PLANNING A COURSE OF STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT: FIRMS INSIDE THE CLASSROOM

Teaching in Strategic Management requires providing the students a wide range of capabilities to perform a manager job. Learning based on a constructivist and cooperative view puts its strength on the knowledge building in an autonomous way by the students who adopt an active role in the process, becoming the lecturer a mediator agent between the learning and the student.

Our paper focuses on the teaching of the Strategic Management subject in the Jaume I University in Castellon (Spain). This subject is divided into practical and theoretical sessions. We present a project to be implemented next year. The objective of this project is to increase the motivation and participation of students in the theoretical sessions by introducing cooperative learning.

Theoretical sessions consist of master classes combined with the introduction of individual or group activities related to theoretical points. In order to increase motivation and participation, we are going to introduce a new activity. Students are going to work in teams and each team should select a real firm to focus on – they are going to work with this firm also in the practical sessions. On each team, each student adopts a role: as a CEO or as a manager in the different areas of the firm (marketing, accounting, operations, human resources, etc.). Lecturers are going to explain one strategy to each team from a theoretical point of view, depending on the firms they have selected. The team must learn the strategy, advantages and disadvantages, when it is appropriate to implement this strategy, and all of the theoretical points associated to it. Then, the team must analyse how this strategy is applied in the firm, and give support to the ideas from the point of view of the role they adopt. Finally, they must explain the strategy in theoretical sessions to the other teams planned as firm’s forums. We expect students to be more involved in the learning process of theoretical concepts, applying these concepts with the guidance of the teacher. Moreover, to learn all the strategies, all of the teams must attend all the presentations. So, the knowledge of a team is necessary for the learning of the other teams. This cooperative way of learning is also positive to the process.

To carry out a correct control of the achievement of the purposes of this project, we plan to obtain feedback from the students through a survey.

Moreover, after each strategy presentation, teams must answer some questions in order to verify that the strategy has been understood. The evolution of the project observed by lecturers also constitutes a control mechanism. Finally, we can use the academic results to evaluate the success of the educational project. This project is going to be developed in one of the groups of the subject; in the other groups, the subject must follow the traditional planning, so the other group can act as a control group to verify if the academic results, satisfaction and motivation in the group we introduce increases.