This book aims to help teachers, trainers and lecturers to get away from a lecture-based approach to training. A new technique ‘Loop-input’ is introduced gradually throughout the book so that, by the end, the reader will be able to plan run, assess, and adapt their sessions in this new way. The idea is illustrated throughout with the help of metaphors, diagrams and similes drawn from parallel fields.

This book is aimed at trainers of foreign language teachers, teachers who run training sessions, and teachers' self-help groups. Regardless of which particular combination of course type, trainee type and trainer you are involved with, two things will be important. One is content, that is, what information, skills or knowledge you want to pass on to trainees or to elicit from them. The other is process, that is, how the content is elicited, shared or acted upon. The highly innovative Models and Metaphors in Language Teacher Training is concerned primarily with the latter aspect.

Planning from Lesson to Lesson
A way of making lesson planning easier
Tessa Woodward and Seth Lindstromberg 1995 (Pilgrims Longman)

This teacher's resource book contains over 50 re-usable activities, creating hundreds of classroom tasks. The book's key feature is that it shows teachers how they can extend and adapt a single activity over a series of lessons with the same group of learners. This means that activities can be re-cycled, helping teachers with individual lesson planning as well as course planning.

2001 Tessa Woodward (Cambridge University Press Handbooks for Language teachers)

​This book provides a step-by-step approach to lesson planning. Although easily accessible, the ideas presented are rooted in established educational theory. The chapters are based on real life questions such as:

What can go into a lesson or course?

How do people learn?

How can I teach?

What materials can I choose?

How can I get started on planning?

​The book helps inexperienced teachers to gain confidence in establishing sound working practices and will give more experienced teachers ideas to refresh their routines. The book was short-listed for the Ben Warren Prize.

Ways of Working with Teachers: Principled recipes for the core task of teacher training, teacher education and mentoring

This book concentrates on the ways that information, ideas, opinions, skills and awareness can be shared in teacher training and development settings. It deals with the following core areas:

Trainer, group, and experiential information-sharing

Interaction with information and material

Consolidating information and experience and transforming these into productivity and creativity

Planning, observing and discussing teaching

Finding out about yourself, others and the job of language teaching

Ways of reducing stress on teacher training courses

Continuing Professional Development for the whole staff.

Headstrong: A Book of Thinking Frameworks for Mental Exercise (Paperback)

This book cuts a clear, workable path for EFL teachers through recent developments in teaching thinking for all ages and in all school and college subjects. It progresses to the fundamentals of building a positive class atmosphere for communicating well and in English.
The book offers over 30 well-thought out, realistic tips for teachers and over 85 practical, easy-to-use activities for language classes. These tips and activities encourage flexibility, fun, creativity and rigour in teacher and student thinking. They involve minimal preparation and a wide range of interesting topics. Most of the activities are multi-level and adaptable from elementary to advanced students. Many integrate the skills of listening, speaking, reading and/or writing.

Thinking in the EFL Class is extremely valuable in helping teachers stay interested in their work and in helping students cope with the demands of learning a language and living in a restless, changeable world. It also provides teachers with ready-to-use handouts, freely downloadable.

Something To Say: Ready-to-use speaking activities
Seth Lindstromberg and Tessa Woodward 2014 (Helbling)

This is a photocopiable resource book designed to help develop automatic fluency, a key element in successful speaking skills for language learners. The activities in the book will help students realise that both they and their classmates are more interesting and creative than they had imagined as well as consolidating students’ control of common grammatical structures and expanding their English lexical base. The level range is from low-intermediate to advanced.

Tessa Woodward, Kathleen Graves and Donald Freeman 2019 (Routledge)

​This book addresses teacher learning over the span of the careers of both novice and experienced teachers in English Language Teaching (ELT). It is designed to a) help novice ELT teachers to see the ways in which their learning may open up careers and communities over a professional life span; and b) support experienced ELT teachers in understanding where they are in their careers and how they may respond creatively to the challenges in that particular career phase. Part 1 synthesises the views of major research on teaching as it is experienced over time by teachers and discusses the implications. Readers engage with these ideas via the activities in Part 2, which encourage them to reflect on their career paths and on possible themes for future work. Part 3 describes ways teachers can set the Part 2 activities within a busy professional life, and Part 4 helps teachers to engage in further explorations on their own or with others. By merging a strong line of research with very practical tools for understanding professional development, Teacher Development Over Time proves to be an indispensable resource for language teachers as well as teacher educators and mentors. It was a finalist in the British Council ELTONS Innovation Awards 2019.

Booklet and CD containing short stories of just under ten minutes each.

Friends and family, good enough to accept my first offering of short stories, encouraged me by asking for second helpings. So, I put together another collection called 'Short Comings'. The title reflects the fact that the stories are not long and have come to me unbidden; after overhearing conversations on trains, experiencing events, listening to friends or simply daydreaming. ​

The two words in the title, if joined together, indicate fallibility*, which is something I know quite a bit about. So, naturally, the characters in these stories and the stories themselves have imperfections too! I've read some of the stories out loud for the accompanying CD but not all.

* Shortcomings: defects, faults, flaws, imperfections, failings, foibles.

My third short story collection, this one illustrates the idea that life is not at any one moment wholly wonderful nor totally dreadful. It is more, well, dappled!

Kath, a restless 30-something, is tired of her noisy life in London. She persuades her partner Ben to move to a village in the Kent countryside. Together they navigate the problems of finding a place to live and work. But then find that rural life is not the paradise they had expected. Life in the slow lane is changing, and fast. Will Kath and Ben stay in their newfound hamlet? Will they flee back to the big smoke? How will they be seen by the locals? Will the couple even stay together?
This humorous series of episodes, based loosely on the author’s own experiences, takes us beyond the image of thatched country cottages and peaceful games of cricket on the village green. Instead, we find quirky characters, cracked church bells, fiercely competitive gardeners and housing developments threatening the orchards.