Purpose : The Pre-conference workshop is part of the ABSEL Professional Development Track, established in 2017, to support the professional development of ABSEL members in their teaching practice, and further our goals of developing practitioner scholars in the craft of business simulation and experiential learning.
Method/Goals:
- Conduct year-round development of professional skills in business simulation and experiential learning.
- Conduct a 1 day set of in-depth workshops to promote applied professional development
- Encourage scholarship in applied subjects,
- Contribute to the development of documented practices from ABSEL members in our core competencies,
- Support the scholarship and skills development of new and/or younger members
Current track chair: vacant
How can you get involved?:
- Attend the pre-conference workshop to develop ideas for work in the year ahead
- Engage with pre-conference workshop prep material and work on a project to complete while at the workshop
- Document your experience in applying the professional development topics, and submit an ABSEL paper in the appropriate track next year
- Nominate topics you;d like to see in future workshops (contact the track chair)
- Offer to lead a 50 minute workshop during next year’s conference aimed at developing practical skills
2019 Program agenda:
In 2019, we have 5 sessions planned: 3 in the morning and 2 in the afternoon as follows:
AM: 9:00-12:00
- Session 1: “Adaptive Learning” by Rick Szal
- A session to work through the design and implementation of adaptive learning strategies to leverage technology to meet individual student learning needs and progressions
- 40 min prep session: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEpf8nEpqek
- Session 2: “Managing Ancillary Assignments for Experiential Learning” by Precha Thavikulwat
- A session that examines how to develop effective assessments tailored for experiential learning
- 43 min prep session: http://geobusinessgame.com/videos/ancillary_assignments.mp4 -or-
- https://towsonu.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=5228fea8-d2cb-4b8b-86c2-a983015064a1
- Session 3: “Designing experiential games” by Dick Teach
- A session that illustrates decades of best practices in the design of effective experiential learning games through the eyes of a master practitioner
- Session preview: https://youtu.be/7BL8bUPx1kA
- Homework
- Gold,S.& Pray, T. (1984). Modeling market- and firm-level demand functions in computerized business simulations. Simulation & Games, Vol. 15 No.3. Sept 1984, 346-363. Sage Publications. 0037550084153006
PM: 12:00-13:00 Lunch
PM: 13:00-16:00
- Session 4: “Experiential Learning with Game-Play for Ethical Decision-making” by Rich McConnell and Jen Petrie
- A report on the design, implementation and results of a collaboration between Univ of Pittsburgh and the US Army Command & General Staff College on the design, implementation and preliminary results of an experiential game to learn ethical decision-making
- Prep Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uvjo09K3Ehg
- Ethics game focus group insights
- Ethics game design notes
- Berg Center report on Ethics game use at Univ of Pittsburgh
- Session 5: “Developing an assessment plan for experiential learning” led by Deb Good & Paul Klein
- a report on an effort to develop a synthesis of experiential learning rubrics for broad management programs
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Track chair comments:
Our goal for this workshop is to inspire some thoughts and plans for you to try at home in your classrooms, that would lead to a case study paper to describe your experience and findings that can be presented at ABSEL 2020. We can continue to grow our scholarship in these areas as we go forward. We encourage you to offer workshop sessions that will lead to active experimentation and implementation in teaching practices that become future ABSEL papers as well. You are the scouts!
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Track resources: highlighting the best practices from previous years for ongoing development
Archives:
2018 workshops:
Session 1: Developing an assessment plan for experiential learning (led by Deb Good & Paul Klein)
This session explored choices and techniques for developing systematic and effective assessment plans for various experiential learning strategies. Small group work will feature brainstorming and design sessions to apply these ideas to participant situations. The intention is that these plans will lead to follow-up papers in 2019 to report on results and build our collective lessons learned database from practitioner experiences.
Workshop concept:
- Our intent is still to look at the nature of assessment with EBL projects but we want to have a very interactive session. So, we would like to request all participants to bring a copy of an EBL project they use in their classes as well as the rubric they use for assessing those projects.
- I will begin our segment by looking at the AACSB Assurance of Learning Standards that we use as a foundation for the creation of those rubrics and some general rules of thumb on evaluation.
- Paul Klein will then discuss an EBL project he uses in his Ethics class and the rubric that he developed.
- We would then like each participant to discuss their own projects/rubrics in the context of the standards presented.
This will be one of the foundational pieces for the next stage of this project which we will look to collaborate on with workshop participants next year. That will be the continued gathering of projects/rubrics so we can classify the nature of those items and judge whether they are aiding in realizing learning outcomes.
Session 2: Flipped Classroom (led by Raghu Kurthakoti)
In our 3rd annual installment of this program, Professor Kurthakoti will lead the group through the development and implementation of student-centric flipped classroom partnering for marketing expertise as a sample of how teachers can apply this technique on their own classroom. This will be followed by a workshop experience where participants in small groups will brainstorm and design their own programs with the intention of building the blueprint for a follow-up ABSEL paper to report results as part of our on-going project to develop the data to support programmatic decisions.
Concept: 90 mins
- A brief overview of student co-created flipped activity (5 mins) – What, Why, Pros and Cons
- An example flipped activity that was created by my students for one of their classes (10 mins)
- Discussion of rubric and development process (15 mins)
- Breakout session in pairs to develop an outline for student centered flipped activities and possible ideas (30-40 mins)
- Coming together and refining ideas to be implemented in Fall 2018 so that a paper can be submitted for the 2019 ABSEL. (20-30 mins)
Preparation material
- ABSEL members presentation on the flipped classroom (30 min)
- ABSEL roundtable discussion about the basics of the flipped classroom (22 min) part 1
- Sharing a flipped classroom experience part 2
- Bloom’s taxonomy and the flipped classroom part 3
- Flipping the professional military classroom part 4 (40 min)
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Session 3: Strengthening your Visualization Skills: a data-driven approach to experiential learning (led by Rich McConnell).
This session will lead participants through the design, implementation and analysis program of experiential learning to improve leader and manager visualization skills conducted at the US Army Command & General Staff College by Dr. McConnell’s team. Their project demonstrates tangible and measurable outcomes of experiential learning in practice, makes an important contribution to the idea of visualization as an essential, teachable skill for leaders, and provides a useful process for doing the same in your teaching practice. Workshop participants will do brainstorming and design for applying these processes in your own teaching practice, with the intention of leading to ABSEL papers to report on results. Prep work for this session will include the McConnell team’s paper, a set of 5 online presentations and background material to set the stage.
Group 3 prep and background materials: a set of presentations and discussions on Educating for Visualization (about 40 min each)
- Session 1a: Introduction & concept
- Session 1b: Panel discussion about concept
- Session 2: Theoretical construct and discussion
- Session 3: conduct of the learning, discussion
- Session 4: Results analysis, discussion
- Session 5: Summary and recommendations, discussion
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