While working at a large advertising agency back in my homeland, I volunteered to manage the production of an in-house magazine for staff at all levels.

What seemed like a fun idea soon became a challenging and nearly unmanageable task. Some of you may recognize or can imagine this scenario.

Content was initially agreed upon in meetings with senior management and department heads, with a publication deadline set. However, contributors were often unavailable, busy, or constantly rescheduled or delegated the task to subordinates who didn't quite meet expectations. After a year of this, I was relieved to pass the project on, especially since I was leaving advertising for a new career in Southeast Asia.

In Cambodia, I was offered the chance to manage a magazine for students of English at a private language center, but I politely declined. Later, while teaching business students in Vietnam, I was asked to get involved in another magazine project, which I also declined.

Since moving to Thailand, I've often considered creating a simple magazine for students. But with a schedule focused on younger students (P1 to P4). I set aside the idea because doing all the groundwork myself wasn’t practical. This year, however, I’m teaching conversational English to M2 and leading a special project group with M5 students. With their help, I've decided to bring the magazine idea to life and will document its development over the school year.

In this article, I’ll cover the details of the first edition, which surprisingly came together smoothly.

The first three challenges were:

a) The students were unfamiliar with the activity, making it an unknown venture.

b) The English level needed to be high enough for confident publication.

c) Although I have a creative background in advertising, I am not a designer. I wanted the first issue to stand out.

Here’s what I did:

I found sample school magazines online, adapted the pictures, and made the content more engaging and relevant for Thai teens. With their interest piqued, I explained that their work on the magazine would significantly impact their term grades. Once they were on board, we did a Q&A session in class, where students interviewed each other to discover personal interests, heroes, and more.

After creating basic profiles, students self-corrected their information and joined teams. Each team took a group picture and selected an English name. I then found a magazine template online, customized it, and filled it with the students' profiles and photos. Finally, I printed around fifteen full-color copies and posted them on notice boards around the school. Feedback has been very positive so far.

Next steps:

I’ve assigned each learning group a specific theme:

• Food & Restaurants
• Games & Cartoons
• Fashion & Shopping
• Music
• Jokes & Comic Strips (translating humor between languages is often the toughest!)

Each team has a document to complete using the five main "wh-" questions and "how." For example, the Food & Restaurants team will answer:

• What is your favorite restaurant?
• Where is it?
• Who do you go with?
• When do you go?
• Why do you like it?
• How much does an average meal cost?

Once students provide feedback and photos, I’ll guide them through language modeling and then involve them in producing the second issue. I haven’t set a publication date because this will depend on when the students achieve a confident level of conversational English. But I'm really looking forward to seeing the end results.