Reflections of Teaching Evidence-Based Management - Center for ...

for employee health and wellness in the workplace?” The debates are held in-classand provide a rich platform to stimulate further discussion.Encouraging students to reflect, self-monitor, and engage in metacognitiveprocessing should help them develop adaptive expertise for dealing withnew and complex problems inherent in the practice of management (Goodman &O’Brien, this volume). De Dea Roglio and Light (2009), in a study of EMBAstudents, developed a model of the “reflective executive,” offering insights toscholars and educators about ways to bridge the rigor-relevance gap. The conceptof the reflective executive focuses on the convergence of connective, critical, andpersonal thinking. For the EMBA student to experience this convergence, thelearning environment must be structured around adult learning principles, with aninstructor acting as a model and guide to prompt open dialogue and reflection.Reflection and self-awareness is the goal of having each student completea Learning Diary, log, or blog as part of course requirements (Learning How toStudy Again, Dawson, 2004). Students are encouraged to make regular entriesand instructors provide examples of ideas to help students get started. Diaries areto go beyond a descriptive record of what students have done, read, or noted inclass. Instead, examples they receive encourage reflections on course readings,class discussions, group work, what they have learned, what they have founddifficult, what they need to learn more about, and demonstrated applications ofcourse learning to practice (e.g., raising the issue “what’s the evidence” outside ofclass). To date, a variety of diary formats have been used (hard copy, wordprocessing files, web-based, e.g., google.docs). Sometimes diaries have been1034