Visual Storyteller — five companies that saw it coming and did nothing
Five slides, five famous business failures. Kodak invented the digital camera and buried it. Blockbuster was offered Netflix and said no. Nokia made a phone you could not break and a market that no longer wanted one. Twelve publishers turned down a manuscript about a wizard. Google Glass made its own users into a punchline. Each slide carries a photograph, three discussion questions and five words to use while answering them.
Show the picture before you show the name
This is the single instruction that matters, and it is in the moderator notes for a reason. A camera, a video rental shop, an indestructible phone — let the class look and guess what the company is and what went wrong. Prediction from an image costs nothing and produces speculation language immediately: it might be about…, this looks like the nineties. Reveal the name and the questions afterwards, into a room that already has an opinion.
The second question is the grammar engine
Each slide asks what the company should have done differently. That is a past modal of regret, and it is one of the structures intermediate learners recognise instantly and produce almost never. Here they cannot avoid it, because the question cannot be answered without it — they should have launched it, they could have bought Netflix, they shouldn't have ignored the warnings. One slide gives you more genuine production of that form than a page of exercises.
Business failure beats personal failure for adult groups
The stakes are real and public, so there is a documented answer to argue about, but nobody in the room is exposed. A student who will not talk about their own mistakes will argue at length about Kodak's. That makes this the safer choice for a new group, a corporate class, or any room where you do not yet know what is comfortable.
The vocabulary box is for before, not after
Each slide lists five words — invention, bankruptcy, fear, digital, opportunity on the Kodak slide. Pre-teach them in thirty seconds before the discussion opens, then require that each speaker uses at least one. Introduced afterwards they are just a list; introduced beforehand they become the tools the students reach for, and you can hear them being used in real time.
Rotate three roles and one image becomes three tasks
Assign a Reporter who states only the facts, an Analyst who speculates about causes using past modals, and a Consultant who explains what they would have advised at the time. Three passes over the same slide, three different grammatical loads, no repeated sentences. With five slides and three roles, a class of fifteen can run the whole deck with everyone speaking in a substantial role.
Level and length
B1 upward; the third question on each slide (is fear of change dangerous?) reaches comfortably into B2 and C1 territory. Five to eight minutes per slide, so one slide is a warm-up and the full deck is a lesson. Navigate at your own pace with Prev and Next — there is no timer, and the deck is designed to be stopped wherever the discussion is still good.
Goes well with
Further reading
Smartboard Games in ESL — what the big screen is good for
Group Dynamics in Large Classes — making thirty students talk