Teaching Evidence-Based Management

Teaching the art of better decision making: How Universities embed evidence-based management

• Season 1 • Episode 7

Share episode

The gap between management research and practice remains stubbornly wide, but a growing movement of dedicated educators is working to change that by embedding evidence-based management into university curricula. This episode explores their journeys, challenges, and successes.

We hear from three university teachers who have pioneered different approaches to teaching evidence-based management - from introducing elements into existing courses to creating entire programs centered around evidence-based decision-making.

Christina Rader from Colorado College shares how she gradually incorporated the approach into her classes and now has students working on real-world projects with local organizations. 

Kemp Ellington from Appalachian State University explains how their department created a dedicated evidence-based management course as part of a curriculum overhaul focused on critical thinking and data literacy. 

Mary Foster recounts how Morgan State University, a historically Black college, integrated evidence-based management as a core competency across multiple courses to develop skills that wouldn't be replaced by automation.

Eric Barends, Managing Director of the Center for Evidence-Based Management, provides perspective on how his organization supports these "lone wolves" and curriculum champions, offering online course modules, consulting, and a network for teachers to share resources and experiences. He outlines the spectrum of implementation approaches, from introducing basic concepts in existing courses to fully embedding the methodology across entire programs.

The episode highlights both the challenges these educators face - from skeptical colleagues to administrative hurdles and financial considerations - and the profound rewards they find in equipping students with a structured approach to making better decisions. As AI and automation reshape the business landscape, these professors argue that the critical thinking skills at the heart of evidence-based management may be the most valuable assets graduates can bring to their future careers.

Whether you're an educator looking to incorporate evidence-based approaches into your teaching or simply someone interested in how management education is evolving to meet contemporary challenges, this conversation offers valuable insights into bridging the gap between research and practice in management.

Host:

Karen Plum


Guests:

Eric Barends PhD, Managing Director, Center of Evidence-Based Management

Kemp Ellington PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Management, Walker College of Business, Appalachian State University, North Carolina 

Mary Foster PhD, Professor, retired from Morgan State University, Maryland  

Christina Rader PhD, Associate Professor with Tenure, Department of Economics and Business, Colorado College 


Mentions:


Contact:

Eric Barends, Managing Director of the Center for Evidence-Based Management 

Karen Plum:

Hello and welcome to the Teaching Evidence-Based Management podcast. I'm Karen Plum, a student of Evidence-Based Management, actually, I'm not sure you ever stop being a student of this approach, to be honest.

Karen Plum:

But in this episode I'm going to explore the way teachers incorporate Evidence-Based Management into their courses and teaching programs. Through the episode I'll explore different approaches and the ways that the Center for Evidence-Based Management supports teachers as they look to embed the approach and its teaching into their programmes, ideally so that it becomes an established part of the university or business school's curriculum.

Karen Plum:

If you're a regular listener, you'll know that the evidence-based management mission is to promote the use of multiple sources of evidence in management decision making, including the use of the best available scientific research, and while there are many ways that this is promoted, clearly teaching students, whether at undergraduate, executive or PhD level, is a primary way to try to spread the word and the practice into organizations where critical business decisions are taken every day.

Karen Plum:

So let's find out how teachers go about including the evidence-based approach into their courses and how they've tackled just one or two challenges along the way.

Karen Plum:

Before talking to three university teachers, I spoke to Eric Barends, Managing Director of the Center for Evidence-Based Management, to find out if there are broad approaches that he's seen teachers adopt over the years.

Eric Barends:

there are several ways and it depends a little bit on the situation that you're in. A very simple, straightforward way to start is to introduce this in a course you are already teaching and it does not necessarily need to be on evidence-based management and it does not necessarily need to be on evidence-based management. Often it's a course on, I don't know, hr management or change management or whatever the topic is, and it helps to introduce some elements of evidence-based management in an existing course. Of course, we hope that teachers that the content they teach is based on evidence, is based on scientific research, and it helps to explain students a little bit about the background, where that research comes from and how trustworthy that type of research is. So a general understanding of that not all scientific evidence is created equal is usually one of the starting points in existing courses. Also, when it comes to figure out whether your intervention as a manager had an effect, if you have evidence- course on change management or HR management or there are a lot of examples, usually in the realm of people management, but even marketing or sales as well, is about how do you know whether you had an effect, whether it moved the needle, whether you sell more units or your employees are more productive or performing, your teams are performing better, then it helps to bring in the evidence-based perspective and learn about how do you assess outcomes. I mean, that's one of the steps of evidence based practice.

