2. Top Dawg Academy is a
course for Transition Year
students, that aims to
teach you useful skills and
lessons the areas of:
Leadership & Confidence,
Creativity & Innovation,
and Teamwork.
5. - Find out your personality
type, and learn to respect
other types i.e bands and
football teams.
- Learn effective
communication skills
6.
7. Everyone will be given a sheet
of statements, please mark the
number that represents you best
in each case.
1 – Disagree
2 – Slightly Disagree
3 – Neutral
4 – Slightly Agree
5 – Agree
8.
9. Types of communication:
Verbal and Non-Verbal
communication
- Verbal communication is
made up of spoken words.
- Non-verbal communication is
made up of tone of voice,
body language, gestures, eye
contact, facial expression and
proximity.
10. First impressions have a long
lasting effect on people, so it is
very important to make a good
one.
1. Act as if you are meeting a good
friend
2. Keep your body language open
3. Speak Clearly
4. Have good posture
5. Be positive
6. Be interested and interesting
Practice!
15. Your turn!
Use one or more of the
techniques that you just
learned about to come up with
3 ideas for a cool new
product, service, business or
invention.
1 in sports
1 in music
1 in school
16.
17.
18.
19. In your teams everyone
decide on one idea that you
all like. Everyone discuss
ways it can be improved
until you are happy with the
concept.
Create a name for your
team and write it on the top
of the page.
Hand out the tests. Explain what each of the numbers mean in relation to their correlating word.
Be on hand for any questions in case some students do not understand.
Ask them to add up their scores paying close attention to the + or – symbols when summing their totals.
Explain in detail
Act out situations. Choose a student to come up and act out a first encounter with them. Act negatively in the first one to show what gives off a negative impression, then act positively to show how to make a good impression.
Get two students to act with eachother – should add some humour!
Class: Give me some words or phrases that you think are related to creativity and innovation. Eg: thinking, ideas, new, outside of the box, improvements, exploring, testing, making,
Creativity is thinking about something new or novel. Thinking ‘outside of the box’
Innovation is thinking creatively about something that exists already, for example how to improve it. It is turning creative thoughts into an impact.
Fun methods:
Role playing is when you assume the role of someone else and think like them to come up with ideas. For example, pretend you are Wayne Rooney. You want to think of a way to make it easier for you to score goals in a football match. Or assume the role of Taylor Swift – You want to think of ways to make it easier to sing everyday without being tired.
Reverse thinking is when you think of ‘wrong’ ideas, and then reverse the thought to come up with a positive idea you might not have thought of in the first place. For example, you think of a terrible mobile phone that doesn’t let you call anyone, and then you turn that around to a phone that lets you call everyone, and go even further and think of a phone that allows you to call anyone by just saying their name. So it turned a terrible idea into a novel one.
Random word technique is when you choose a random word and try to come up with ideas based around it. For example, if you are thinking about a way to improve car wheels, and your random word is toothbrush; you then think of how you can take inspiration from a toothbrush for car wheels. What if you had bristles like on a toothbrush all around the car tyre to give better grip in bad weather?
Encourage students to use the
Split the class into teams of 4s and encourage them to decide on one idea per team, then let them discuss and add to it so that they are all happy with it. Go around the tables and help them to guide them in the right direction if needs be.
Each team must stand up one by one and tell us about their idea.
Each team must stand up one by one and tell us about their idea.
