When I started teaching, the teachers’ rooms I worked in didn’t have wifi or computers (or if they did, it would be ONE computer that most likely gathered dust in the corner). But they did have lots of books, and large tables. A very common sight in these staffrooms would be a teacher carefully cutting out little pieces of paper for a communicative activity to use in class. It’s very likely that this activity would come from a book authored by Jill Hadfield. I know that I spent many hours preparing and running such activities, and one of my earliest treasured possessions as a teacher was my very own copy of Elementary Communication Games.

It was a great moment for me when I first met Jill and her husband Charlie at an ELT conference in Spain, where I interviewed them for the IATEFL Teacher Trainer’s SIG newsletter. Later I would come to know them much more, and I was honoured to eventually collaborate and co-write two books with Jill. When I heard the sad news that Jill had passed away earlier this year, I thought of all the activities that I had learned from her over the years. These activities brought lots of joy and communicative fun to my classes. Here are six of my personal favourite activities by Jill Hadfield.

1 Ladybird Bingo (Beginner Communication Games Longman 1999)

This was the first activity I thought of in the category of ‘cutting-up-lots-of-bits-of-paper’. This is essentially a simple little game of bingo but instead of cards with numbers on them, the students have cards with lots of ladybirds on them. Each ladybird has a different number of spots you need to count. It’s a classic example of a very simple twist that makes the activity original. One thing I appreciated as a novice teacher about all the games in Jill’s Communication Games books was the Demonstration instructions and Classroom language to use to explain how to do the game. This not only helped me explain the game, but also helped me with my classroom instructions in general.

2 Sensory Poem (Live Online Teaching, with Lindsay Clandfield Pavilion Publishing 2021)

Writing with Jill was always an enjoyable experience. We would spend hours on zoom calls trading ideas back and forth. Jill had much more of an artistic bent that I do. She often brought nice poetry and creative writing ideas to the projects. The Sensory Poem activity involved students creating their own poem based on what they hear/see/smell outside their window. It follows a simple structure (e.g. plural noun + verb+ing) and was the perfect activity during the covid lockdowns, which was when we wrote the book it appears in.

3 Art Monologues (Interaction Online, with Lindsay Clandfield Cambridge University Press 29017)

This is another example of a creative writing exercise, but adapted for online forum groups. In Art Monologues, students are assigned a portrait painting and have to write the internal monologue of the subject of the painting. They then guess who other students wrote about. The staging of this activity, which was written to be done in a forum or messaging group, really works well.  

4 Tower Block (Intermediate Communication Games, Longman 1990)

Almost as much as cutting up bits of paper, I associate the Communication Games books with the puzzles that were in them. These were sometimes real brain burners! The Tower Block game (which Jill writes can be played with 7 to 46 students!) is one such example. In Tower Block, each student is assigned a role card. They are all students in a large, multi-floor university residence. They need to read their role cards to find out where their rooms are and put themselves in order on a floor plan. The role cards are hilarious, here’s an example:

You’re a computer science student and you have a very noisy room on the first floor. On your right there’s a biology student who plays the guitar excruciatingly badly and on the other side there’s a philosophy student who has earnest and excitable discussions late at night. You can’t think what these philosophy students get so worked up about. And above you there’s some kind of amateur jazz musician.

5 Group portrait with melon (Classroom Dynamics, Oxford University Press 1992)

Another aspect of Jill’s work was a focus on the importance of group dynamics in the classroom. Her book on the topic, Classroom Dynamics, was full of not only fun activities but really useful advice and strategies for managing groups. This book could be equally useful for anyone involved in training or working with groups in education or not. One of the activities I most remember was ‘Group portrait with melon’, where all the students need to dress up (or wear different hats) and pose for a photograph with an ‘intriguing object such as a melon’. After the photo is taken, they come up with stories behind why they were all there at that particular time with that particular object. It’s feasible, it’s creative and it’s quirky.

6 Describing people (Simple Speaking Activities, with Charles Hadfield, Oxford University Press 1999)

When I first met Jill and Charlie, they were giving a talk based on a series of books they had collaborated on specifically for classrooms with minimal resources. This book had emerged from the teaching they had done in Africa and Tibet - their book A Winter in Tibet (Impact Books 1988) is also a worthwhile read about the experience. Any of the activities in the book Simple Speaking Activities are great for beginners. I like ‘Describing People’. By using the frames ‘We are both_____ / We have both got _____’, students begin creating sentences to describe themselves and others and finding commonalities. It’s a small but simple activity that encourages cooperation, understanding and kindness. I think this perfectly encapsulates so much of Jill’s work.