Crash and Learn

by Jim Smith Jr.

Motivation, direction, and inspiration for every trainer, presenter, or facilitator who has ever "lost" an audience.
Part handbook and part inspiration, Crash and Learn presents road-tested strategies for becoming more polished, powerful, and effective. From audience motivation to honing storytelling skills to the simple act of setting chairs in a room for maximum impact, Crash and Learn will enable you to captivate, teach, and inspire. 

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Erin · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was part of a "book club" of sorts at work. Each team member covered a chapter and walked through the techniques covered in their chapter as part of our lunch and learn series. His training techniques are mostly geared toward academic, large group lectures, or week long conferences but he does have some techniques that can be broken down and used in a smaller classroom setting with a shorter time frame.

[Becky Everhart · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are two reasons I read this book. First and foremost, as a preschool teacher, my audience can get hostile pretty quickly, so having some better tricks up my sleeve for presenting information to them in a more interactive way and keeping their attention is pretty intriguing, even if this may seem like off-label usage. I have just completed my first full year of being a teaching assistant, and I have so much to learn. If I could find the time and money to take more trainings on my own, I'd go all the time, but I don't, so I'll break down and give the bemoaned self-help genre a try.

The other reason is to better understand how trainings work so I can get more out of trainings I attend for work and for my outside interests. This could mean becoming a more engaged participant, seeing what the trainer thinks is most important, giving better feedback, and possibly as a means of seeing how to become a trainer. I have so much knowledge from my experiences that it has been suggested that I become a trainer more than once, so I'm curious. After reading this book, I don't know if it would really be my cup of tea, but at least I wouldn't be a total blunderer like my early college public speaking experiences.

As far as the actual reading, I feel that it could be better. I like the layout and feel that Mr. Smith cut through a lot of filler by using a list format. However, there is a lot of information that seems to be repeated because it fits with a segment or to make the idea of flipping through to a section instead of reading straight through more viable, making it hard to keep my place or stay interested. Sometimes I double-check to make sure I haven't lost my place. Because of this, I wanted to plow through as fast as I could and often found myself driven to distraction. There are quite a few observations that really struck me as something special that no one else really seems to notice, but with that comes a certain disgusting smugness, particularly as he is picking apart less adept colleagues in vignettes about what not to do. He is almost always the one who knows best, whose ideas almost seem to work, and I don't think that's the case, especially since he had to read so many other books to write his. The idea of putting easel-size post-its on the ceiling and the floor seems ridiculous, and my co-workers would likely laugh him out of the building as they ripped him a new one about wasting money and resources we could think of utilizing more wisely. I like the idea of the workbook areas at the end of the chapters, but the questions are generic, and I would not be so involved with this book that I would actually fill it in, particularly since I plan on passing it along once I am finished. All in all, it isn't terrible, but it isn't awesome either.