Scott's beginners class

In response to David's request for more classroom ideas. I have to re-tell this story about a breakthrough in my teaching that - now I realise - was utterly consistent with Dogme principles.

This happened after I had been teaching I suppose 6 months. I was in Egypt and had a beginners class that I was enjoying a lot, because they were keen, highly motivated students, and were uncomplainingly allowing me to frogmarch them through an incredibly structural, drill-and-repeat, type programme. Somehow it must have occured to me (I don't know what prompted it) that they could probably do more than I was letting them, so one day I decided to abandon the book and let the brakes off a bit.

I started the class but sticking on the board a picture - it happened to be a cover of TIME magazine (OK so I brought something into the classroom - but that was IT!) featuring the king of Saudi Arabia. I stuck it up without comment, and took a seat to the side of the class. They stared at me expectantly - I did nothing. Eventually one student said something like "Saudi Arabia" and looked at me. I made no response. A few more adventurous students followed with the odd word here and there - "desert", "oil", "hot" etc. The story that had prompted the magazine cover (US arms sales to Saudi) also started to emerge - mainly lexically.

Soon they stopped appealing to me for support, and let words and phrases pop up almost like a free association exercise.

After what must have been ten minutes or so, and when they seemed to have exhausted themselves, I gave the board pen to one of the students and said "OK, I'm going out for 5 minutes: write up a summary of what you said." I popped my head in 5 mins later and they all shouted . "No, not yet!". The board was already half full.

Another 5 minutes later I came back in. They had filled the board. I went through it, word by word, sentence by sentence, reformulating and explaining. And that was the lesson. Without a doubt it was a "critical incident" in my development as a teacher. It took me years -decades actually - to map it on to some kind of principled base. I also know that it had a lot to do with my particular relationship with that class (I still remember the names and faces of some of those students - and this was 25 years ago!) as well as a certain devil-may-care attitude on my part, thanks to the freedom that I was able to enjoy in that particular school - and also, perhaps, because the whole language teaching thing was poised on a cusp - within a year or two the first waves of the communicative approach were breaking on the shore. Also - interstingly - we had bugger-all materials - you simply had to be inventive -it was that or First Things First!