Ways of Doing : Students Explore their Everyday and Classroom Processes (Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers)

Rating:
Summary: Innovative
Review: Before purchasing this book I attended a Paul Davis workshop and got to see many of the activities in this book. I can understand that this book can strike teachers as strange but I believe that it's the whole point. They seem stranger on paper but in reality many have worked wonders for me.

Few methodology books include new and innovative material. Ways of Doing will give you many new activities that can bring your classroom to life with not much preparation time.

It includes both teacher-centered and student-centered activities so it can be good to both the "charismatic" and the "not so charismatic" teacher.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting, but not very helpful
Review: I found this book, like all of the books in the Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers series, very interesting to read. Davis and Rinvolucri always write books that are full of unusual ideas. This book is, too. However, I found it less useful than their other books as a source of things to do in class, because most of the activities in this book are simply too unusual, and will require an exceptionally charismatic teacher to make them work. I teach English in Asia, and I have found that the students here are much less willing to accept new or strange techniques than are European and North American students. To sum up, the book may open up to you a new and fruitful way of designing activities for class, but I don't think that you will be able to use many of the specific activities that they present.