As part of our Erasmus+ professional development programme, Paralimni Lyceum hosted a two-day interactive teacher training workshop on 31 May and 1 June 2025, led by Nicola McNab, an experienced international trainer with a background in applied linguistics, teacher education, and intercultural communication.

The workshop brought together a diverse group of educators — primarily language teachers (English, Greek, French, Italian, Russian), alongside colleagues from Mathematics and Physics. This blend of backgrounds created a dynamic learning space for collaboration, exchange, and practical inspiration.

Setting the Tone: Icebreaker and Community Building

The workshop opened with a light-hearted icebreaker activity to build rapport and create an inclusive atmosphere. Participants completed and shared personal prompts such as “After teaching, I like to…” and “Something not many people know about me is…”, helping everyone get to know each other and fostering peer connection from the start.

Day 1: Project-Based Learning (PBL) in Action

The first day focused on Project-Based Learning (PBL) — a methodology that encourages language and content learning through collaborative, long-term projects.

Topics covered included:

Theoretical foundations: Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), Task-Based Learning (TBL), the Interactionist Model, and the Noticing Hypothesis
Core principles of PBL: collaboration, negotiation of meaning, creative production, and assessment through reflection
The teacher’s role in scaffolding project stages and providing mini-lessons as needed
Aligning PBL with exam requirements and language development goals

Hands-on group task:
Participants took part in a model PBL activity titled “The Elixir of Life”, where they:

Reflected on the meaning of happiness and well-being
Designed a creative “elixir” (potion) with symbolic ingredients for a long and happy life
Shared their group outcomes in short presentations

This demonstration allowed participants to experience the full arc of a project, from brainstorming and research to collaborative creation, presentation, and reflection.

Day 2: Making Learning Engaging and Learner-Centred

The second day of the workshop introduced participants to two innovative and adaptable methodologies: Gamification and DOGME. Both approaches aim to increase student engagement, promote interaction, and support meaningful learning experiences across subjects. The day concluded with a collaborative lesson planning session and guided reflection.

Part 1: Gamification in the Classroom

Warm up Game Activity: Race to the match!

The session kicked off with an energetic “Race to the Match” activity.

Each group received a set of questions and had to move quickly around the room to match them with the correct answers posted on the walls. The first group to finish with all correct matches won.

Teachers in action during “Race to the Match”

This warm-up was not just a physical icebreaker, but a live demonstration of how competition, movement, and teamwork can be used to activate learning and focus — even before any formal instruction begins.

After the warm-up activity the trainer explained how the game can be used or adapted in the language classroom.

Why Gamify the Classroom?

Following the warm-up, the trainer introduced the pedagogical value of gamification:

By embedding elements of play — such as challenges, rewards, feedback, and collaboration — teachers can increase student motivation, participation, and retention of language.

Gamification is not about turning learning into a game — it's about using game mechanics to create clear goals, engaging tasks, and a positive emotional climate in the classroom.

📹 Video: Nicola McNab explains the principles of gamification and how it supports language learning

Games Explored During the Session

Sentence Building Challenge

In this creative grammar game, participants were given a single word and a topic (e.g. environment, food, holidays etc). Their task was to form a complete, grammatically accurate sentence as quickly as possible.

Points were awarded for:

Speed
Accuracy
Vocabulary level
Creativity

This activity encouraged fast thinking, grammar awareness, and topic relevance — and was easily adaptable to different levels.

📹 Video: Teachers' reflections after the activity

Pronunciation Games

The session also included a series of engaging pronunciation activities designed to raise learners' awareness of individual sounds, improve articulation, and offer creative alternatives to traditional drilling.

One example focused on distinguishing between the voiceless /p/ and voiced /b/ sounds.

Warm-up: As seen in the short video below, teachers began by saying aloud the sounds /p/ and /b/ to feel the difference in voicing and breath. This brief activity helped establish a clear contrast before the main task.

Activity example – Sound Sorting: Teachers were given a set of words (e.g. pig, bag, paper, beach) and asked to sort them under the correct sound category: /p/ or /b/. This encouraged awareness of pronunciation features such as voicing and minimal pairs — particularly useful for learners whose first languages don’t include these contrasts.

Additional pronunciation games included:

A sound maze, where teachers had to identify the correct target sound in a pair of words in order to progress along a path and reach the finish line
Games involving rhythm, stress patterns, and intonation variation

After playing, participants discussed which of these games could be most useful or adaptable in their own classrooms — depending on age group, learner needs, and language level.

📹 Video: Warm-up – voicing practice: /p/ vs /b/

Word Tennis

A quick-response game in which participants took turns naming words from a chosen category (e.g. food, cities, emotions). The aim was to respond without hesitation or repetition. This game built vocabulary fluency and cognitive agility.