Eric Barends:

So a lot of people say, yeah, but we don't have a course on evidence- based management. That doesn't matter, you can start in any course you teach and bring in elements, just mention like, hey, we try to take an evidence- based approach here in this class. That means this, and you give them a sort of primer or a first few insights on what an evidence-based approach entails. And that's one mode.

Eric Barends:

The second typology is that they have a little bit more say about the content and they can choose the textbook or they can choose the exercises or whatsoever, and then they approach us to see whether they can use our educational material, and that can be the textbook or exercises or, even better, the online course modules, and then there are all kinds of variants. What they do is making a few course modules available for their students, so two or three out of the 15 we have, but still allowing them to complete all modules so that they can get a certificate and, you know, offering the students to get their certificate in their own time, parallel to the class, to the course, is something that works really well and is really appreciated by students, and we of course at CEBMA also promote this and support the university or the teachers to do this.

Eric Barends:

But that is actually the sort of second step that you change content within your course, in your class, and then the next step would be an elective on the topic of evidence-based decision making, evidence-based management, whatever you call it, or a master program or whatsoever, but dedicated to evidence-based management or decision-making.

Eric Barends:

And the final step is that it is integrated in a whole program like an MBA or a master of science or a BA, and that means it's not integrated in one class or one course but in multiple courses. So this course is on data analytics and therefore it uses the modules or the book chapter on organizational evidence, and this is about I don't know, human behavior or whatsoever, and we focus on biases. So the chapters and modules on professional expertise, how to acquire and how to critically appraise, or there's always a course on research methods or academic skills or whatever it's called, and that's where the scientific evidence modules come in acquiring, appraising and finding and applying. And that is actually the last step that is integrated in multiple parts of a program, sometimes over multiple years, and that's the great thing, of course, you just have the book or the modules, but you can use it over a stretch of one or two years.

Karen Plum:

So those are the basic approaches. A single teacher who's sympathetic to evidence-based management, integrating parts of the approach into their class; one or more teachers working on a broader programme at their university; through to the inclusion of the approach in multiple courses and classes.

Karen Plum:

CEBMa has an established track record of working with teachers and universities to incorporate as much or as little of the evidence-based management approach and methodology as they have the bandwidth for, bearing in mind the type of student, the course objectives and the time available in the course or the programme.

Karen Plum:

All the teachers I've spoken to have engaged with CEBMa and worked with them to design an approach that works for their context. So let's find out how our guests went about this journey, starting with a little background to explain what first attracted them to the approach and why they wanted to teach it.

Karen Plum:

Christina Rader is Associate Professor with Tenure in the Department of Economics and Business at Colorado College. Her response was twofold.

Christina Rader:

I had been interested in it from before my grad school days, when I applied for my PhD. One of the things I was interested in was evidence-based management. So many years of interest and then there I was, in a teaching capacity where I might actually be able to bring it to students. I think from my time working in different companies I would see us make decisions but not know if this was a good decision.

Karen Plum:

I think this neatly encapsulates what I've heard from many teachers. They want to see valuable research being used in organizations, and this is amplified if they've had practical experience of decision making in organizations, which they've felt was either very vague or actively based on something other than evidence - like gut feel or one person's opinion, for example.

Karen Plum:

Kemp Ellington is Associate Professor in the Department of Management at the Walker College of Business in North Carolina's Appalachian State University. An industrial organizational psychologist, he spent many years teaching psychology, naturally spending time talking about research in class, because that's what's expected. But what about when he moved to a business school? What were the students there going to expect?

Kemp Ellington:

When I was moving to a business school, you know, I didn't really know what to expect. Were my business students going to be, you know, receptive to talking about research studies? I'd always found that students actually find it really interesting and kind of are engaged when I start describing a study and what they did and what they found.

Kemp Ellington:

So I knew I wanted to do that, but I wasn't sure if the business students would see the relevance or would be receptive to that, and so I wanted to find a way to sort of help illustrate that, and I think showing the importance of and the value of making management decisions based on evidence was a good way to do that, or at least I felt like that was a good way to do that. So that's why I started out kind of setting it up at the beginning of the class that way, talking about principles of evidence-based management, sources of evidence.

