Atomic Classroom Habits – Tim's Free English Lesson Plans

Webinar – Atomic Classroom Habits: Wednesday 8th May 2024

Posted on May 4, 2024 by Tim Warre

I’m doing a slightly shorter version of my Atomic Classroom Habits webinar on Wednesday 8th May 2024 in collaboration with Learn Your English.

The session will take place at 12:00 EST, that’s 18:00 in Spain. It will last around 35-40 minutes with time after for a Q&A.

Here’s the blurb:

In James Clear’s 2018 book “Atomic Habits” the writer discusses the power of making small 1% improvements to our daily habits and how these incremental changes can have long-lasting compounding effects.

This talk will look at ways we can apply this principle and theories of habit formation in general to a classroom setting.

Attendees will leave this talk with practical ideas and tweaks they can make in their own classes, as well as a longer-term framework for putting their students on a path to more effective and rewarding language acquisition.

Atomic Classroom Habits, News, Teacher Development, Teacher Training

Atomic Classroom Habits at Jornades Multilingües EIM-UB

Posted on January 10, 2024 by Tim Warre

Happy New Year everyone! I have exciting news for any Barcelona-based teachers. I will be giving my “Atomic Classroom Habits” talk, based on James Clear’s book “Atomic Habits”, at the Jornades Multilingües EIM-UB at the University of Barcelona on Saturday 20th January.

Follow this link to take a look at the programme. It’s a whole day (9-15h) of professional development workshops and talks delivered in a range of languages, all for only €15! So if you’re in the area, check it out!

Atomic Classroom Habits, Teacher Development

Atomic Classroom Habits: Retrieval Placemat

Posted on June 1, 2023 by Tim Warre

This is hopefully the first in a series of posts that accompany my recent talk, “Atomic Classroom Habits”, that I gave at Innovate ELT. Follow this link to access the slides from my talk.

One of the ideas I talked about was a using a retrieval placemat that students find on their desks when they enter the class. The aim is to stimulate retrieval of content from the previous class. They should work in pairs to answer the various questions on the mat without looking at their notes. The idea is to push them to retrieve the information from their long-term memory.

I got the idea from Kate Jones’s wonderful book “Retrieval Practice”, which you can find by following this link. Most of her retrieval activities are aimed at teachers of other subjects such as history or politics, so I’ve tweaked her idea for the ESL classroom.

You can download the mat by right-clicking on the image in the post, or by following this link. If you want to edit the placemat, I made it using a simple template on Canva. Follow this link to use my version as an editable template.

Simply print out the placemat in nice bright colours and put it on your students’ desks for when they arrive. Alternatively, you could just project it onto the board at the beginning of each class. Let me know how you get on!