Book excerpt: Team building is a proven approach for helping people become respectful competitors, cooperative team members, and community leaders. Now you can help your students or group develop those same important skills with Essentials of Team Building: Principles and Practices. The authors, with two successful books on team building and 30 years of team-building experience, offer a day-by-day guide for implementing activities and challenges for individual sessions, units, or an entire semester. The activities and challenges are geared to beginning through advanced participants in a variety of settings, and they help participants develop the following valuable skills: à ̄¿Å"Problem solving à ̄¿Å"Appropriate risk taking à ̄¿Å"Building working relationships à ̄¿Å"Cooperation à ̄¿Å"Leadership and communication à ̄¿Å"Creative thinking à ̄¿Å"Building trust à ̄¿Å"Making decisions à ̄¿Å"Setting goals à ̄¿Å"Developing physical skills In chapters 1 and 2 the authors introduce the concept of team building, including its benefits, its connection with adventure education and community building, and the process involved in building a team. Chapters 3 and 4 provide assessment tools and safety strategies. Chapter 5 offers a sample college course outline in team building. You'll find icebreaker and community activities in chapter 6, and in chapters 7 through 9 you can choose from an array of introductory, intermediate, and advanced challenges. Chapter 10 provides character development and community-building challenges, and an appendix lays out challenge cards, useful forms, reports, and examples. In addition, Essentials of Team Building: Principles and Practices includes à ̄¿Å"58 activities and challenges for beginning through advanced teams; à ̄¿Å"reproducible forms for organizing, presenting, and evaluating team-building challenges; à ̄¿Å"ready-to-use unit and semester plans with evaluation tools for each activity; and à ̄¿Å"a bound-in DVD with video clips of 25 challenge demonstrations and reproducible challenge and organizer cards.