Karen Plum:

Kemp also does consulting work, so he's able to bring practical examples into class and highlight the differences between going with your gut and looking at multiple sources of evidence when making important decisions.

Karen Plum:

Mary Foster is a retired professor from Morgan State University in Maryland. As chair of the department curriculum committee, she and other faculty members from the business administration department set out on a mission to modernize their curriculum in 2021. There were many things they wanted to address, including what students, employers and faculty were looking for. They wanted to find differentiators to set them apart from competitors, but also to understand what skills employers were seeking that weren't being met at the time. Aspects that came up were critical thinking, problem solving, leadership and teamwork. But what about students? What were they looking for?

Mary Foster:

When we looked at the student perspective at that time, what was really a lot in the headlines and a lot on people's minds was automation, big data, data analytics, AI was starting to be kind of tossed about, and from a student perspective, the compelling thing was how not to be replaced. Like what skills could you learn in college that you wouldn't be replaced by a robot? And that comes back to critical thinking, people skills, the leadership and teamwork, and so we thought there was a connection there.

Karen Plum:

As a university, Morgan State was already becoming known for analytics, problem solving and critical thinking. But they also had a deeper driver related to their heritage. Mary explained that Morgan is a historically black college with a large proportion of students receiving financial aid. It has a proud heritage of serving disadvantaged people.

Mary Foster:

We had this deep heritage of being a place where people who originally weren't allowed, you know, to get an education in any place else, and so of inclusion and supporting disadvantaged people, and so we wanted that to be part of this mix somehow, to be part of our core competency.

Mary Foster:

So we were looking for something that could help us do this, and that's where evidence-based management came into the picture and it seemed just to be a really good fit. It seemed to click, because the evidence-based management approach is very analytically driven, right? A nd that fits with the whole automation, big data, AI and it's how do you not get replaced by all those things? Because the value add that human beings can bring in evidence-based management is assessing the, you know, the credibility, the reliability, the validity of the data.

Mary Foster:

So anybody can scoop up data, but the assessment of its credibility and the interpretation that's the value add and then translating that into decisions and then evaluating how that worked out, you know that whole process, is where there's a real value add and those are hard skills to learn but incredibly valuable skills in our world.

Karen Plum:

So a variety of different perspectives, drivers and ambition lay at the heart of our teachers journeys. Let's take a look at how they introduced evidence-based management into their teaching. Here's Christina from Colorado College.

Eric Barends:

We always encourage the lone wolves - I don't know why we always refer to the term lone wolves but they are often lone wolves. The lecturer that is very fascinated or very sympathetic towards evidence-based practice or decision-making. And we say don't step into this fight on your own. Let us support you and we give you a platform and we will stand behind you, because you're probably a junior assistant professor at the beginning of your career and we have some academic heavyweights that can support you.

Karen Plum:

Next let's hear from Kemp at App State University, who you'll remember spoke about transitioning to a business school and how his students would respond to the notion of using academic research.

Kemp Ellington:

I personally started initially using it in several of my courses, both undergraduate and graduate courses, primarily as a way to set up the approach that I would take to the class, where I knew, going in, I wanted to be able to talk about research with my students and present research to them. So I would kind of introduce the idea of evidence-based management at the very beginning of the course and give them some kind of interpretive guidelines for research and things like that, so that, going forward, when I presented research studies and things like that to them, they would be able to have a better understanding of why we're talking about that and kind of, yeah, how to interpret it.

Kemp Ellington:

So, and you know, in that case I would use a little bit from the book as well as from the modules in terms of kind of setting things up and presenting the four sources of evidence and those sorts of things. But it was more just kind of bits and pieces of it there, and then the rest of the course would be about whatever the topic was human resource management, compensation, training and development, that sort of thing.

Kemp Ellington:

But then back in around 2020, the management department here at Appalachian State we decided that it was time to kind of reconsider our curriculum for undergraduate management majors and we went through this kind of curriculum revision process where the entire department had multiple meetings and kind of tried to bring in outside (speaking of evidence), outside evidence and data to try to reconsider, kind of our current offerings versus maybe where there were some gaps.

