The Art of Persuasion — a two-hour speaking club, already planned
Twelve activities, 120 minutes, written out in order: a check-in, Sell Me This Napkin, two rounds of daily dilemmas, then twenty-minute blocks on the corporate pitch, the social pitch and the compromise challenge, four fast rounds of Category Crash, and a closing feedback slot. The screen shows the group only the task. The facilitator's notes stay hidden behind a button, and the timer counts up.
Two screens in one, and that is the point
What makes this runnable by someone who has never hosted a speaking club is the split. Project it and the room sees a large prompt and nothing else. Tap Moderator Notes and you get the instructions, the angles to push, and the follow-up questions — visible only to you. You are not improvising a session or reading from a sheet of paper while twenty people watch; you are reading the same screen they are, with more on it.
The napkin is the most important fifteen minutes
Selling an object off the table is silly, which is exactly why it works as the second activity. Nobody can fail at it and nobody has to expose anything real, so the group warms up on persuasion mechanics — hook, benefit, objection, close — before the stakes rise. Skip it to save time and the corporate pitch an hour later will be noticeably flatter, because the room never practised persuading without consequences first.
The functional language the tasks demand
Every prompt is an open scenario rather than a scripted dialogue, so the language has to be improvised: hedging (I see your point, but), conceding (fair enough, however), trading conditions (I could agree to that if), and closing. This density is why negotiation practice is efficient for B2 and C1 groups — a single fifteen-minute round elicits more complex structures than an hour of open discussion, and each structure arrives attached to a purpose.
Give the two sides different goals
A negotiation where both parties want the same outcome is a conversation. Before each pitch round, tell each side privately what they need — who pays, who chooses, who has to compromise, and what they cannot give up. The conflict does the teaching. Without it, students agree politely in ninety seconds and look at you expectantly.
Feedback between rounds, not at the end
Use the closing slot for the group's reflection, but run a thirty-second language moment after each activity instead of saving everything for the end. Name one persuasive move that worked and one that was missed. Students can apply it immediately in the next round, which they cannot do with a list delivered at 8 p.m. when everyone is packing up.
Running it, and running it again
B2 to C1, two hours as written, though the blocks are independent enough to build a forty-five minute session from three of them. Once a group has been through it, hand the moderator screen to a strong student for the second session — summarising positions neutrally and keeping time is a genuinely C1 task, and far harder than taking part.
Goes well with
Further reading
Group Dynamics in Large Classes — making thirty students talk
Error Correction in Speaking — when to interrupt and when to wait