The time a teacher takes in explaining is inversely proportional to the information retained by students.
Yak, Yak, Yak In Teaching and Learning
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Author Archives: Robert Bacal
Jan
08
1-Day Team Building Pitfalls
Is it possible to deliver effective team building in one day? The short answer to that question is no. It is impossible to deliver a fully fleshed out team building simulation with all of the ingredients required for a fully effective team building initiative. Something has to give. What steps can be taken to deliver effective team building despite shorter and shorter lead times for planning and increasingly condensed timeframes for delivery? Here are few ideas.
Jan
07
Team Building in the Midst of Turbulence
What a week! First the debt ceiling crisis kept the world at the edge of its seat. Then, financial woes in Europe and concerns about the Euro and the Yen. Now stock markets around the globe are spiraling downward. In the midst of this, I uncovered more incidents of wasteful spending on playtime for executives and employees by companies with declining performance. Have some executives learned nothing from the events of the past 3 years? No amount of playtime, golf, jamming in a rock band, or other placebos can substitute for good old fashioned brainstorming to tap into the collective wisdom of your team.
Dec
14
Playing with Michelle Cummings
Hi folks, I spent a training day – as a participant (something I rarely get to do) – with Michelle Cummings this week. Michelle was visiting from the USA (as a guest of the ACA), where she offers a variety of team-building programs and training resources. It was a fun day and I learned some
Dec
14
Ice-Breaker Exchange
Simple, non-threatening game to get people interacting and sharing. At A Glance Starting with a question card each, partners ask each other the question on their card, before swapping cards and then seeking a new partner to ask their new question. What You Need Set of Ice-Breaker Question cards What To Do In advance, prepare
Dec
14
Taking Play Seriously
Hi folks, I was sitting in a plane on Monday heading to Boston (to celebrate Project Adventure’s 40th anniversary this weekend), and read with interest the following newspaper articles from The Age (10/10/11): Exercise Linked To Higher Test Scores – in short, the more your students move and play, the more they learn in ALL
Dec
14
Train Station Greetings
An hilarious, silly exercise to energise your group. At A Glance Two people spy each other on opposite sides of the group and approach one another in ‘slow-motion’ until they are within a metre of each other, and then suddenly they each turn away and look for a new person to start the process over
May
11
Why Do YOU Use Social Media – Please Let Us Know
Some of you may know that I’m working on a book called “Giving the Business To Social Media – Hype, Hope, Bust, Reality”, and I’d really like your input. Specifically, just one question for now.
Why do you use Social Media?
Apr
26
Bacal’s Laws: Popularity Makes Truth
Actually, that’s the short version. Here’s the long one.
Any opinion, value, product or service that achieves critical mass in terms of popularity will therefor become true (or false), or valuable, or not valuable (you get the idea) REGARDLESS of its actual characteristics.
Thus, you have pet rocks, Twitter, and other social media, other fads, myths about learning and training.
Apr
13
The Tyranny of Middle Class Values and How Some Think About Work
I wrote on the human resources discussion list, a short piece that was stimulated by one consultant’s praise for the employment engagement concept, one that, by the way, I abhore for a number of reasons.
The gist is that pretty much all the fads that get popular — employee engagement, autonomy, TQM, etc are based on a hidden set of values that tends to come from the upwardly mobile middle class — a group that is ambitious, and desires to get ahead. Perhaps one reasons these initiatives fade away is because the work world simply isn’t made up exclusively by those people.