When I was a student I worked briefly at the Edinburgh Evening News’ Pink, the sports newspaper that used to come out 15 minutes after full time on a Saturday afternoon. If there was one thing that was key to a good story, it was to give the full-time result in the first sentence, and then go on to describe how Inverness Caley managed to pull that off. The readers would always get to the end of a crazy story, even if they were struggling along the road juggling a pie, Bovrill and the paper in their hands.

The same thing makes for a great presentation in the classroom. Giving your lesson aim is already a positive step, so perhaps there’s nothing new in this. But when I suggest starting with the end of a presentation, I mean just that. Try showing the kids the final expected result of the lesson. And make that result implausible, off-the-wall, but, above all, something playful that kids will enjoy. Textbooks tend to miss that las point.

Here’s an example:
“Today we’re going to learn how to speak about things that happen in the future” or “We’re going to ‘do’ the future tense” is a lot drier and potentially lethal in PowerPoint terms than “Today we are going to say why we will not come to school tomorrow” (thanks to my anonymous front row prompt on Saturday who came up with that great idea). Immediately, the students are hooked on a crazy idea, something they don’t entirely understand either, but which they will get down to the bottom of before the end of the day. And talking about their creative ideas in English is fine at first - they will be that much more motivated to express what they want to say than what any textbook thinks makes an interesting example of the future tense.

So today, try starting one lesson from the end, making sure that the end of the story you’re spinning is a good one

Does it make a difference? Does it squeeze another minute or two of concentration out of the class?