Abstract
This issue marks the beginning of the second year of publication of Management Teaching Review (MTR). Our unique online platform continues to make targeted, immediately useful pedagogical resources readily available to educators. We are pleased to report that in 2016 we published more than 30 articles related to management education, with more being submitted and reviewed every day.
These articles are useful because, as management educators, we are tasked with teaching our students what they will need to help them succeed in their careers in management and leadership. Increasingly, our collective attention has turned from what they need to know to what they need to be able to do. Educational researchers have traditionally referred to these broad categories as knowledge and skill acquisition, which along with dispositions—values, attitudes, and beliefs—form a triumvirate of broad learning objectives. More recently, educators have put attention on the role of student engagement as a predictor of learning and personal development. The student engagement argument holds that students will be more likely to learn if they are attentive, curious, and interested in what they are learning or being taught. Indeed, research has found that student engagement is linked positively to desirable learning outcomes such as critical thinking and grades (Carini, Kuh, & Klein, 2006).
MTR’s contribution to this multifaceted discussion of teaching and learning is to publish student learning activities that engage students in learning management-related content and skills. We also publish descriptions of resources that can be used to support these goals, and reflective pieces on the relationships between research and teaching in management education. The articles in this issue of MTR highlight three categories within these broad goals: fostering student engagement, developing critical thinking skills, and developing discipline-specific skills.
Fostering Student Engagement
This issue opens with an article from our Research-to-Practice Insights section, “Teacher Openness and Prosocial Motivation: Creating an Environment Where Questions Lead to Engaged Students.” After reviewing research on how the perceived motives of those posing questions influence listener responses, author Bret D. Crane offers practical strategies for shaping a classroom experience in which students are more likely to feel motivated to respond to questions from the teacher.
Two Resource Reviews advocate using technology to foster student engagement. In “Edutainment: Using Technology to Enhance the Management Learner Experience,” Erin Makarius describes the use of two easily accessible technologies, Powtoons and GoAnimate, and reports positive student reactions to their use in courses on human resources and training. In “Storytelling at Its Best: Using the StartUp Podcast in the Classroom,” Atul Teckchandani and David Obstfeld discuss the advantages of podcasts, such as StartUp, to provide engaging, versatile, and portable examples of course concepts that students can analyze and discuss in fields such as entrepreneurship, leadership, organizational behavior, and human resources.
Developing Critical Thinking Skills
This issue also provides four Experiential Exercises, the first two of which offer opportunities to nurture students’ critical thinking skills. However, the two exercises are grounded in different definitions of critical thinking, illustrating a point made in the second article, namely, that critical thinking is a term that has multiple meanings and interpretations.
The first exercise defines critical thinking in terms of the higher levels of Bloom’s (1956) taxonomy of cognitive skills. “When Two Heads Aren’t Better Than One: Conformity in a Group Activity,” by C. Melissa Fender and Lisa T. Stickney, establishes the conditions for students to explore their own group processes while requiring them to apply, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate course material on team and group behavior.
The second exercise extends the definition outlined above to include the exploration of deeper issues of context and points of view. “Insidious Incentives: A Critical Exercise to Explore Knowing, Context, and Multiple Views,” by Paul L. Stepanovich, Pamela J. Hopkins, and Ernest Stark, provides a hypothetical case and exercise about human resource incentives that can be used to teach systems thinking, research methods, research paradigms, and/or to explore social issues.
Developing Discipline-Specific Skills
The final two Experiential Exercises in this issue focus on helping students develop soft skills that are central to development as an effective manager or leader.
“Designing the Widget: A Group Decision and Negotiation Task,” by Lisa A. Delise and Abby L. Mello, mirrors a realistic product design task in which students develop interpersonal skills in group negotiation, including information sharing, conflict management, communication, and development of trust; it is suitable for courses that address these and related organizational behavior topics.
The closing article, “Teaching Leaders to Lead Themselves: An Emerging Leader Exercise,” by Carolyn I. Chavez, Claudia Gomez, Marcus Valenzuela, and Yasanthi B. Perera, aims to develop students’ self-awareness of how others perceive them vis-à-vis preconceived notions of leadership behaviors. Because the activity requires dealing with both positive and negative feedback, the authors suggest that it may be more appropriate for more mature students, such as those who are near graduation or in graduate-level courses in leadership and organizational behavior.
We hope these articles enrich your teaching practice and reinforce your commitment to management education.