Abstract
It is with great joy that we assume the role of editors for Management Teaching Review (MTR). We sincerely thank the Organizational Behavior Teaching Society and especially Jeanie Forray and Kathy Lund Dean as founding coeditors for their vision of reenergizing our commitment to student learning and excellence in the classroom through MTR. We also acknowledge the immensity of the role of establishing a journal that truly builds on our Society’s roots and mission to “enhance the quality and promote the importance of teaching and learning across the management disciplines,” and we embrace this mission with MTR.
MTR provides an exciting online platform for sharing “immediately useful resources for teaching and learning practice” in the management domain, whether in the classroom or in an organizational setting. As such, MTR is not only relevant to college educators but also trainers, coaches, and those individuals committed to teaching and learning.
We view MTR as a conduit for strengthening our community around this shared passion for teaching. Our online platform is enabled with an interactive “Reader Responses” function (see Figure 1) where readers can submit comments for particular articles and read the comments submitted by others. We anticipate that this function will create a collaborative space for fostering conversations around teaching and learning. Please visit our website (http://mtr.sagepub.com/), take advantage of the free access period for MTR, and see what all the excitement is about!
MTR comments feature under “Reader Responses.”
The pedagogical resources in MTR are organized in five main sections: Experiential Exercises, Research-to-Practice Insights, Practice-to-Research Connections, Resource Reviews, and Format Translations. We commonly see short, targeted, and immediately useful classroom activities in our Experiential Exercises section. The implications of how current disciplinary research can be applied to the classroom constitutes the second section, Research-to-Practice Insights. The third section presents articles describing how experiences in the classroom inform practice-based empirical research: Practice-to-Research Connections. The fourth section, Resource Reviews, includes reviews of specific resources that can be immediately useful to our teaching and learning practice. The fifth and final section, Format Translations, is where modifications to pedagogical tools from one audience to another are provided, for example, translating a corporate training program to the undergraduate classroom. A common theme emerges in all MTR’s contributions: the passion and commitment to promoting learning—both at the personal and professional levels.
In This Issue
This issue highlights Experiential Exercises. The eight articles included here provide a broad range of classroom activities for increasing students’ readiness for the workplace, improving student preparation and engagement in class, and sharing novel ways of developing student knowledge and skills in traditional management content areas.
The first article by Kirk Francis Smith, titled “A Classroom Experience That Builds the Top Skills Employers Want,” describes a new way of integrating guest speakers into the classroom. Instead of one-way presentations, Smith provides an interactive method for involving students in solving real-time issues facing guest speakers. The activity can be completed in one class session and requires students to work in teams to analyze problems and present solutions to the guest executive. As a result, students develop important skills that are required in contemporary organizations. Gaining and maintaining currency in the field is also applicable to the next article by Gordon Schmidt, titled “Using Pinterest in the Management Classroom.” Schmidt provides instructions on how to apply the social bookmarking site Pinterest to course assignments. Instructor- and student-created Pinterest boards provide platforms for sharing visual content that is relevant to course material and helps students develop practical social media skills that are in demand in the workplace. Sample assignments in Training Methods and Organizational Behavior and clear directions on how to use Pinterest make this contribution inviting to both experienced and novice users of Pinterest.
Improving student engagement through increasing classroom participation and preparation are always timely topics to MTR audiences. In the article, “Do It All Wrong! Using Reverse-Brainstorming to Generate Ideas, Improve Discussions, and Move Students to Action,” the authors Marcia Hagen, Allan Bernard, and Eric Grube present a fun and easy way to stimulate students’ idea generation and problem-solving capabilities through the development of “bad” ideas. This activity is immediately applicable to a wide range of course topics and guidelines for implementing the activity and bringing “bad” ideas full circle into “good” ideas are provided. Improving students’ preparation for class is the emphasis of the next article by Susan H. Taft, titled “Incentivizing Students’ Preparation for Class: The Hat Trick.” At the beginning of the course, Taft provides students with two choices to test class preparation: regular quizzes or the “Hat Trick,” where names are randomly pulled out of the hat. In Taft’s experience most classes choose the Hat Trick, and in this article she provides a rationale for why this approach is motivating to students and how to implement the activity.
Designing innovative ways of teaching the traditional management topics of leadership and power is the focus of the next two articles. In the article titled “Leading Through Courageous Following: The Artist’s View” by Tim O. Peterson, Claudette M. Peterson, Caitlin R. Olek, Emily N. Peterson, Steve C. Crusz, Elsa G. Bollinger, and Taylor C. Koch, students are tasked with creating a piece of art that depicts their views on leadership and followership. Students use the ideas set forth in the book The Courageous Follower by I. Chaleff as a basis for thinking critically about leadership. Students present their art projects in a public forum and write reflective papers on the meanings of their creations. The project offers a creative and insightful method for increasing student learning around the topics of leadership and followership. Several student examples are shared, including a video that can be found on the MTR website, and directions for adopting the assignment are included.
Next, authors Therese A. Sprinkle and Michael J. Urick share techniques to increase student learning and immersion when using films in the classroom in their article titled “Alternatives to the Movie Sandwich Habit: Practical Approaches to Using Movies to Teach Leadership and Power.” Sprinkle and Urick point out concerns regarding students watching movies passively and failing to optimize the learning potential of these potentially rich learning opportunities. To remedy this concern, the authors present two approaches—the “movie club” approach and a modified gamification approach—and they provide materials for applying these approaches to leadership (using J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth film) and power and influence (using such films as Harry Potter and the Hunger Games).
The final two articles also present innovate ways of teaching traditional topics. In Gurudas Nulkar’s article title “Strategic Tangle: A Cocreated Strategy Game for Management Students,” the author provides an activity where MBA students have the opportunity to apply course concepts and devise strategy around a particular business function or practice. The resulting activity is a noncomputerized game played over four stages and 6 hours where student teams cocreate their strategies through defender and challenger rounds. Guidelines and materials for running the game are provided as well as suggestions for adapting the game to other courses. In the next article by John H. Batchelor and Gerald F. Burch, titled “Transforming a Trip Abroad Into an Experiential Exercise in Entrepreneurship,” the authors describe how a trip to China to study Chinese entrepreneurship resulted in an excellent opportunity to practice entrepreneurship before the trip in addition to learning about it during the trip abroad. Students created and managed a short-term business to fund their trip and developed entrepreneurial skills through negotiating contracts and managing strict travel requirements. The authors present an overview of the activity and discuss their lessons learned and best practices generated from the experience.
The eight articles included in this issue offer valuable resources for enriching our pedagogy and illustrate our MTR mission: To commit to serving the management education community by publishing short, topically targeted, and immediately useful resources for teaching and learning practice. Our published articles and interactive platform provide a rich, collaborative space for active learning resources that foster deep student engagement and instructor excellence.
We thank the Associate Editors and Reviewers as well as the team at Sage Publications who made this second issue of MTR possible. We also encourage authors to continue to submit their pedagogical research to MTR and share in the community of teaching and learning that is the heart of this journal.