Five Ways To Spice Up Your Teaching

Teaching English as a Foreign Language can be a tiring job when you’re teaching the same lessons five times a day. It can often feel like you’re stuck in a “rinse and repeat” cycle. Getting out of any rut takes a bit of creativity and innovation and the same can be said for teaching. If you’re feeling bored and frustrated with your lessons, you might find you’re putting less effort into your lessons when you should actually be putting in more.

5 ways to keep your teaching exciting for you and your students

Do something fun

Sometimes it’s nice to just have fun with your students. Play them some interesting YouTube videos, bring a game to class like Pictionary, or play Hangman on the whiteboard. Leave the language lesson out of it and just enjoy having fun with your class.

Do a Dogme lesson

If you’re brave enough to put the coursework book down, do so and teach your class without any learning materials. Allow them to talk about what they would like to, and a language focus will naturally come out of the discussion.

Surprise them

It’s good to break routine and bring some excitement into the classroom, not only for your students but also for you as the teacher. If you don’t usually incorporate technology into your lessons, play the class a YouTube video or something fun to base the lesson off. If you usually work from the coursebook, try something different. It doesn’t matter what you choose, just do something unexpected.

Let your students teach

Allow your students to take control of the classroom and let them come up with ways of explaining things to the class.  By assigning language points to groups of students, it becomes a team lesson with the incentive to be the winning team. They can do this however they want to, including playing games or doing worksheets.

Play games

Bringing games into the classroom is a fun way to spice things up. Dedicate an entire lesson to playing games and let the students choose which games they’d like to play. You can set the games up so they are all actually revision in nature, and it’s unlikely your class will even notice as they’ll be enjoying feeling like they’ve been given the lesson off.

Remember, doing things differently in the classroom isn’t just about making it interesting for your students, it’s also about making teaching interesting for you. When you learn how to spice up your lessons, you won’t get caught up on the proverbial hamster wheel and will start to find yourself looking forward to teaching your lessons.