Kemp Ellington:

And so one area that we identified where we felt like there was a gap or a need in terms of our curriculum was critical thinking, data literacy, problem solving, decision making, and so felt like that really, you know, mirrored a lot of the topics that were covered in evidence- based management. So we decided to create a whole new course for our undergrads which is required for all undergraduate management majors and basically the entire course is the topic of evidence- based management.

Karen Plum:

Undertaking the curriculum revision with his faculty colleagues, Kemp said everyone was on board and supportive of the initiative. As you heard earlier, Mary from Morgan State decided to introduce evidence-based management during a curriculum revision which, as it happened, was underway at broadly the same time as Kemp's - during the early years of the COVID pandemic, which probably elongated the process at least to some degree.

Karen Plum:

Mary worked with Eric Barends, who helped the committee by giving them access to CEBMa's online evidence-based management course, which enabled them to get a good sense of what it was all about. Here's Mary talking about the skills that evidence-based management would deliver around interpretation of data and the translation into decisions.

Mary Foster:

The other thing that was a really good fit for us was that the notion of getting data, getting evidence from multiple sources. Because traditionally practitioners are always consulted right and usually you know you get some organizational data too if you're doing a pretty good job. But using scientific evidence and using stakeholder input - those are rarer. But those things - getting input, evidence from stakeholders in particular and integrating the science, those things are inclusive and that fit with our desire, our long heritage and history of supporting disadvantaged people whose voices hadn't been heard, so we saw that as a good fit.

Mary Foster:

So, given that, we said, okay, we know we want to have our courses be leadership, teamwork, you You know some critical thinking, so let's use evidence-based management, think of it as our core competency and integrate it into these four courses and two electives. And so what we did is we wrote course descriptions and syllabi for courses. Think of it as we started it with first, let's teach you how to do evidence-based management. Then we had courses on value creation and leadership. That became part of the major, and then we had electives on change management and team effectiveness.

Mary Foster:

So we ended up creating these five courses and every course you used evidence-based management to learn stuff in that field, in that discipline, in that arena.

Karen Plum:

Mary explained all the steps that the curriculum revision needs to go through.

Mary Foster:

In our university and in probably most universities in the US, how that works is you have a committee within a department puts together a recommendation that has to include, you know, all the details of the course descriptions and syllabi and stuff like that, and then it goes to the department for review and voting and review, discussion and voting.

Mary Foster:

From there it has to go to a school level kind of curriculum committee for review, discussion, voting. Then it has to go to the Dean, then it has to go to the university level curriculum committee for review, discussion. Every time there's review and discussion there's opportunity for it to be changed or killed.

Mary Foster:

And then from there it has to go to the person who's in charge of academic affairs and curriculum, usually a VP of academic affairs, and then from there, once it's signed off, goes through all those and is approved, then it has to go to the registrar who is the gatekeeper of kind of the course catalog, usually. There's a timing o f course catalog changes - sometimes they're continuous, sometimes they happen on a timetable and has to get in, be put into the system, and then it has to be scheduled, and so that's the process. But if you do that then it's in and it stays in until someone else goes through that process.

Karen Plum:

Clearly it takes time, lots of follow up, lots of persistence and, essentially working the system and all at the same time is doing the day job. But there does come a time when the curriculum needs an overhaul There does come a time when the curriculum needs an overhaul and the sense of dedication to achieving better outcomes was. And striking as I talked with the teachers about their experiences and you can see

Karen Plum:

the evidence-based approach reflected in the curriculum change process itself. I was interested to know if there were financial challenges associated with the introduction of evidence-based management, particularly the inclusion of . CEBMa's online training universities,, the which carries a price tag per student For some universities. The inclusion of another learning resource that costs money is an

Karen Plum:

issue, but there are many ways to address the financing. Before we get into that, I know that some listeners won't have heard modules, the online course, so just briefly, it has 15 modules each covering one stage of the evidence-based management methodology. It's accessed online, it's highly interactive and essentially takes a learning-by-doing approach. I've done it and learned a huge amount from it, and there's now a podcast which accompanies the course which we made to augment the learning for students. There are links to the course details

Karen Plum:

and the podcast in the show notes of this episode. So how can teachers who want to incorporate the

Karen Plum:

course into their programme ensure that financing isn't an issue?

