Today's lesson was a bit shorter than usual but we still had time to discuss the article by Sue Clarke about Stirrers and Settlers that we had to read as homework.
The article is oriented towards education in Primary Classrooms, but I think that since we're dealing with English as a Foreign Language (EFL), our students (and ourselves as teachers) can benefit a lot from these techniques regardless of their age.
In the first place, according to the author of the article, Stirrers and Settlers are a way of channelling this (the students') energy. This means that teachers can find different ways to get their students moving and talking or working silently by themselves as needed.
The whole objective of including Stirrers and Settlers is achieving a balanced lesson. After all, as language teachers we do want our students to communicate and participate actively in our lessons but we surely don't want our classrooms to be places of perpetual chaos.
One of the most concrete reasons to include them presented in the article is that children have a short concentration span, but in fact most teenagers (and sure, adults as well) have a short concentration span too. Knowing this, including long and tedious activities in our lessons would only make our students' learning processes harder, so I enthusiastically support the integration of Stirrers and Settlers in our EFL lessons.
In this other article, the author suggests songs, roleplays, ball games, class games and mingles as Stirrers, and drawing, silent reading or story-telling, word games and arts and crafts as Settlers.
The type of settler activity I like the most among the ones suggested by Sue Clark, is Categorising and Brainstorming. I think it is a very versatile technique that can be adapted to different topics, levels of proficiency and students' interests, so it is easy to integrate and modify according to the group we're teaching. Besides, brainstorming and categorising can be very helpful to activate and build prior knowledge at the beginning of a lesson.
Regarding stirrers, I'm very fond of Surveys, as suggested by Clark, because they give students a chance to move around the classroom and to use some features of the language repeatedly. For instance, if teaching students how to ask for and tell the time, one could make everyone draw a clock with a different time and then have students ask their classmates 'what time is it?' to give them a chance to practice.
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