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...

 Success is a great motivating factor, and students who are motivated are usually more engaged in the lesson and their learning. However, it's important (I feel) that students don't just equate success with grades. After all, loads of people (including teachers!) have been successful in life without scoring top marks.  This is where personal learning checklists can come in. Using these at the beginning, middle and end of a unit (and perhaps other points between) allow students to see the progress that they have made, the successes that they have had.  Here's an example, if you aren't sure what I'm talking about: It is literally a list of skills you intend for students to acquire or develop during the unit. Students self-assess themselves, perhaps using a colour code (red, amber, green) or letter code (d - developing, s - secure, e - expert), returning later to review their own progress. Thus they can then see how your teaching input has lead them to acquire new s...

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 ...