Understanding the dynamic relationships of the entities that have the most impact on an organization - or that the organization impacts the most - is at the core of stakeholder management approaches. In this article, we present an experiential exercise that provides a creative practical, low-overhead, discussion-oriented classroom activity to…

Courses: Introduction to Communication Theory, Small Group Communication, Organizational Communication, or any class with a group-based component. Objectives: This activity aims to engage students more deeply in group role-playing activities, reduce stereotyping and prejudice in a popular activity, and enhance students' understanding of group…

Building on the foundation laid in "Teaching a Methods Course in Social Work With Groups" by Roselle Kurland and Robert Salmon (CSWE Press, 1998), this book provides a guide to teaching social work with groups. Group work is used increasingly in the field even as its education declines, leaving many instructors required to teach the…

Course: Qualitative Research Methods. Objectives: To provide students with an experiential understanding of the six steps to conducting a thematic analysis: (1) gaining familiarity with the data, (2) creating coding categories or subcategories, (3) generating themes, (4) reviewing themes, (5) labeling themes, and (6) identifying exemplars. To help…

In a small-group communication course, students participate in a semester-long project to observe an organization while applying many group communication principles, including conflict resolution, group dynamics, teambuilding, leadership, and diversity. In groups of five, the students select any organization, agency, or department on campus or in…

Want to make your instruction more equitable and effective, more interesting, and more fun? It's time to try flexible grouping. Unlike traditional grouping, which typically puts like with like or combines students without regard to the best way to promote their individual growth, flexible grouping is both purposeful "and" fluid,…

Courses: Public speaking, business and professional communication, group communication. Objectives: This activity will introduce Monroe's Motivated Sequence as a way to organize persuasive arguments; improve students' ability to deliver presentations with consistent content, voice, and style; and improve team-based delivery skills.

"Cooperative Games in Education" is the first comprehensive guide to the world of cooperative play and games for pre-K-12 learning. It includes a thorough pedagogical rationale and guidelines for practice, a survey of related research and scholarship, engaging anecdotes, illustrations, historical background, and an array of sample games…

The Project CALI (Content Area Literacy Instruction) instructional framework is designed to enhance reading comprehension for all students, those with disabilities as well as their typically developing peers, in inclusive co-taught middle school content-area classrooms. For students with and at-risk for disabilities, even well-designed,…

Although U.S. corporations rely heavily on merit pay programs to distribute pay increases to their employees, many undergraduate students, even those who have held jobs, lack exposure to merit pay programs until they take their first human resource management course. The exercise gives students an opportunity to experience how organizations make…

Authors Pete Hall, Alisa Simeral, Bryan Goodwin, Bj Stone, and Bess Scott identify 24 of the most common "problems of practice" faced by educators--something that is not going quite as well as it could in the teaching-learning process--and show educators how to guide their own self-reflective journey toward solving these problems,…

The authors developed a teaching project for students to debate data and workplace privacy dilemmas, formulate plans of action for the use of certain data about workers and job applicants, and apply the law to reach and defend their solutions. The purpose of this versatile exercise is to sensitize both undergraduate and graduate business students…

This communicative activity is ideal for English language learners of at least a low-intermediate proficiency level. In this activity, the teacher brings several personal items from his or her life to share with students. These items should be carefully selected and should in some way represent the values, experiences, or characteristics of the…

There exists an "innovation gap" where students are not prepared to meet the demands of an increasingly complex world. Skills such as creative confidence help close this gap and also foster innovation. To better prepare students, two concepts, design thinking and experiential learning, are integrated through the use of a modified writing…

Strategic alliances--voluntary interfirm arrangements involving resource sharing--are critical to firm success. To help strategic management students better understand alliance negotiation and formation, we developed a simple game that places them in a real alliance negotiation situation, involving simultaneous cooperation and competition (i.e.,…