Take your students on a mission to learn with this innovative book, says Wayne Trotman

ESCAPE THE CLASSROOM

Fiona Wall Minami

Perceptia Press, 2020

ISBN: 978-4-939130-29-8

The author of this supremely intriguing title is a firm believer in the psychological notion of ‘flow’. “What on earth does that have to do with language teaching?”, I hear you murmur over your cornflakes. A much deeper explanation can be read in her brief and hugely informative introduction, but in layman’s terms, flow relates to a state of complete absorption with an activity, such as those participating in the many enigmatic missions in this book will probably experience, a kind of heightened sense of interest. It all sounds rather heavy, I know, but bear with me; this really is a book with a difference.

From her brief biodata, the author has a clear history of escape rooms, including war bunkers in Austria, plus – and you’ll probably be as surprised as I was to learn – an Aztec gold mine in the north of England. (Yes, really!) The goal in escape rooms is clearly to work as a team, finding useful objects, breaking codes, opening locks and solving puzzles; all within a strict time-limit of course. Each of the 15 missions in this title has six absorbing activities that test the learner’s memory, powers of observation and ability to remain calm under pressure. All these attributes enable them to escape the classroom and how many learners do you know who would not wish to do that?

“The initial activity involves learners guessing from the eye-catching 
full-page illustration what clues it reveals concerning what they are going 
to be asked to do”

In order to avoid spoilers, apart from missions one and 15, they can be covered in any order; so, let’s jump into the first, titled ‘Enigma’. As with most of them, the initial activity involves learners guessing from the eye-catching full-page illustration what clues it reveals concerning what they are going to be asked to do. Befitting the mission title, there then follows a vocabulary task on codes, which was quite enlightening for me personally as I couldn’t answer most of them. Further evidence that I’m a dinosaur, perhaps, but do you yourself know what QR stands for in relation to the recent trend in QR codes? This led to the first of many visits I subsequently made to the detailed and almost life-saving ‘Teacher’s Guide’. (To save your own time, the answer is ‘quick response’, though I was sure it was quality reader). I should also add that within the vocabulary task there was a hidden password, one which I took pride in working out.

Following the above, missions deal with the topics of survival, clocks, aliens and play, each involving work on common idioms and expressions in English, such as ‘killing time’ and ‘once in a blue moon’. Along with these are further motivating tasks, like the several open-ended quiz questions that involve group participation. Although I wasn’t so successful in the quiz activities and was occasionally completely baffled when searching for the code word, I felt much more motivated by the word-search puzzles.

The business end of each mission, though, is the final activity – the escape. I tried the lot and can report that the task to escape from mission three, titled ‘Clocks’, was the most fun. I carried it out with a trial group who had only five minutes to find a dozen or so common classroom items before a mysterious terrorist organisation set off a bomb that would obliterate the classroom itself and all within it. Did I not announce above this was a book with a different outlook on ELT matters?

While it may never replace the mainstream course books that tend to prevail, as a supplementary resource it would certainly add a bit of spice to any of them. As the contents of the missions might suggest, this title would probably be best used with learners at a high level, probably B1 and above.

Wayne Trotman is a teacher educator at Izmir Katip Çelebi University, Izmir, Turkey.