A Teacher’s Guide to The Go-Giver
Over the last several years we have seen a steady stream of educators using The Go-Giver in their classes, with students at every level from high school to graduate school. The demand for an organized curriculum guide finally became so strong we decided it was time to produce one ourselves. And now it’s here!
In December 2015, exactly eight years after The Go-Giver was first published, we released A Teacher’s Guide to The Go-Giver: A Curriculum for Making a Difference.
About the Teacher’s Guide
Originally intended for adult readers, The Go-Giver touched a chord in readers from all walks of life—including avid young readers, from middle school through college age. Shortly after its publication in 2007, the book was picked up by Randy Stelter, a high school English teacher and athletic director in the northwest Indiana school system. Randy used the book to help enhance his students’ perspective on “what it’s going to take to be successful in the real world,” and has taken his school’s senior class through the book every year since. Soon other educators began following suit, adopting the book as part of their curricula at every level from high school through graduate school.
Now Randy has teamed up with Go-Giver authors Bob Burg and John David Mann to create this Teacher’s Guide, a detailed lesson plan that includes vocabulary lists, assigned readings, questions for comprehension and critical thinking, extensive topics for class discussion, and a set of final projects designed to deepen students’ understanding of the book and to ground its lessons in their own everyday experience.
Designed as a high school curriculum, the Guide’s content and approach can also be readily adapted for use by college professors in higher-education settings.
Bob Burg’s Interview with Randy Stelter
Bob chats with Randy about how he first came up the with idea of teaching The Go-Giver to the Senior Class and how he introduced it. He explains how he used the book and developed the curriculum. Randy has been teaching the book for nearly ten years and he shares how the way he teaches the material has evolved. We hope you find the interview to be helpful. Please feel welcome to contact us if you have any questions. Click Here to download MP3 file.
Worksheets
A separate PDF file of all the worksheets included in the Guide (designed for easy distribution of individual worksheets to students, in either paper or digital form) is available here.
A Teacher’s Guide to The Go-Giver Reviews
Excerpt from A Teacher’s Guide to The Go-Giver
LESSON ONE: Core Concept Discussion
What is success?
“Success” can mean different things to different people. When you hear the phrase, “a very successful person,” what comes to mind for you? How would you define success? Financially? Spiritually? Mentally? Physically? Relationally? Socially?
How would you consider yourself as successful?
What do you think it takes to be, or to become, a genuinely successful person?
Have you ever wished you could ask a highly successful person the keys to his or her success? What questions would you ask them?
Quick Write and Group Discussion
Write down the name of a person you consider to be highly successful. This can be someone from history, or someone alive today. In the next two minutes, write down as many questions as you can think of that you would like to ask this person about how they became successful.
(After two minutes)
Put down your pen, form yourselves into groups of three, and share in your groups what you have written.
(After two or three minutes)
While still in your groups, take three minutes to consider this question: “What can you learn from successful people, and how can they influence you today?”
(After three minutes)
Now have one student from each of your groups report to the whole class what you discussed.
The Go-Giver’s Laws of Success
In this course you will be reading a book about a man named Joe who learns many valuable business lessons, which also serve as life lessons. He learns these lessons primarily from a man named Pindar, but also from a number of Pindar’s friends.
As you follow along with Joe on his journey, you will also learn about five key principles called the “Five Laws of Stratospheric Success.” Joe will be asked to test out these each one of these five laws by applying it in his own life, immediately, the same day he learns it.
As you read we’ll ask you to brainstorm ways you can apply these five laws in your own lives, too, just as Joe does.