If you’re teaching the same class again, chances are you’ve already gone through your arsenal of tried-and-tested icebreakers and back-to-school activities. So what are your options?
A) Find something new (you can find plenty in the ELT blogosphere: on this blog, see my BACK TO SCHOOL: 8 Q&A ACTIVITIES, 5 Activities for the First Day of School from OntheSamePageELT, My 10 Favorite Back-to-School Activities from Maria Theologidou, and a super bundle of great 85 GTKY activities 😮 from the TEFL Zone, to name just a few); or
B) Reuse your favorite activity (see the flow to make it feel fresh below).
So, you’ve got an activity you love. But how can you tweak it so it feels fresh for your students, and for you too?
Here’s one way to do it.
So, what do we have? A fantastic dice icebreaker from OnTheSamePageELT.
It works like a charm with students. But I’ve already used it a few times, including the digital version. To help brainstorm new angles for tasks, I’ve made my Task Tweaker, the LLM-powered tool that tweaks tasks by changing key parameters.
It’s simple to use. Describe the activity or upload a screenshot of the icebreaker to the Task Tweaker. Add the learning objective, student age, and proficiency level. You may also include students’ interests, which can be reflected in the task (optional). Don’t forget any specific constraints, like the time limit, available resources, or context, e.g., the first class after summer break. Then hit Generate Task Variations.
The model will provide a list of tasks with parameters tweaked and clear activity foci. You can tweak them further or mix and match, take a bit here, a bit there.
Here are six task variations I got:
So there you have it, six really different, super engaging activities, and all of them came from one single starting point.
If you’re still looking for an aha idea, enter your focus or parameters and hit Generate again.
And to wrap up: the tool is powered by a large language model combined with my expertise and teaching approach, but the original credit for the task goes to On The Same Page ELT. Cheers, Miguel! And Happy New Academic Year, everyone!