Karen Plum:

We developed these modules in collaboration with learning engineers and learning scientists of Carnegie Mellon. So there are exercises, learn by doing exercises. Did I get - this exercise? It's a whole structure behind it. So, yes, obviously you would prefer to use those. Dean -

Eric Barends:

But if you're a lone wolf and you're on your own and you want to dedicate some time four or five hours to evidence-based practice and modules, you don't have a , and you go to your dean and you say, hey, I would like to use these modules, and they say and, by the way, they're going to cost 120, 150 bucks per student. Then the dean says, well, I'm paying you. Why should I pay for modules that you found somewhere analytics, that's you not going to work? Just go back and do your job. So that's the situation.

Eric Barends:

So what we usually do is see what we can help CEBMa online the teacher by setting up a free trial. So you're going to use the modules not all the modules, but make all modules available nevertheless and see how students respond to it, whether it resonates with them. And then you have a stronger case to your university or to your colleagues or whatsoever, and say, hey, I found this, try them out. They're very helpful. By the way, you teach data analytics. You could maybe use these modules and, by the way, you teach that change management, maybe have a look at the modules on assess the outcome and stuff like that. So we start with a free trial almost always.

Karen Plum:

Christina, Kemp and Mary's courses all make use of the online course. Here are Kemp and Christina talking about the arrangements. . A

Kemp Ellington:

So here, our undergraduates are on a textbook rental system, so they pay a flat fee every semester. It covers all of their online textbooks for their courses. The first two semesters that we offered this evidence-based management course, we used the book and I believe, if I'm not mistaken, it was the third time that we adopted the modules in there, and so we did run into a little, I guess, resistance for lack of a better word in terms of adopting those and having it count as pa rt of the textbook rental system, though the modules were kind of viewed as courseware and for the most part, courseware is meant to be kind of paired with a textbook.

Kemp Ellington:

So, you know, I think the resistance was just that. Well, if this is courseware, where's the textbook? I think the resistance was just that well, if this is courseware, where's the textbook? So we were able to work, though, with others in the university and kind of show them the modules and the content there, and thankfully were able to get approval for it to count as part of our textbook rental system, and it certainly helped, it was a big deal that could be linked through VitalSource. So all of the student e-textbooks that are used here have to be able to be linked via VitalSource. I do remember that it was very important that that was possible.

Christina Rader:

We operate on a three and a half week, intense format where students take one course at a time for the three and a half weeks. I teach one course at a time and so that means that we're pretty focused about what we do. So they do roughly half of the modules and we, with CEBMa have worked out a deal where the students pay a somewhat reduced charge for the modules and then we pay Eric a consulting fee to join us in class and actually help students with the projects.

Christina Rader:

He is the best question asker I've probably ever met in terms of critical questions, right, and in pushing. So the value is the students see that and then he makes me better in doing so, because I think it will probably be a lifelong skill for me to become good at asking critical questions. I can ask them, but I think, just having been raised in the friendly American way, it can still be hard to push, or I've been trained well enough to just go along with things. So he's an excellent question asker, a nd it makes me better.

Christina Rader:

The second thing is h e is excellent at the CATs that the students will do. So the students will do a critically appraised topic, and he is just excellent at helping with guidance on that. Right, I would think as someone with a PhD, shouldn't I naturally be great at that? Like it's an area that I have skills, but my skills are not as good as Eric's in terms of he just knows how to search and pull out the findings really well. So that benefits both the students and me, and also just having another set of eyes who can bring more perspective, because there's the science but there's still art to it, you know of doing the work.

Karen Plum:

The combination of Eric's straight talking and Christina's ability to coach her students through their assignments seems to work well. Her students work on client facing projects - either other departments in the College or external clients, so they're getting real world experience as well. Having heard Eric's plain talking, they then work out how they're going to communicate with the client.

Karen Plum:

In terms of the online course, they do half of the modules as part of Christina's program, but are encouraged to do the others, to learn the rest of the process and get their completion certificate which, as Mary explained, can be branded with the university's name, the Carnegie Mellon name and the Center for Evidence-Based Management. So it definitely has value for future hiring decisions.

Karen Plum:

And now here's Mary explaining her experience of establishing the online course in her curriculum at Morgan State.

Mary Foster:

Essentially what the Center for Evidence-Based Management did is they made their 15-week course into an equivalent. It has a digital textbook, the Evidence-Based Management book and it has this learning environment that's broken into modules that integrates with most modern learning management systems.

