Category: Teacher Development

Posted in Teacher Development, Teacher Training

Macmillan Education Festival Construyendo Futuro March 25th – 27th 2025

Posted on by Tim Warre

This week Macmillan are holding on online festival of teacher development sessions aimed at making the language classroom more inclusive. The festival runs from the 25th-27th March and I’ll be giving a session entitled “Cracking the Teen Code” on Thursday 27th from 11:35-12:05 CET.

Find out more about the festival and check out the full programme here: https://www.macmillaneducation.es/iberia/festival/

Here are the details for my session:

Cracking the Teen Code

Strategies for Engaging and Empowering Young Learners

Teaching teenagers can be challenging, but it can also be one of the most rewarding aspects of ELT. This session explores practical strategies to keep teenage learners engaged while fostering an inclusive and supportive classroom. You’ll discover ways to adapt materials, personalize activities, and make lessons more relevant to their lives. Walk away with ready-to-use games, project ideas, and adaptable techniques to connect with and motivate your students.

Posted in Atomic Classroom Habits, Teacher Development, Teacher Training

Webinar – Atomic Classroom Habits: Wednesday 8th May 2024

Posted on 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.

Register for the session by following this link. Hope to see you there!

Posted in Teacher Development, Teacher Training

Macmillan Academy Day – Barcelona 27th April 2024

Posted on by Tim Warre

Next Saturday 27th April 2024 I will be speaking at the Macmillan Academy Day in Barcelona. The sessions run from 10:00-13:30 and there will be two sessions in total.

The first session, entitled “Challenging Students at C2” will be presented by the excellent teacher trainer and author Ethan Mansur. He will be presenting his new book “Ready for C2 Proficiency” and giving loads of great tips on how to help students bridge the gap from C1 to C2.

Then, the title of my session is “Teen Tactics: Engaging and Encouraging Adolescent Learners.” We will explore practical techniques, strategies and activities to tackle teens classes and make them more engaging and thus more effective.

Register now at this link or by scanning this QR code:

Download the programme below:

programa-digital_barcelona_acasDownload

Posted in Atomic Classroom Habits, News, Teacher Development, Teacher Training

Atomic Classroom Habits at Jornades Multilingües EIM-UB

Posted on 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!

Posted in Atomic Classroom Habits, Teacher Development

Atomic Classroom Habits: Retrieval Placemat

Posted on 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!