Exponential Growth of Business Schools - A Paradigm in Emergence: An Imperative Need to Transform Management Education and Development
Rapid technological advancement coupled with ever increasing interconnectedness has been opening the global opportunities for everyone, amidst rising global population and declining resources. It is an imperative need of management professionals to deal with newer and dynamic challenges in the public or private systems. Often newer challenges require varied solutions that can come from critical thinking younger generation management graduates and quality of tomorrow’s professionals is the result of today’s efforts in educational systems. Present scenario of management education presents a bleak future as most of our educational policies and systems are designed to produce mediocre professionals. Therefore, it is need of the hour to reengineer and transform most of the management programmes the way they are offered. The paper discusses the present scenario of management education, prerequisites for quality of management education, sustenance of quality, pedagogical tools and future outlook.
Management Education for Practicing Managers: Combining Academic Rigor With Personal Change and Organizational Action
For several decades, management educators have discussed the difficulty of accommodating the competing values of academic rigor and organizational relevance. Only a few articles, however, consider approaches for integrating theory and practice in educational programs for working managers. Building on 15 years of experience in executive education, this article presents an approach grounded in experiential and action learning, which combines personal learning and organizational action without compromising academic standards. The following educational practices are discussed and evaluated: reflection reports, personal learning contracts, roundtable examinations, live cases, action-oriented thesis work, and organizational knowledge theaters. Taken together, the approach constitutes a powerful program design to address multiple learning loci and combinations of reflection and action, albeit one with considerable challenges and difficulties, as the authors discuss.
School Principals and Education Law: What do they know, what do they need to know?
Principals now work in complex and challenging environments where uncertainty and change are the hallmarks of their roles and responsibilities. As such, the knowledge and capability demands on principals have expanded, including those related to education law. While these matters attracted some research interest a number of years ago, there has been little recent work in the area of principals and education law. This article reports on an exploratory study into aspects of the legal knowledge held by Tasmanian government school principals, particularly concerning non-sexual physical contact between teachers and students. The research was undertaken using a small-scale, mixed-methods research design, which required principals to respond to various legal scenarios. Three key findings emerged from the study. First, principals used two different levels of working knowledge about education law  one related to legal problems, and the other to legally-related routine activities. Second, on the particular topic of physical contact, some knowledge held by principals was not legally accurate. Third, for major legal issues, participants indicated that they acquired access to information from legal experts. The situation for routine legal matters was less clear, although in-service training and practical experience were identified as potential sources of knowledge. Participants recognised the importance of a sound knowledge of education law, especially for dealing with security and safety issues and preferred to access further information through in-service training. Notably, the findings of the study are broadly consistent with those from earlier Australian and international research, suggesting that much remains to be done in the area of principals’ education law knowledge.