51 Tools for Transforming Your Training

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Image of 51 Tools for Transforming Your Training: Bringing Brain-friendly Learning to Life

"Brain-friendly learning" is not about techniques and gimmicks. It is far more than just putting on baroque music, or playing fun games. It's a movement rather than just a method; a movement to recover the real joy of learning that combines both sizzle and substance to every part of your training. This resource provides a blueprint for a new generation of accelerated learning methods. At its heart are five key principles: keep it real; facilitate the flow; honour uniqueness; make it rich and multi-sensory; and state is everything (well almost).

The Wisdom of Crowds

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Image of The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few

Smart people often believe that the opinion of the crowd is always inferior to the opinion of the individual specialist. Philosophical giants such as Nietzsche thought that "Madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups". Henry David Thoreau lamented: "The mass never comes up to the standard of its best member but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest member." The motto of the great and the ordinary seems to be: Bet on the expert because crowds are generally stupid and often dangerous. Business columnist James Surowiecki’s new book The Wisdom of Crowds explains exactly why the conventional wisdom is wrong.

Lend me your ears

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Image of Lend Me Your Ears: All you need to know about making speeches and presentations

This is a groundbreaking, yet practical guide to the art of public speaking. The past twenty years has seen the emergence of an industry standard model of presentation - the slide show. Yet, research has shown that audiences are deeply dissatisfied with this mode of public speaking.

In "Lend Me Your Ears", Max Atkinson - a highly experienced speaker and trainer, having been involved in speech writing for business, politics and the arts for 30 years - uses the findings of recent scientific research combined with the rules of classical rhetoric to highlight the secrets of successful persuasion.

Participation Spice it Up!

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Image of Participation Spice it Up!: Practical Tools for Engaging Children and Young People in Planning and Consultations

Packed full of practical tools and ideas for engaging children and young people, Participation - Spice It Up! is serious fun and a great way to deal with serious issues. For starters, it looks at the ideas and values that underlie our approach to participation. There are also tips on the practicalities and pitfalls of planning and running collaborative and creative sessions. The main course of the book consists of over 40 tried and tested activities you can mix and match. These cover everything from getting started, gathering information, long term planning, evaluation and keeping everyone awake. All the activities are clearly laid out and easy to follow with ideas on how you can creatively adapt them.

The World Cafe

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Image of The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter

"The World Cafe" is an easy-to-use process for fostering collaborative dialogue and creating innovative possibilities for action particularly in large groups. Anyone interested in creating "conversations that matter" can engage the World Cafe approach, with its' seven simple design principles, to improve people's collective capacity to share knowledge and shape the future together.

101 Ways to Develop Your People

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Image of 101 Ways to Develop Your People, without Really Trying: A Manager's Guide to Work Based Learning

Every workplace is riddled with development opportunities - but they often go unnoticed and under-utilised. This paperback shows how to exploit everyday opportunities that don't take a lot of organising and don't wreck the budget. Without question, every manager should have a copy!
This book will help any manager at any level, within any organisation to develop their people, using normal work activities to enhance people's learning in order to improve their effectiveness. It offers a goldmine of practical help and advice on 101 pertinent topics.

The Jelly Effect

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Image of The Jelly Effect: How to Make Your Communication Stick

The Jelly Effect gives you simple, proven techniques for improving your communication and selling ability. Like throwing jelly at a wall, poor communication just doesn't stick. But there are simple, memorable, and affordable ways to win more attention and more business. And anyone can learn them. Every business can benefit from better communication. The Jelly Effect introduces revolutionary communication and persuasion techniques from corporate communications superstar Andy Bounds. You will learn to sell yourself, your ideas and your products or services to customers, prospects and even colleagues. Exercises, quizzes, mini-tests, tips and inspiring stories help you master the art of persuading anyone, individually or in large groups.

Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind

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Image of Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: Why Intelligence Increases When You Think Less

The human brain will do a number of unusual, interesting and important things - if given time. As described in this book, there is evidence from cognitive science and elsewhere that it will learn patterns of a degree of subtlety which normal, purposeful, busy consciousness cannot even see, let alone master; it will make sense out of hazy, ill-defined situations which leave everyday rationality flummoxed; it will get to the bottom of personal, emotional issues much more successfully than the questing intellect; it will detect and respond to meaning - in poetry, for example - that cannot be articulated; and it will sometimes come up with solutions to complicated predicaments that are wise rather than merely clever.

The Back of the Napkin

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Image of Back of the Napkin, The: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures

When Herb Kelleher was brainstorming about how to beat traditional airlines, he grabbed a bar napkin and a pen. Three dots to represent three cities. Three arrows to show direct flights. Problem solved, and the picture made it easy to sell Southwest Airlines to investors and customers. Consultant Dan Roam shows readers how to harness their innate talent for visual thinking, promising that thinking with pictures can help anyone discover and develop new ideas, solve problems in unexpected ways and dramatically improve their ability to share their insights.

Our Iceberg is Melting

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Image of Our Iceberg is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions

This charming story about a penguin colony in Antarctica illustrates key truths about how deal with the issue of change: handle the challenge well and you can prosper greatly; handle it poorly and you put yourself at risk. The penguins are living happily on their iceberg as they have done for many years. Then one curious penguin discovers a potentially devastating problem threatening their home - and pretty much no one listens to him. The characters in this fable are like people we recognise, even ourselves. Their story is one of resistance to change and heroic action, confusion and insight, seemingly intractable obstacles and the most clever tactics for dealing with those obstacles.