Guess who...

...just bagged an 'Outstanding' from an OFSTED inspector?

Except he wasn't working for OFSTED, but in a private capacity, hired by TVU as part of a team to check that all us lecturers are standing on our best tippytoes while balancing the tutorial equivalent of a ball on our noses.
However, it was a bloody good lesson, and one forged out of rather unpromising materials. One thing that worked especially well, and which I pass on free: Speed Dating Information exchange.
the students in this class were split into two groups, reading two different texts, but answering the same questions. After they had finished the texts and answered the questions in their groups, I had them sit down in two rows facing each other. They then began to ask their partners questions in order to elicit information from each other. After a minute, I got one group to move chairs so that they talked to a new partner, and change again after another minute and so on, until each person in the first group had talked to evfery member of the second group. It worked wonderfully well, especially as students had to generate new questions in order to fill in their gaps in the knowledge they had obtained from a previous partner.