Season 7, Episode 8 is packed with spontaneous teaching ideas, lesson lead-ins, online classroom routines, creative listening tasks, and the eternal TEFL struggle of being stuck indoors when the sun is shining. Gav and Em discuss how they start lessons, ways to avoid classroom monotony, using real-world materials in class, and the freedom TEFL teachers have to experiment and improvise. There’s also a brilliant live email-writing activity, an impromptu Jackie Chan listening lesson, favourite teaching websites, and a very important discussion about forks. Support the pod and fuel the tea and coffee fund at ko-fi.com/howtoenglishpod

Resources:

Jackie Chan interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0IWSyc5AQQ

Wikipedia: https://www.wikipedia.org/

BBC learning: https://www.bbc.co.uk/learningenglish/

Google images: https://images.google.com/

https://test-english.com/

Timestamps:

00:00 – Intro and what’s coming up in this episode

02:07 – How Gav and Em start the first five minutes of a lesson

05:39 – Greeting students and avoiding classroom monotony

10:17 – Being stuck inside teaching when the weather is beautiful

14:03 – The creative freedom of TEFL teaching

16:01 – Gav’s spontaneous live email-writing lesson

21:59 – Em’s improvised Jackie Chan listening activity

26:01 – Favourite websites to use during lessons

29:19 – Safe searching, grammar websites, and online teaching tools

32:11 – “Put a fork in me, I’m done” and outro banter