Seeing Through the FOG: A Classroom Exercise Illustrating the Challenges of Sharing Information as Facts, Opinions, and Guesses in Teams

Information sharing is a critical aspect of effective team functioning. However, it can be challenging to discern whether the information communicated is fact, opinion, or someone’s best guess (FOG) due to the varied understandings, assumptions, and interests team members bring to any collaboration. In this article, we introduce a role-play exercise that helps participants better understand the complexities associated with information sharing in teams and how to sort through the FOG associated with information exchanges. Drawing upon research on motivated information processing, this exercise simulates the challenges of information sharing and assists teachers in demonstrating strategies to overcome them.

Teaching Meaning: A Pedagogical Strategy to Help Ministry Students Understand Meaning Making in Narrative Perspective

This article describes a pedagogical classroom exercise that encourages ministry students to understand the jarring experience some people may confront when their life stories are disrupted and their ways of making meaning are challenged. Contemporary work in narrative and meaning making that grounds the exercise is presented. This exercise may be helpful to professionals who teach or mentor ministry students in their care of those enduring loss.

The Retail Apocalypse as a Critical-Thinking Classroom Exercise

One does not have to teach retailing or supply chain management to be aware of the immense changes taking place in retailing. Indeed, the speed at which brick and mortar retailers were folding before the pandemic has only quickened given the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic across the economy. Staying abreast of the retailers and suppliers going out of business has become a challenge. At the same time, educating retailing and supply chain management students on the current and developing market realities in an interesting and educational manner has proven difficult. This article describes a game that can accomplish the goal of providing a meaningful, critical-thinking exercise for classroom use that will elicit student discussion and classroom satisfaction.

CandiDating Game: An Exercise in Interviewing and Hiring

This article describes a game show-style classroom exercise that is appropriate for any management-related courses that wish to enrich students’ understanding of a key phase of the hiring process. The activity introduces the importance of job descriptions and job specifications through a semiscripted unstructured interview patterned after a classic television game show. In The CandiDating Game, one student interviews three candidates in front of the class. Through varying the job specifications that each student receives without informing the students or interviewer, the instructor can use this activity to engage the class in a rigorous discussion on the importance of job specifications and the general structure of interviews.

Supplemental Material: GMDE: Extracting quantitative information from geologic maps

Contains a sample classroom exercise using a map from the Canadian Rocky Mountains that can be done with GMDE.

Supplemental Material: GMDE: Extracting quantitative information from geologic maps

Contains a sample classroom exercise using a map from the Canadian Rocky Mountains that can be done with GMDE.