This workshop allowed participants to learn and use practice-based strategies and interactive techniques to make creativity part of their toolbox and enhance the lesson and students’ outcomes. The techniques and strategies apply to different skills, levels, and ages.

The workshop started with an activity called “Cocktail Party”,  in which participants shared personal information and knew each other. This activity took 5 minutes. When time finished, the participants learned about the theme and general objective that was to design a creative activity related to the topic, level, grammar, or skill. The activity name was “The classroom TESOL”.

Then, the definition of creativity was addressed, and participants gave their opinions, comments, and experiences about what creativity was and how they had used it in their teaching. After that, we shared steps and techniques to consider when designing or creating activities. These steps would help identify and discuss if two teachers had used creativity or not in two situations provided.

At that point, participants experienced three activities in which the presenter used creativity:

a) The soap opera.

  • In Groups of 3 or 4. The presenter provided four different drawings which were parts of the soap opera.
  • Each group had to create two sentences using past simple of the verb TO BE (was/were) per each drawing, four sentences in total per group.
  • When all groups were ready, they presented their parts of the story. In the end, they connected the parts produced by each group of soap opera.

b) Mr. Bean predictions

  • The participants expressed their ideas about the most important items they needed when going on vacations
  • Then, the presenter played the game and stopped it in some parts of it to ask participants to make predictions using WILL or WON’T.

c) This is me.

  • Participants drew themselves and wrote three single words related to the most important things about them. They had to use present perfect and present it in the “Art Gallery” simulation.

After the participants came up with some more ideas and techniques, in groups of 3 or 4, they had to create an activity taking into account the topic, the grammar point, level, an hour of day and number of students given randomly by the presenter.

They presented their activities in the CLASSROOM TESOL simulation activity.

As a closure, the participants made a circle, tossed a ball around, and shared one idea they were taking away with them from the workshop.