Randomness

It can be difficult sometimes to hold students' attention, especially when your class consists of teenagers whose patience and attention span has been shortened by electronic gadgets, or working adults who have used up their energy at work. Thus, anything that can spark learners' attention is a welcome tool, and one way to get people to perk up is by unleashing the unexpected. Anything unpredictable is more likely to attract their attention.

Here are a few ways to use randomness to shake things up:

• In an activity where students are called on to answer, you can use a ball to select who will answer next. Either you can toss the ball to choose, or you can let students choose to whom to throw the ball after they answer. Other ways of choosing who'll answer include drawing slips of paper with students' names and spinning a pen whilst tossing it and letting it land (seeing who it points to, like the game Spin the Bottle).
• When possible, allow students to fill in content to make the flavor of the exercise fresh and unpredictable. This lets people be creative, and nobody's sure what will come next. For example, if practicing the past perfect, a student can make a statement like: "Jorge, when we last had class together, you looked distraught. What had happened?" Jorge then has to say, "I was distraught because my pet giraffe had run away." In this example, the first student gets to (1) choose a victim and (2) choose an emotional adjective, and the second is challenged to react with an interesting response.
• Try also building anticipation with something that hasn't been revealed. For example, imagine that you're teaching the class -ing adjectives like "exciting", "frightening", and "boring". You can produce a folder with a picture inside and ask a random student (I'd choose the one poking at his cellphone) which adjective describes the picture that you're hiding. Watch him become flustered as his expectation oscillates between photos of a bikini model and a wild boar.
• Always be careful not to let the complexity of the randomness overshadow the lesson. For example, if students are learning a tricky bit of grammar, you may be best off relying on a more systematic activity until they have a pretty firm grasp of it.