Mary Foster:

So they are using the model that universities use - not all universities, but universities in the United States tend to use for students, for how courses get executed and delivered. So none of this would have happened if they didn't have that. They were very flexible and we had this vision, talking with Eric, that, okay, so we're going to take this evidence-based management, this online course, and students are going to essentially have multiple opportunities as they take the courses in their major. They're going to use that online course as their learning resource for all of these courses.

Mary Foster:

So there were some technical details that we had to work out, and what I really give the Center for Evidence-Based Management credit for is that we didn't know how we were going to work out those things, but they committed to doing it and as we got into it and we're trying to, you know now it's real we have to make it happen and it was some trial and error - we figured out that, okay, it's essentially like giving a student access to it, because the idea was they pay once and then get access to it over their, w e said four years, but it was really like two to three years. We didn't want them paying multiple times, and so they had to create keys and do kind of administrative, technical things to make that happen.

Karen Plum:

Having established that access to the online course was needed for the duration of the student's major as a learning resource, CEBMa had to figure out how to make that happen technically and smoothly behind the scenes and, as Mary said, having access to the online course for three years makes the initial cost a bargain.

Karen Plum:

From the examples the teachers gave me, it's clear that CEBMa are very flexible and go out of their way to support teachers who want to include evidence-based management into their courses. While there are undoubtedly a range of measures available, each solution is geared to the circumstances and objectives of the teacher, the faculty and the university.

Karen Plum:

From CEBMa's perspective, as an organization trying to promote and share the evidence-based management approach, the ideal scenario is where it becomes embedded in the established curriculum offered by the university or business school, like in the case of Morgan State or App State, where our teachers went through the curriculum revision process.

Karen Plum:

Mary spoke earlier about evidence-based management as a core competency integrated into four courses and two electives in their major, and here's Kemp explaining how it's involved in multiple courses at App State

Karen Plum:

.

Kemp Ellington:

I use it as kind of the setup for other courses on, again, training and development, human resource management, to sort of introduce how we're going to approach the class, that we're going to approach this topic from an evidence-based standpoint and introduce the model to them

Karen Plum:

. So in that sense, yes, I've integrated it into other courses but, you know, primarily as a way to sort of set up the approach that we're going to take in the class, but not kind of covering all of the different modules or chapters that are covered in the model, whereas the evidence-based management course is the

Kemp Ellington:

one that kind of covers it. .

Karen Plum:

It makes such a lot of sense to use the principles of evidence-based practice as a way to learn another subject, so asking critical questions, using multiple sources of evidence, evaluating the quality of the evidence, examining outcomes and effects, and so on and so on. Mary explained that when introducing the evidence-based approach to other people, it often worked to present it as a tool to help them with the learning experience, for example, when teaching leadership or team effectiveness. She also thought it was better not to be too precious about it. Not every learning experience requires everyone to use the whole process.

Mary Foster:

It's about saying make sure we have the best available evidence and that we're trying to make the best possible decision that kind of applies to almost any situation or topic and make sure that we are thinking about what are the questions we ask and we're framing them and being thoughtful about that. Make sure we're getting input from all the stakeholders. These concepts are applicable in any field and they are likely to increase your probability of being more effective if you're considering all stakeholders, if you're assessing the credibility of the information you're getting. I mean, I think that is exciting when people can kind of wrap their heads around it and start doing that.

Karen Plum:

Where evidence-based management isn't embedded in the curriculum and is reliant on a lone wolf, it can just stop being taught if that wolf moves away from the university. Then the person picking up the wolf's classes might have no idea what the class is about, and in any case they have their own way of teaching the subject. So even if CEBMa reach out and try to ensure the evidence-based management content continues, they aren't always successful. Forging relationships with the wider university community to try to offset this situation is something that's an ongoing activity for them.

Karen Plum:

There are also instances where CEBMa has partnered with universities to actually run courses. Here's Eric.

Eric Barends:

So there are some universities that offer a program in partnership with the Center for Evidence-Based Management, so, for instance, the University of Malta, and there's also a university in Canada that offer a master program in evidence-based decision making or evidence-based management or evidence-based change management, for instance at the Free University of Amsterdam in partnership with the Center for Evidence-Based Management.

