This book is for trainers, educators, professors, instructional designers, learning leaders, facilitators, coaches, manager who want to engage their teams, and anyone interested in using activities to facilitate learning.

The book is divided into three parts.

PART ONE. THE WHAT AND WHY WE DO WHAT WE DO. The authors give you a bit about the Thiagi way of doing things. They provide the framework for how they approach activities and the facilitation of activities. They even give an overview of the science of learning as an opening salvo since learning is the purpose of what they do in the first place. Some of the content will be familiar but updated, given their own latest experiences and the current research out there. Some will be new to readers of their work but hopefully as useful as the previous material.


PART TWO. THE HOW TO DO WHAT WE DO. In this section, the authors really get into the mechanics. How they do instructional design. How they organize their activities. How they choose which activity to use. How to debrief an activity. How to evaluate whether an activity worked, and so forth.

PART THREE. THE ACTIVITIES. The authors provide eleven chapters on different interactive strategies. Each contains three to six activities, a total of sixty for the book. These are the eleven they tend to use the most, and they're the author's favorites.


The book is a major update of previous books and articles. No Thiagi book has put together both the theory, the mechanics, and the protocols all in one place since the 1990s. Think of this book as the official and most up-to-date Thiagi book.