Welcome To The Free Training and Development Resource Center

In a fast paced world, continuous learning is essential to success. Individuals need to learn to succeed in life and at work. Companies need to ensure their employees continue to learn, so they can keep up with increased job demands, and so the company can gain or maintain competitive advantage.

This site provides resources, ideas, strategies, etc to help those involved in the training and development profession help meet the learning needs of the organization through the use of training techniques, facilitation, and development activities.

Of course, there's also material here for learners themselves, and corporate personnel (e.g. those in human resources departments to help them maximize training and learning effectiveness.

Below are the newest training and development items added to our library:

• Angles on learning - (Special Merit Award)

  By JS Atherton - Extensive explanations of many learning theories and their implications. We bestow on this site and its owner the Special Merit Award for one of the best sites of its kind anywhere. ^new (Added: 27-Jan-2010 Hits: 0)

• Learning and Teaching (teaching section) (Special Merit Award)

  By JS Atherton - This may be the best site (along with its companion site on learning) on the net for those who want to become better teachers, trainers and learners. Excellent breadth and depth of coverage of both learning and training. Go there! ^new (Added: 27-Jan-2010 Hits: 0)

• Misrepresentation, myths and misleading ideas

  By JS Atherton - The world of teaching and learning is rife with received wisdom, including the potency of learning styles (which deserves a page to itself), and plenty of other unproven but fashionable ideas.See "What works..." on the teaching site It is not so much that they are "wrong", but: * the evidence base and/or research methodology may be flaky, and/or * they may have been misinterpreted and generalised beyond their legitimate use, and/or * they originate from such tightly controlled laboratory settings as not to make sense in the real world. ^new (Added: 27-Jan-2010 Hits: 0)

• Cognitive Dissonance and learning

  By JS Atherton - Cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomenon which refers to the discomfort felt at a discrepancy between what you already know or believe, and new information or interpretation. It therefore occurs when there is a need to accommodate new ideas, and it may be necessary for it to develop so that we become "open" to them. Neighbour (1992) makes the generation of appropriate dissonance into a major feature of tutorial (and other) teaching: he shows how to drive this kind of intellectual wedge between learners' current beliefs and "reality". Beyond this benign if uncomfortable aspect, however, dissonance can go "over the top", leading to two interesting side-effects for learning ^new (Added: 27-Jan-2010 Hits: 0)

• Learning how to learn

  By JS Atherton - For our purposes, there are two quite different traditions about learning how to learn. One stems from the Deep and Surface learning strategies studies (about responses to being taught), and the other from the work of Gregory Bateson. Bateson maintained that many discussions about learning were confused by category errors about the kind of learning they were about. He suggested that there are a number of levels, in which each superior level is the class of its subordinates (rather like Kelly's notion of superordinate and subordinate constructs). ^new (Added: 27-Jan-2010 Hits: 0)

• Convergent and Divergent Learning

  By JS Atherton - Hudson (1967) studied English schoolboys, and found that conventional measures of intelligence did not always do justice to their abilities. The tests gave credit for problem-solving which produced the "right" answer, but under-estimated creativity and unconventional approaches to problems. He concluded that there were two different forms of thinking or ability in play here: ^new (Added: 27-Jan-2010 Hits: 0)

• Conversational learning theory; Pask and Laurillard

  By JS Atherton - ordon Pask's work stands rather outside the mainstream of the psychology of education, but is immediately recognised by many learners and teachers in adult education as being very significant. He was a cyberneticist rather than an educationalist, and developed a systems approach to learning which is highly abstract and difficult, although rewarding: it is reflected in the “conversational” models of learning of Laurillard and Thomas and Harri-Augstein. ^new (Added: 27-Jan-2010 Hits: 0)

• Personal Construct Theory

  By JS Atherton - Personal Construct Psychology (PCP) is known as such, rather than as a “theory”, because it is the only approach in psychology which was developed from the start as a complete psychology, explicit about its asumptions and theoretical base. Although often treated as a cognitive approach alongside others — and seeming a little too rational in some respects — it claims to go beyond the distinction between cognition, emotion and conation (“will”) found in all other psychologies. ^new (Added: 27-Jan-2010 Hits: 0)

• Constructivism in learning

  By JS Atherton - Constructivism is the label given to a set of theories about learning which fall somewhere between cognitive and humanistic views. If behaviourism treats the organism as a black box, cognitive theory recognises the importance of the mind in making sense of the material with which it is presented. Nevertheless, it still presupposes that the role of the learner is primarily to assimilate whatever the teacher presents. Constructivism — particularly in its "social" forms — suggests that the learner is much more actively involved in a joint enterprise with the teacher of creating ("constructing") new meanings. ^new (Added: 27-Jan-2010 Hits: 0)

• Memory - Excellent Article To Start

  By JS Atherton - Memory is a very complex topic, much researched and at the heart of the “cognitive revolution”: what follows is therefore even less reliable than usual, but it has been filtered and distilled with the needs of teachers in mind: please go elsewhere for a synoptic view, such as Gross (1996) ch 12; Rose (1993) ^new (Added: 27-Jan-2010 Hits: 0)

• Experiential Learning (Excellent beginning)

  By na - The ideas on this page have been adopted and adapted to all kinds of learning situation, but it should be noted that they refer to learning from experience or discovery (such as situated learning) rather than to taught (or "reception" learning, as Ausubel calls it) or rote learning. Kolb (1984) provides one of the most useful (but contestable) descriptive models available of the adult learning process, inspired by the work of Kurt Lewin. ^new (Added: 27-Jan-2010 Hits: 0)

• Leadership Development Planning

  By Carter McNamara - A collection of material on leadership and leadership development planning, including some informal exercises to stimulate thinking on the topic of leadership. ^new (Added: 27-Jan-2010 Hits: 1)

• Situational Leadership Whitepaper Download (free but requires registration)

  By Paul Hersey - Read Lessons in Leadership: An Interview with Paul Hersey, a pioneer and thought leader on the Situational Leadership Model, to learn about: * The distinction between attitudes and behavior * The four styles inherent in the Situational Leadership® Model * How the Situational Leadership® Model differs from competing theories ^new (Added: 27-Jan-2010 Hits: 0)