A Few Exciting Teaching Ideas

In my role as an evening program coordinator, I have the privilege of observing colleagues in action, making substitute arrangements, and passing along lesson plans for subs. The teaching techniques that some of our fellow teachers show me have never ceased to wow me. I would like to share a few of these wonderful ideas that I have learned and re-learned.

Terri showed me a simple yet powerful parts of speech competition idea. She had her students take out a piece of paper and make three columns. Students were told to write in the first column as many nouns as possible in two minutes. At the end of the allotted time, they counted how many nouns they had put down and decided on a winner to receive a small prize. The winner shared his or her list. The same steps were repeated for the other two columns, one for verbs, and the other for adjectives. While watching her conduct this activity, I thought of other applications of it. For example, if we want to review the basic sentence structure of S + V + O, we might want to deliberately make the three columns correspond to the sentence structure order so that a follow-up can be a meaningful (or hilarious) sentence construction activity.

Terri also had a team relay game where she pre-wrote 15 requests on the board and covered them with a pulled-down projection screen. She put her class into two teams, who lined up to get ready for the relay. When the curtain is drawn, each team was supposed to send a member to their designated side of the board to produce what the teacher requested in order. For each team, only one member can write, but all members can offer suggestions. Once a team finishes all the 15 requests, i.e. wins the relay, the competition is over. But the debriefing begins. The whole class work together to go over the winning team's sentences and then the other team's. This really maximizes student participation and is very well suited for reviewing the grammar points learned so far.

Katrina likes to put her students in charge of the reading. In groups and with teacher help, students read an article and then design comprehension questions in the T/F, multiple choice, fill-in-the blank, or sentence-completion formation. Each group then takes turns testing the rest of the class with their comprehension questions. Whoever raises his or her hand, gets picked, and answers the question correctly earns a point for his or her group. A tally is kept on the board for all the group.

Katrina also has a favorite game called Marco Polo for checking reading comprehension. She prepares a deck of cards with questions ("Marcos") and answers  ("Polos") written separately. After distributing the cards randomly, she has her students mingle and find their matches.

Activities like this not only energize the whole class but also caters to diverse learning styles. They blend fun and purposeful learning together. Done right, they sure can make your students want to attend your class night after night.