Then they switch roles, like a relay. Spacing out the information avoids queues and crashes. Not only is this great for cardio, but you are helping students build their memorization and recall skills, both crucial for exam success (not that I'm a fan of exams as a form of assessment, but they are the reality of much of the educational landscape). More immediately, exercise creates endorphins, which is a massive m...

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...

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...

 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 ...