Now that you have read this book, you should better understand our overall thesis. In our own experiences working in and around schools and businesses, we have found that the best leaders, the best service‐oriented professionals, the best salespeople, and the best trainers are those who do – either by instinct or by conscious effort – what the best teachers do in effective classrooms. We wrote this book to help those in and around business – and serving in those roles – to better understand the best teaching and learning practices and the related opportunities for improving business practices.
There are a few things (or lists) that we believe will help you understand our “learning experience design” and the intentional choices we made throughout the book.
We deliberately used some scholarly practices in how we approached this work:
We used 10 educationally researched practices to connect our observations and insights to corporate environments:
We also focused on four primary roles throughout the book. For each, we provided a glimpse into our design work, making a more specific “user persona” against which we constantly checked our work. The roles were:
Finally, we designed this book so that you might engage with it in myriad ways. Based on our design, there are five paths you may have taken. Ideally, you would have tried more than one, and as a result, engaged with the book in a slightly new way each time:
Throughout this book, we visually differentiated the access points to those paths. A quick riffle through the pages should have made it easy to dive in. Also, at the end of each main section of the book, we turned your attention to some of the things that good teachers consider in advance of a learning experience and suggested a few things that, depending on your role, interests, and curiosities, we hoped you would find the time to try.
The design of any learning experience can only be measured by the near‐term and long‐term impact and influence on the subject toward meeting the learning objectives. As a result of reading this book, are you equipped to be a more authentic seller? Will you practice more immediacy in your leadership? Will you consider the delight of a customer whom you are serving? Will you better train your colleagues, borrowing from the practices of the best classroom teachers?
We hope so, and please let us know how we did and how you're doing. Send us a note at [email protected] or visit us at makeyourselfclear.xyz. And if Twitter is still a thing when you are reading this, follow us at @reshanrichards and @sjvalentine.