Abstract
Spring 2020 has been a challenging time for higher education. Instructors scurried to post courses online as pandemic became a household word. We sought online resources to support our learning objectives, and we became more adept at videoconferencing, discovering ever new options under “the three dots” on the screen.
Now, as I assemble this issue, colleges and universities are announcing that they will be reopening for the fall semester. But as the summer brings new spikes and wider spread of the coronavirus, it is less clear what form fall classes will take. Will we be teaching face-to-face, mask-to-mask, or screen-to-screen?
As we prepare our courses, we need to remember that regardless of whether students take our courses on-ground or online, they will learn better when they can engage in learning activities tied to course content. The articles in this issue of Management Teaching Review, five Experiential Exercises and two Resource Reviews, provide resources for both online and on-ground courses.We open optimistically with two articles that describe learning activities for physical spaces: traditional classrooms and the professor’s office door.
“Escape the Traditional Classroom: Using Live-Action Games to Engage Students and Strengthen Concept Retention” by Carolyn M. Plump and Steven I. Meisel explains how to adapt the features of commercial escape room games, such as discovering clues and solving puzzles, to support a wide range of learning objectives in both graduate and undergraduate courses and disciplines.
April J. Spivack’s exercise focuses developing design thinking skills along with creativity and innovation, cornerstones of business success. In “Recasting the Door: An Applied Design Thinking Skill Building Exercise,” student teams create art installations that symbolically or metaphorically transform the way viewers or users interpret the instructor’s office door.
With our newly developed videoconferencing skills, we are ready for a project in intercultural communication. In “The Textbook Didn’t Mention That: An Intercultural Experiential Exercise in Business Communication,” Susan L. Luck and Stephanie Swartz describe how they connect their transatlantic MBA classes to learn major theories of intercultural communication theory by practicing cross-cultural interactions.
The next three articles are written from the perspective of on-ground, in-class activities, but they could be adapted for online courses.
In “Understanding Resistance to Change: An Experiential Exercise,” Virajanand Varma asks his MBA students to change a personal behavior and then reflect on the relationship between the lessons learned and the challenges of managing organizational change. The exercise is appropriate for graduate courses in leadership and undergraduate courses on organizational behavior and change management.
Coauthors Claudette Marie Peterson, Tim O. Peterson, Shontarius Aikens, Jon W. Beard, Joy Beatty, Carrie A. Blair, Ashley Lesko, and Erika Small draw on the time-honored principle of learning through storytelling in “Story Hour in the Management Classroom.” Once or twice a semester, they read aloud a children’s picture book to their management students and then ask students to identify connections between the story and business concepts they have been studying.
The issue closes with two Resource Reviews. The first, “A Web-Based Simulation Game for Teaching Supply Chain Management,” describes an online supply network simulator suitable for reinforcing concepts such as forecasting, inventory and production control, supply network design, and logistics. After describing the activity, author Ming-Ling Chuang comments on variations in how graduate and undergraduate students approach the simulation.
With the final article, we return to our opening theme: using games to teach management. The Resource Review, “Can Your Students Save the World? Utilizing Pandemic®, a Cooperative Board Game, to Teach Management,” by Chantal Van Esch and Todd Wiggen, explains how physical and virtual versions of this game can be used to reinforce decision making, leadership, teamwork, goal setting, and ethics concepts. The authors close with a word of caution, advising instructors to be sensitive about students’ experiences with COVID-19.
Winner of MTR’s Best Pedagogical Contribution Award
The winner of the 2019 Management Teaching Review Best Pedagogical Contribution Award is “Puzzling in Teams: A Multipurpose Group Activity for Teamwork, Communication, Problem Solving, and Creativity” by Kerri Anne Crowne (Volume 4, Issue 4, pp. 306-316). The selection committee admired the versatility of this easy-to-implement classroom activity and its applicability across generations and educational levels.
This year’s committee was chaired by Kathi Lovelace (Menlo College). Committee members were Carolyn M. Plump (La Salle University), Gordon Schmidt (Purdue University Fort Wayne), Nicholas Rhew (Coastal Carolina University), and Lucy Arendt (University of Wisconsin–Green Bay).