Learning Journeys

This book brings together a who's who of today's most successful leadership experts and consultants who share personal lessons.

Better Learning Solutions Through Better Learning Experiences When training and development initiatives treat learning as something that occurs as a one-time event, the learner and the business suffer. Using design thinking can help talent development professionals ensure learning sticks to drive improved performance. Design Thinking for Training and Development offers a primer on design thinking, a human-centered process and problem-solving methodology that focuses on involving users of a solution in its design. For effective design thinking, talent development professionals need to go beyond the UX, the user experience, and incorporate the LX, the learner experience. In this how-to guide for applying design thinking tools and techniques, Sharon Boller and Laura Fletcher share how they adapted the traditional design thinking process for training and development projects. Their process involves steps to: Get perspective. Refine the problem. Ideate and prototype. Iterate (develop, test, pilot, and refine). Implement. Design thinking is about balancing the three forces on training and development programs: learner wants and needs, business needs, and constraints. Learn how to get buy-in from skeptical stakeholders. Discover why taking requests for training, gathering the perspective of stakeholders and learners, and crafting problem statements will uncover the true issue at hand. Two in-depth case studies show how the authors made design thinking work. Job aids and tools featured in this book include: a strategy blueprint to uncover what a stakeholder is trying to solve an empathy map to capture the learner’s thoughts, actions, motivators, and challenges an experience map to better understand how the learner performs. With its hands-on, use-it-today approach, this book will get you started on your own journey to applying design thinking.

Janet Gregory and Lisa Crispin pioneered the agile testing discipline with their previous work, Agile Testing. Now, in More Agile Testing, they reflect on all they've learned since. They address crucial emerging issues, share evolved agile practices, and cover key issues agile testers have asked to learn more about. Packed with new examples from real teams, this insightful guide offers detailed information about adapting agile testing for your environment; learning from experience and continually improving your test processes; scaling agile testing across teams; and overcoming the pitfalls of automated testing. You'll find brand-new coverage of agile testing for the enterprise, distributed teams, mobile/embedded systems, regulated environments, data warehouse/BI systems, and DevOps practices. You'll come away understanding - How to clarify testing activities within the team - Ways to collaborate with business experts to identify valuable features and deliver the right capabilities - How to design automated tests for superior reliability and easier maintenance - How agile team members can improve and expand their testing skills - How to plan "just enough," balancing small increments with larger feature sets and the entire system - How to use testing to identify and mitigate risks associated with your current agile processes and to prevent defects - How to address challenges within your product or organizational context - How to perform exploratory testing using "personas" and "tours" - Exploratory testing approaches that engage the whole team, using test charters with session- and thread-based techniques - How to bring new agile testers up to speed quickly-without overwhelming them The eBook edition of More Agile Testing also is available as part of a two-eBook collection, The Agile Testing Collection (9780134190624).

It is clear that teacher educators have ongoing professional learning and development needs. Chief among these are continuing to learn about content developments and pedagogical practices useful for teaching a range of PK-12 students in varying contexts; developing reflective competencies and sets of practices useful for teaching teacher candidates about teaching; effectively balancing teaching commitments with institutional expectations for scholarship and service; and forging useful understandings of identity across the spectrum of teacher educator responsibility and development over time, including taking on managerial or administrative roles. Working in institutions largely devoid of formal support mechanisms, teacher educators are often left on their own to meet these needs and subsequently must create or seek out opportunities for their ongoing growth. This volume explores in greater depth how exactly teacher educators engage in professional learning and development across their career trajectories. University-based teacher educator learning occurs in a range of settings and across the career span. Contributors to this volume describe university-based teacher educator learning spaces focused on their ongoing professional learning. Such spaces include teacher educator communities of practice, critical friendships, self-study learning groups, faculty learning groups, co-mentoring, and institutionally sponsored professional learning spaces.

