Ice-breakers:

When a group of any kind gets together for the first, or even the hundred-and-first time, it is important to “break the ice”, or to create a space where the participants can relax and feel free to share. Types of ice breakers include playing games, storytelling, and even joke-telling. When I walk into an English class, I like to tell a few jokes or perhaps tell a story. Most often, however, I like to share a comic strip that is related to the topic or lesson of that period. Almost everyone likes cartoons, and an advantage of using comic strips is that they are very short, but a definite disadvantage is that they often require students to understand cultural and social references that native-speaking comic strip readers know intuitively. The best kind of comic strips are often the ones that you write yourself because you can highlight particular words, phrases, and grammatical forms that you want to focus on in the class. You can draw the pictures yourself or source them online. To those teachers who don’t think they can write funny punch lines to comic strips: first of all, you may surprise yourself; second, you’ll improve with practice; and third, for a language lesson, it’s not as important for the comic strip to be funny as it is for the strip to be cute or charming.
 

Pair and Group Work:

I work primarily as an English conversation teacher, so pair and group work is an essential part of my classes. However, there are ways that pair and group work can be used no matter what the learning goals of the class are. That said, there are some things to remember in using pair and group work. For example, the first time you invite a class to get together into pairs or groups, let them choose their partners by asking them to “find a friend”. Many will choose the classmates that they know, some will partner with the classmate sitting next to them, and others will just sit quietly waiting for something to happen. Quickly spot the spares from this last section and get them together with a team. In addition, each successive time that you require partnered work, surprise the students: let them choose their friends only sometimes, and assign them friends for other periods. A general rule might be that partners can choose themselves and groups should be assigned. As random as it may seem, it will give the students a sense of purpose in the partnering, which there is. I always tell my students that if they work with the same friends every period, they will practice all the same mistakes, but if they work with new friends sometimes, they will learn new mistakes, and mistakes are memorable!
 

Written Deliverable:

In business consulting, the provider of this service must submit a “deliverable” to the client, which will include an executive summary, progress reports, the results of research conducted, and a list of suggestions that the client should follow in order to improve the company’s performance. Likewise, language teachers are required to submit deliverables to their students in the form of feedback, grades, and suggestions for ways to improve. This should not be one way. Students should be expected to submit some form of written deliverable every lesson, which might include such assignments as a dialogue, a worksheet, or a short report. There are 3 reasons for this: 1) students should submit something that the instructor can evaluate and provide feedback on, 2) students should have a record of their work as proof of attendance and participation, and as exam-review material, and 3) written deliverables give students something to focus on while their instructor is circulating around the classroom talking with other students, and it allows the instructor to monitor just how closely the students are tracking with their classmates’ progress on the activity. Instructors must always have a sense of how to most efficiently prompt their students in order to get them back on track, anywhere from asking what the best conclusion to a dialogue might be to asking the students to get started by writing their names on their papers.