OPINION
Facilitate active engagement Creating an actively engaging business or management classroom involves promoting student action and expression. Students are encouraged to make decisions in business situations, practising responsible leadership behaviours. Active engagement leads to focused attention and immersive experiences, fostering flow states. Relevant strategies include animating: focusing students’ attention, energising them or asking them to perform an action that invites them to physically move in their space. Authenticating: exposing students to real-world issues and engaging them in experiences that are authentic to their current and future realities. Linking: Building relationships between students and industry professionals, businesses, community organisations and other impactful stakeholders. Utilising technology: creating opportunities for students to use technologies in effective, healthy ways. Design for iteration Learning is a process that unfolds through cycles of action, feedback and reflection. Designing for iteration fosters cumulative experiences where students can experiment, take risks and adapt in real time. By incorporating learning cycles that encourage trying out different concepts, making mistakes and receiving feedback, iterative experiences cultivate essential lifelong skills of learning and resilience. Iteration promotes cognitive flexibility and collaborative problem-solving, both crucial elements of contemporary leadership. Overall, designing for iteration aims to develop competencies necessary for responsible management such as prototyping, gathering feedback and initiating change. Relevant strategies include exploring: designing open-ended learning experiences where students are encouraged to experiment. Prototyping: embedding cycles of iteration, development, drafting, feedback and revision into learning experiences, classroom exercises and assessment models. Revisiting: thinking back on a topic over time to reveal the progress of understanding. Compassing: deprioritising testing and summative grading to focus more on the student-learning journey. Develop supportive social interaction The dynamics of a classroom are shaped by its people with their diverse backgrounds, beliefs and interactions. Harnessing the power of human connection, supportive social interaction fosters transformative learning experiences. Research highlights the social nature of learning, emphasising its context within communities of practice and cultural frameworks. Social interactions within groups facilitate academic achievement, conceptual understanding and pro-social behaviours. In a globalised world, responsible leadership relies on quality social interactions, including cross-cultural competencies and understanding multiple perspectives. Developing supportive social interaction in classrooms cultivates collaborative engagement, empathy, cultural understanding and relationship-building skills, all essential for responsible leadership. Relevant strategies include instilling community: a place where students can engage with each other in healthy, trustworthy and productive ways. Braving: guiding students to engage openly in controversial topics, complex experiences and difficult conversations. Bridging: connecting students to different cultures, disciplines and perspectives in ways that broaden and
“The i5 classroom emphasises fostering joy and well-being as an integral aspect of learning”
clarify their understanding. Teaming: organising group experiences that explicitly develop students’ critical communication and interpersonal skills.
Foster joy and well-being The i5 classroom emphasises fostering joy and well-being as an integral aspect of learning. This approach encourages students to embrace their emotions fully, experiencing delight, wonder and surprise, as well as acknowledging feelings of sadness, disappointment and anger. Recognising and caring for each individual student’s holistic well-being is crucial for responsible leadership. Relevant strategies include delighting: infusing fun, surprise, wonder and celebration into teaching and learning. Sensing: providing space for students to notice and navigate a range of emotions in themselves and others. Contemplating: guiding students in reflection about their inner spiritual and physical selves through contemplative practices and meta- reflection. Rippling: enabling students to grasp the profound impact of individual and collective actions in an interconnected world. PRME looks to build on its existing network of educators to foster global cooperation and examples of best practices to advance pedagogy and student skill set development in an effort to promote business education and the SDGs. The synergies in the work being undertaken by the association of MBAs (AMBA) on student skill set development through the international MBA surveys and the i5 initiative provide an encouraging opportunity for the future of this project. Prioritising sustainable development through innovative pedagogy challenges ‘education as usual’ to hold ‘business as usual’ to account so that it becomes more inclusive, critical and sustainability-driven.
Meredith Storey is senior manager of the Impactful Five (i5) project at the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME), an initiative of the UN Global Compact. She has more than 10 years’ experience across the UN and higher education systems and holds MSc and PhD degrees in business education for sustainable development from the University of Limerick’s Kemmy Business School
Ambition JULY/AUGUST 2023 | 49
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