A Teaching Revolution!

This course has an innovative, unique structure with a proven method for obtaining incredible results. XB disrupts the status quo, challenging your students every day and in every way. This course demands that students set the bar high for themselves and their peers and generates a learning experience that will buzz around campus.

Just ask the students and staff at the University of Central Missouri.

Design Principles

1)  Live the material; use classroom reality as a case so that students can learn from their own experience.

"The arts record and convey the fundamental values and ineffable experience of human civilization. The sciences propel the spirit of inquiry into the universe and undergird the ascent of mankind. Management applies artistic cultivation and scientific erudition to humanity's challenges that must be resolved by next Tuesday. " I am lucky enough to teach a subject that can relate to almost anything. Twenty years ago, I realized that my undergraduate students had no experience to ground abstract management concepts, so I set out to enable them to learn from their immediate experience in the classroom. In Management and Organizational Behavior, they learn management by doing it and articulating their experience.

We do what the management texts tell us to do and see what happens. The texts say, "departmentalize, specialize, systematize, delegate, trust." So over the years I have built an organization, replete with departments, positions, and procedures – all related to the task that the college sets for us, to learn our subject. Because our personnel change every semester, this organization exists in a book called The XB Manual © . This manual sets forth theory, applying it to the case of the classroom organization, and gives specific instructions for doing most of the tasks that teachers perform with hardly a thought. Students, now considered members, are supposed to learn the material and do what the book says to do. See the next section for what actually happens.  Let me emphasize the fundamental pedagogical design here: we work as an organization, not as a class. My ideal "classroom" would have thirteen break-out rooms surrounding a meeting room with folding chairs and walls you could paste flip charts on and leave them. The whole group might meet at the beginning of class, but most of the time they would be going about their business, accomplishing their objectives - not working prepared exercises. It would feel more like an office at work than a classroom.

2)  Delegate everything you can.

The previous principle contains this one, but delegation is too important and too scary to leave subsumed. Managing means accomplishing your objectives through the efforts of other people. As a manager I seek to work myself out of a job (without getting fired). This principle requires me to have other people perform important tasks as well as trivial ones. They cannot learn to take responsibility without having responsibility.

Let us begin with the mechanical functions of a classroom. How much skill does it take to stand in front of a class and call on people? Some. So one department develops this skill and then trains everyone to moderate discussions by having them do it. Another department leads us in reciting our organizational oath at the beginning of every class. Trivial, easy – until people object to performing "this stupid ritual." Then they really have to lead (and another department may study their leadership). Still another department takes and enforces attendance. Even trivial functions can put the monkey on your back (a management image for responsibility).

But I go further and delegate the second greatest responsibility that a teacher has, day-to-day grading. The organization evaluates almost everything a member does, but I do almost no evaluating. Having tried other methods, I have my subordinates use a draconian but highly effective and enlightening system, rank-order grading with no ties allowed. One department directs this massive undertaking and collects the data. I may audit their data but do not handle it much. As matters stand, the college requires me to report final letter grades. I cannot delegate this greatest responsibility. In my design, I take the accumulated ranks (over 130 measurements of each member's performance), sort them in a final rank order, and draw lines where I feel the final letter grade breaks should occur. Of course, considerable complexity creeps into this process in practice, but in the design I delegate grading.

3)  Groundhog Day: make use of predictable recurrences.

In the movie Groundhog Day, the hero relives the same day endlessly. He becomes effective only when he understands the complex, static structure of his environment. He alone knows what will happen. I have taught XB ('XB' refers to both the class and the organization that exists within it; 'XB' stands for eXperience Base) over 40 times, rewriting the manual constantly to incorporate events that recur. At the beginning of last semester (during the "forming" stage) a student on crutches told us that he had injured his leg when he was drunk. I said, "Page 236." As a teacher I wanted people to know that behavior follows patterns. Feigning omniscience is also fun.

Other courses use this design principle of repeated behavior. Management is a language, and students following procedures and conducting rituals are performing what a French teacher will recognize as a substitution drill. You learn the grammar by repeated use, substituting subjects, predicates, names, etc.