Being Entprenuerial

We may convince ourselves that we must teach and our learners learn in within the confines of syllabus, program, institution. Thus, our OBTC call to be entrepreneurial is incongruous at best and a hell of a tease at its worse. After all, business entrepreneurs can venture away uninhibited by convention. Bunkum. What my students call the "real world" is just as constraining, perhaps more so. Those who breakthrough create their own conditions for innovation within. I see it not as thinking and working outside the proverbial "box". I see entrepreneurial behavior as making the interior of that box as different as it takes to "blow minds". We who have designed, run, and published experiential teaching exercises over the past 20 or 30 years have been doing just this. You get your 75 minutes twice a week, a classroom, tables and chairs, and a bunch of registered potent learners. That's the box. Today, in my two 75 minute periods of OB teaching, my students will be playing an adaptation of Trivial Pursuit to draw them into inquiry about the nature of motivation. Steve Meisel and I demonstrated this way of re-decorating the "box" at last year's EAM conference. See the 2006 Proceedings. When I leave that room at 2 for the next professor and class of students, it might go back to being just a box. But, for my 150 minutes, it was the scene of eight teams battling with their knowledge of popular culture to win beans redeemable in December for (maybe) a new car! They will be posting reflections on that exercise in our Vista Blackboard blended course site.

Entrepreneurial teaching? Yes, for I never quite know how these experiments in active learning will turn out (thank goodness).

Entrepreneurial learning? Sure. They don't know what they have learned, until they look back and probe this fresh, novel experience. It could be a flop. It could be an event they'll not soon forget, when thoughts of motivation swim into mind.

How about you? Can you bring to OBTC 08 a way you have turned that "box" into an exotic realm?