Our free professional development series for language teachers returns this September — and the first session lands just as classrooms everywhere are filling up again.
Teachers’ Refresher: Back to School takes place on Thursday 17 September 2026 at 6:00 pm (Rome time). It’s free to attend, fully interactive, and designed to be useful the very next morning.
Why the First Lesson Matters More Than We Admit
Every teacher knows the feeling of that opening lesson. A new group, a summer’s worth of forgotten vocabulary, and a room where nobody quite wants to speak first.
It’s tempting to treat those early sessions as a warm-up — a bit of admin, a placement test, a gentle easing-in before the “real” teaching starts. But the first few lessons of a school year do something far more consequential than fill time. They establish what the classroom is going to feel like for the next nine months: whether speaking is safe, whether mistakes are survivable, whether effort is noticed.
Set that tone well and you spend the year building on it. Set it badly and you spend the year working against it.
Getting Students Talking from Minute One
The central challenge of a back-to-school lesson is a practical one: how do you get a roomful of hesitant students communicating before their confidence has had time to return?
The answer is rarely a formal exercise. It’s activities with a low barrier to entry and a high tolerance for imperfection — tasks where students are so focused on the content that they forget to be self-conscious about the language.
In this session we’ll work through several that earn their place in any teacher’s back-to-school toolkit:
Two Truths and a Lie — deceptively simple, endlessly adaptable. Students produce language naturally while listening closely to one another, and the teacher gets an immediate read on fluency, question formation and risk-taking.
Emoji storytelling — a visual prompt that removes the blank-page problem entirely. Because the scaffolding is non-linguistic, it works across a remarkably wide range of levels, from near-beginners to advanced groups who can push the narrative into more complex tenses.
Holiday surveys — a structured way to get students moving, asking and reporting, while giving you a natural window into their conversational range.
We’ll look at how each one can be adapted up or down the levels, so the same core activity serves an A2 class and a B2 class equally well.
Assessment That Doesn’t Feel Like Assessment
There’s a second thing happening while your students are laughing their way through a guessing game: you’re gathering information.
Informal diagnostic assessment — watching, listening, noting — often tells you more in twenty minutes than a formal test tells you in an hour. You see who volunteers and who waits to be asked. You hear which structures have survived the summer and which have quietly disappeared. You notice the student whose grammar is strong but whose confidence isn’t, and the one whose confidence far outruns their accuracy.
None of that shows up on a placement score. All of it shapes how you teach the group.
The webinar will cover how to make these observations systematically, so that the fun of the first lesson is also doing serious pedagogical work.
Routines, Reflection and Independent Learners
Beyond the opening activities, the session turns to the structures that carry a class through the year.
We’ll look at establishing positive classroom routines — the small, repeatable rituals that reduce friction and free up cognitive space for actual learning. We’ll discuss how to build reflection into lessons so students develop the habit of noticing their own progress rather than waiting to be told about it. And we’ll consider practical strategies for nudging learners towards genuine independence, which remains one of the most valuable things any language teacher can hand over.
These aren’t abstract principles. They’re the mechanisms that determine whether a class still has momentum in March.
What You’ll Take Away
As always with the Teachers’ Refresher series, participants receive:
- A Certificate of Attendance
- A webinar handout with activity instructions and useful links
Everything is designed to be practical. You should leave with material you can use immediately, not a set of notes to file away and forget.
Join Us — It’s Free
The Teachers’ Refresher webinars are open to all language teachers, free of charge. Whether you’re starting a new academic year with familiar classes or walking into a room of complete strangers, this session is built to give your lessons a confident, purposeful start.
📅 Thursday 17 September 2026 | 🕕 6:00 pm (Rome time) | 💻 Online via Zoom
👉 Register free for Teachers’ Refresher: Back to School
Places are limited and registration takes less than a minute. We look forward to seeing you there — and to a school year that starts as it means to go on.