Eric Barends:

Our name is stamped on the program and we are also responsible for the quality control of the content of the program, and that means that me or Denise or some of our Fellows or teachers are also a guest lecturer or make a contribution to the program. That is a sort of option that we also offer and it can be very helpful, because if you say, hey, we want this in our program, but we don't have the expertise on all these steps of evidence-based practice, we say, well, you teach this and some of us can come over and be a lecturer and have two classes or this special workshop on critically appraising scientific research findings or whatever, and that's how we support them .

Karen Plum:

Throughout this episode, you've heard examples of how CEBMa, and Eric in particular, support teachers and universities. CEBMa also has a network of teachers who share not only experiences but materials that they use in class, which others can use. The guests on this episode said how useful these are and hoped that actually more would become available. There's clearly an ongoing appetite for new material.

Karen Plum:

The materials are available to members of the Teachers Network on the CEBMa website. If you aren't a member, Eric would be delighted to hear from you. You can find links in our show notes or head to the website, cebma. org, that's C-E-B-M-A dot org.

Karen Plum:

To wrap up, I'd like to leave you with some thoughts from our guests, starting with probably the closest we have to a lone wolf, Christina, explaining why she finds the work fulfilling.

Christina Rader:

This is something that I care about, that I see the value for students and it's been very fun talking with the clients and as I've gotten better at managing the projects.

Christina Rader:

Like the first set of projects weren't very good and it wasn't the student's fault, it's just I didn't know what I was doing, right and it was hard. You know, I hadn't learned how to navigate things. Like the client tells you this is the problem, right, you then go talk to people about the problem. They say that's not the problem, like I had just had not learned how to navigate that yet and how to prep for that.

Christina Rader:

But it was fulfilling to have the students just even getting exposure to this idea of evidence-based management and I would say very fulfilling to play with the idea that everyone says they're an evidence-based like. If you say it, they're like oh yeah, I use evidence and starting to understand, okay, why is what they say they're doing not evidence-based management and why is this approach actually a really valuable thing especially as someone who's just coming out of undergrad something that you can bring to your workplace that you have this structured approach and way of thinking and understanding what evidence means. It's not just some one fact that we grab onto.

Karen Plum:

Christina also mentioned that helping students to sell the concept of evidence-based management is something teachers need to keep a focus on, and Kemp agrees.

Kemp Ellington:

I had a student email me not too long ago saying this was after she completed it, saying that it was one of her better courses here at Appalachian State. So but you know, on the as I guess, counter examples, there are certainly undergraduate management majors, now that we're offering it as a required course for all majors, that it's been more challenging to help them sort of connect to the material and see.

Kemp Ellington:

So I spent a lot of time in the course talking about the why. Why are we talking about this? Because you know, for some of them, I think, when you get into particularly the unit on evidence from science and even organizational data, for that matter, but particularly evidence from science they, you know, start to maybe forget why am I, as a business student or as a management major, talking about this? And so I sort of continually remind them of why and the practical value of this and the importance of narrowing the science practice gap and those sorts of things.

Karen Plum:

And, finally, reflecting on her journey of embedding evidence-based management into the curriculum at Morgan State, I asked Mary if it was one that she would recommend to others.

Mary Foster:

If you care about or you are motivated by wanting to make sure that students have a consistently high quality learning experience and if you care about that experience being enduring, or if you care about how you spend your time, does it endure beyond you? Then, yes, this makes perfect sense, right?

Mary Foster:

But not everybody cares about those things that in terms of, or you might care about them, but it's not your highest priority. Other things may matter to you more. A nd so is it a hard journey? Yes, but it's not impossible. I mean, there's lots of things we do that are hard and I'm thinking you know, if I'm going to do something hard, let's do something that's good for people and sustainable.

Mary Foster:

This was a committee that, if that committee hadn't agreed to do this and created this, it would never have happened. So everybody needs allies, everybody needs team members, everybody needs that village to help, you know, affect change like this.

Karen Plum:

I think that's a great place to finish. Remember there are contact details and links in our show notes which will take you to other resources.

Karen Plum:

I'd like to thank all the guests Christina, Eric, Kemp and Mary for sharing their experiences and insights with me. I've really enjoyed all the conversations and I hope you've found some inspiration for your evidence-based management teaching journey.

Karen Plum:

See you next time. Goodbye!

Head Shot

Karen Plum

Host