Tutti-Frutti

A timed game where players filled out a table of categories (e.g. country, animal, food) with words starting with a selected letter. It combined vocabulary recall with time pressure, encouraging both competition and creativity.

Is That a Monkey in Your Bag?

This humorous, improvisation-based game had participants justify the presence of a random object (like a monkey) in their bag using imaginative explanations. It promoted spontaneous speaking, storytelling, and creativity while reducing speaking anxiety through humour.

Storytelling Chain – Third Conditional

Sitting in a semicircle, participants created a shared story using third conditional grammar.

One person began with a sentence starter like: “If I hadn’t got drunk last night…”, and completed it with a result clause. The next teacher transformed that result clause into a new conditional hypothesis and continued the chain (e.g. “If I hadn't gone dancing …”).

The game developed grammatical accuracy, listening comprehension, and creative continuity, all within a playful storytelling framework.

Other Ideas Shared by the Trainer

Nicola also shared a range of adaptable games and ideas that teachers can tailor to their classrooms, including:

Backs to the Board
Team Spelling Races
Station-based quizzes
Dice or card-based speaking prompts
Use of classroom objects or images to trigger spontaneous language production

These examples showed that gamification doesn’t require expensive resources — just creativity, structure, and a willingness to play with language.

Reflection on the use of games in the classroom

Part 2: DOGME – Teaching Unplugged

The second part of the day introduced DOGME, a flexible, learner-centred teaching approach that thrives on emergent language, spontaneous interaction, and student-generated content.

Core ideas covered:

Teaching with minimal or no materials
Letting students’ voices, interests, and language shape the lesson
Emphasising fluency over form, while offering real-time feedback and upgrades
Being flexible and allowing classroom dialogue to become the curriculum

Strategies discussed:

Starting a lesson with an object, image, or anecdote that provokes conversation
Building tasks or debates from students’ spontaneous comments
Encouraging students to negotiate meaning and co-construct learning moments
Using DOGME moments for speaking practice, vocabulary development, and functional language

Clarified distinction:
While similar to Task-Based Learning (TBL), DOGME places less emphasis on a pre-set outcome and more on interaction as the outcome itself.

DOGME in Action – Two Examples from the Workshop

During the session, participants didn’t just hear about DOGME — they experienced it first-hand through two spontaneous, in-the-moment examples:

Live Interaction Sparked by a Comment

At one point, a participant made an offhand remark, which the trainer picked up on and turned into a brief language-focused exchange. She used the word that had been said as a starting point to elicit further input and explore its different forms, meanings, and uses.

This was a genuine DOGME moment — where the teaching emerged organically from something real, unexpected, and relevant.

Prompt-Based Conversation: “What annoys me the most...”

In another activity, participants were invited to reflect and share their thoughts anonymously on Padlet, starting with the phrase “What annoys me the most…”. Nicola began by sharing her own response, modelling honesty and tone.

The responses submitted led to an authentic, lively group discussion about shared irritations and social habits, creating connection through relatability and offering space for natural language use without imposed constraints.

These moments highlighted that DOGME is not about abandoning structure, but about recognising when learnable language arises naturally — and being ready to act on it. Teachers reflected on how these moments could be intentionally invited or simply welcomed when they arise.

Participants left this part of the workshop with a better sense of how DOGME can be integrated into any classroom — not as a rigid method, but as a responsive mindset.

Part 3: Collaborative Lesson Planning & Reflection

To wrap up the two-day workshop, participants formed small groups and were invited to design short lesson plans or teaching sequences inspired by one of the approaches explored during the training:

Project-Based Learning (PBL)
Gamification
DOGME

Each group developed a mini-lesson tailored to their subject area, learner profile, and classroom context. These were presented informally, sparking peer feedback, practical adaptation ideas, and shared inspiration across teaching disciplines.

Following the group presentations, the workshop concluded with a guided reflection session, where participants discussed:

Which approach (PBL, Gamification, or DOGME) felt most aligned with their teaching style
What new strategies they felt confident trying in their classrooms
Which activities were most memorable or surprising during the workshop
Concerns or open questions they still had about adapting the methods to large or mixed-ability classes

The conversation also touched on:

How to balance spontaneity and structure when applying DOGME moments
Ways to integrate gamification without over-relying on competition
Opportunities to co-create projects with students, using their ideas as springboards for learning
The value of professional exchange across subjects, especially when it comes to classroom engagement and inclusion

Participants expressed appreciation for the practical nature of the workshop, its interactive format, and the opportunity to see real-time application of theory through demonstration, modelling, and shared experience.

The session closed with a sense of renewed motivation and several concrete takeaways to apply back in their classrooms — and a mutual feeling that playful, participatory teaching can bring both joy and effectiveness to the learning process.

Reflection activity on the wall with post it notes:

Powerpoint presentation for both days:

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