In this inventive mix of criticism, scholarship, and personal reflection, Carrie J. Preston explores the nature of cross-cultural teaching, learning, and performance. Throughout the twentieth century, Japanese noh was a major creative catalyst for American and European writers, dancers, and composers. The noh theater's stylized choreography, poetic chant, spectacular costumes and masks, and engagement with history inspired Western artists as they reimagined new approaches to tradition and form. In Learning to Kneel, Preston locates noh's important influence on such canonical figures as Pound, Yeats, Brecht, Britten, and Beckett. These writers learned about noh from an international cast of collaborators, and Preston traces the ways in which Japanese and Western artists influenced one another. Preston's critical work was profoundly shaped by her own training in noh performance technique under a professional actor in Tokyo, who taught her to kneel, bow, chant, and submit to the teachings of a conservative tradition. This encounter challenged Preston's assumptions about effective teaching, particularly her inclinations to emphasize Western ideas of innovation and subversion and to overlook the complex ranges of agency experienced by teachers and students. It also inspired new perspectives regarding the generative relationship between Western writers and Japanese performers. Pound, Yeats, Brecht, and others are often criticized for their orientalist tendencies and misappropriation of noh, but Preston's analysis and her journey reflect a more nuanced understanding of cultural exchange.

Great leaders are great learners More than a decade ago, a group of bestselling authors, thought leaders and management experts - among them Marshall Goldsmith, Beverly Kaye and Ken Shelton - met to share their defining moments on leadership with one another. So taken were they with each other's stories that an annual tradition of trading leadership secrets was established. A recurring truth emerged: great leaders seize the opportunity to learn, again and again. Learn Like a Leader brings together these remarkable stories of learning and provides a close look at how top leaders - including Jim Collins, Warren Bennis and Dave Ulrich - were able to grow their careers, overcome setbacks and soar to the top. Offering profound lessons from key learning moments in the lives and careers of the contributors, Learn Like a Leader conveys the power of storytelling in teaching, training and mentoring.

Good healthcare is about more than making a diagnosis and giving the correct medical treatment - the experience of those going through the system is hugely important. As a result, the use of patient stories or “narratives” in learning is gathering significant support and interest. This is a collection of such narratives from children and from the parents of children with a range of long-term or complex conditions. They would be useful for medical students and instructors, but also for anyone working for children with chronic and complex conditions, including nurses and other allied health professionals, as well as psychology students. There are also essays on points arising from a parent and from those involved as a tutor and as a student. A free sample chapter is available via the Downloads / Updates tab on our website.

Wright offers this searing and uplifting account of her spiritual journey that begins with her surviving a terrible accident to her triumphant ascent of Mt. Kilimanjaro.

This trusted teacher resource and course text provides a comprehensive approach to assessing and building children's word knowledge (grades K–8). Kathy Ganske shows how carefully planned word study can improve students' reading and writing skills while fostering their appreciation of language. Complete instructions are provided for implementing the Developmental Spelling Analysis (DSA), an easy-to-use assessment tool, and for tailoring instruction to learners' strengths and weaknesses. Numerous word lists, student work samples, and "Literature Links" are included, along with 27 reproducible forms. The large-size format facilitates photocopying. Purchasers also get access to a webpage where they can download and print the reproducible materials. New to This Edition: *Addresses the Common Core State Standards. *Incorporates additional activities and technology tips, plus updated research findings. *Chapter explaining the meaning of word study and its role in literacy instruction, including "Researcher Voices" perspectives from noted experts. *Ideas for making the most of small-group instructional time. *Expanded "Literature Links" book lists, now including informational texts. *DSA answer sheets have been enhanced for easier scoring and several new reproducibles added. See also the companion volumes from Ganske, Word Sorts and More, Second Edition: Sound, Pattern, and Meaning Explorations K–3 and Mindful of Words, Second Edition: Spelling and Vocabulary Explorations, Grades 4–8, which provide a wealth of ready-to-use word study activities.

Many industries today are putting humans at the center of the business. The same is true for L&D. Use the Moments That Matter in Corporate Learning Framework to put people at the center of learning. In this issue of TD at Work, Marek Hyla, Ariel Wrona, Grzegorz Plezia, and Natalia Kmiec-Braun explain the six moments, associated experiences, and the individuals involved who are part of the learning journey. Further, they: · Detail why each moment is important and how to create an effective experience. · Suggest questions to ask learners along the way to create the best learning journey. · Offer considerations that can facilitate or detract from learning. The Tools & Resources in this issue is the Moments That Matter checklist for instructional designers.