Angela Passarelli

On Becoming an Experiential Educator: The Educator Role Profile

Background Becoming an experiential educator involves more than just being a facilitator or matching learning style with teaching style. Experiential education is a complex relational process that involves balancing attention to the learner and to the subject matter while also balancing reflection on the deep meaning of ideas with the skill of applying them. Aim To describe a dynamic matching model of education based on Experiential Learning Theory and to create a self-assessment instrument for helping educators understand their approach to education. Method A dynamic matching model for “teaching around the learning cycle” describes four roles that educators can adopt to do so—facilitator, subject expert, standard-setter/evaluator, and coach. A self-assessment instrument called the Educator Role Profile was created to help educators understand their use of these roles. Results Research using the Educator Role Profile indicates that to some extent educators do tend to teach the way they learn, finding that those with concrete learning styles are more learner-centered, preferring the facilitator role; while those with abstract learning styles are more subject-centered preferring the expert and evaluator roles. Conclusion A model for the practice of dynamic matching of educator roles, learner style, and subject matter can aid in the planning and implementation of educational experiences. With practice, both learners and educators can develop the flexibility to use all educator roles and learning styles to create a more powerful and effective process of teaching and learning—in Mary Parker Follett’s words to, “. . . free the energies of the human spirit . . . the highest potentiality of all human association.”

Visioning in the brain: an fMRI study of inspirational coaching and mentoring.

Effective coaching and mentoring is crucial to the success of individuals and organizations, yet relatively little is known about its neural underpinnings. Coaching and mentoring to the Positive Emotional Attractor (PEA) emphasizes compassion for the individuals hopes and dreams and has been shown to enhance a behavioral change. In contrast, coaching to the Negative Emotional Attractor (NEA), by focusing on externally defined criteria for success and the individuals weaknesses in relation to them, does not show sustained change. We used fMRI to measure BOLD responses associated with these two coaching styles. We hypothesized that PEA coaching would be associated with increased global visual processing and with engagement of the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), while the NEA coaching would involve greater engagement of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS). Regions showing more activity in PEA conditions included the lateral occipital cortex, superior temporal cortex, medial parietal, subgenual cingulate, nucleus accumbens, and left lateral prefrontal cortex. We relate these activations to visioning, PNS activity, and positive affect. Regions showing more activity in NEA conditions included medial prefrontal regions and right lateral prefrontal cortex. We relate these activations to SNS activity, self-trait attribution and negative affect.

Vision-based coaching: optimizing resources for leader development

Leaders develop in the direction of their dreams, not in the direction of their deficits. Yet many coaching interactions intended to promote a leader’s development fail to leverage the benefits of the individual’s personal vision. Drawing on intentional change theory, this article postulates that coaching interactions that emphasize a leader’s personal vision (future aspirations and core identity) evoke a psychophysiological state characterized by positive emotions, cognitive openness, and optimal neurobiological functioning for complex goal pursuit. Vision-based coaching, via this psychophysiological state, generates a host of relational and motivational resources critical to the developmental process. These resources include: formation of a positive coaching relationship, expansion of the leader’s identity, increased vitality, activation of learning goals, and a promotion–orientation. Organizational outcomes as well as limitations to vision-based coaching are discussed.

The cognitive neuroscience of entrepreneurial risk: conceptual and methodological challenges

Do entrepreneurial ventures involve risk? The quick answer to this question is “well, of course they do!†And there is no shortage of supportive data. For example, the US Panel Studies of Entrepreneurial Dynamics (PSED) Gartner et al., 2004; Reynolds and Curtin, 2009, 2011) shows that as many as 72 months after a business-organizing venture begins, only some 30 percent of efforts have produced new firms. Spending six years trying to organize a company “risks†at least the time and opportunity cost; selling a company for less than the venture-capital raised “risks†the wealth of the investors. But there are at least two important differences. First, investors can take a portfolio approach to try to balance risks and rewards. Individuals, however, typically start only one enterprise at a time, so they stand to lose “all,†not just “some.†Second, investment decisions made by angels or venture capitalists are typically collective decisions, involving the best guesses of multiple brains. By contract, business-organizing decisions are typically made by a single brain. At the present stage of theory and research, the single-brain decisions have been most heavily studied by the methods of neuroscience. Consequently, this chapter restricts its focus to the judgments of risk made by individual entrepreneurs. When the goal is to examine the brain correlates of variations in risk judgments, restricting the investigation to an individual person is merely the beginning. At least four other design elements need to be considered for the final answers to be clear: (1) there must be a conceptual analysis that distinguishes one sort of risk from others; (2) the research designs chosen must maximize the opportunity to obtain meaningful results; (3) the concepts selected for testing must be operationalized unambiguously; (4) potential methodological confounding must be avoided. The present chapter is organized to address each of these concerns in turn to identify practices that might better enable researchers to understand the cognitive neuroscience of entrepreneurial risk.

Assessing Leader Development: Lessons from a Historical Review of MBA Outcomes.

Graduate management education seeks to enhance the likelihood that graduates will be effective leaders, managers, or professionals. This requires programs that are designed to enable students to develop the related competencies, and increasing regulatory pressures require programs to document evidence of success. However, both the design of competency development efforts and the assessment of those efforts remain a challenge for contemporary business schools. Here we examine a 25-year assessment program to illustrate the challenges associated with developing emotional, social, and cognitive competencies among full-time MBA students. We discuss key interventions that yielded positive assessment results and the challenges of maintaining a longitudinal assessment data set. We then examine patterns of competency development across nine cohorts to propose five factors that appeared to affect the variations in competency development over time and cohorts: (a) sequencing effects of emotional versus social competency development; (b) the sawtooth or alternating cohort effect; (c) leadership and organizational climate in the school; (d) events in the world at large, like a global recession; and (e) program structure and design.

Pitfalls in Organizational Neuroscience: A Critical Review and Suggestions for Future Research

The potential of neuroscience to be a viable framework for studying human behavior in organizations depends on scholars’ ability to evaluate, design, analyze, and accurately interpret neuroscientific research. Prior to the publishing of this special issue, relatively little guidance has been available in the management literature for scholars seeking to integrate neuroscience and organization science in a balanced, informative and methodologically rigorous manner. In response to this need, we address design logic and inferential issues involved in evaluating and conducting neuroscience research capable of informing organizational science. Specifically, neuroscience methods of functional magnetic resonance imaging, electroencephalography, lesion studies, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and transcranial direct current stimulation are reviewed, with attention to how these methods might be combined to achieve convergent evidence. We then discuss strengths and limitations of various designs, highlighting the issue of reverse inference as precarious yet necessary for organizational neuroscience. We offer solutions for addressing limitations related to reverse inference, and propose features that allow stronger inferences to be made. The article concludes with a review of selected empirical work in organizational neuroscience in light of these critical design features.