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Playmobil pro is an innovative modelling kit for adults that encourages creative thinking in the university/workplace. International multilingual students often disclose that they have little opportunity to develop their intercultural awareness, and cross-cultural and multilingual communicative competencies while engaging in meaningful activities that foster sustainable content and language learning. In the present study, 35 students were involved in two Playmobil pro workshops. They worked individually to present themselves to their peers, referring to their cultural background. They then worked in groups to explore intercultural differences among people working for organizations operating in the UK and another country of their choice and offer recommendations to help organizations avoid cross-cultural conflicts. The aim was to actively engage students to work on their final assignment and develop their intercultural awareness and cross-cultural communicative skills. This case study used a qualitative design and explored students' attitudes by asking them to write a short anonymous report at the end of the implementation and provide anonymous feedback via Mentimeter after each workshop. The lecturer also kept notes in the form of a diary during this implementation. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the data which revealed that Playmobil pro facilitated intercultural communication in the post-COVID-19 era as students seemed to be unwilling to work with their peers in face-to-face classes, possibly suffering from trauma. However, learners confessed that they needed more time, support, and artefacts to fully present their ideas and thoughts. Recommendations for the effective implementation of Playmobil pro with multilingual students will be offered.

We report on a study of how instructors in an online management classroom aim to develop critical reflection through asynchronous discussions. There is an ongoing debate centered on improving asynchronous discussions in online management education but insights into how these discussions could be facilitated to promote critical reflection remains largely under-developed. We address this issue by considering the extent to which management instructors' perception of their role and understanding of being critical impact their facilitation of asynchronous classroom discussions and the challenges associated with this facilitation. Results from 18 semi-structured interviews with instructors teaching in an online MBA program at a UK higher education institution show the potential of asynchronous discussions to promote critical reflection. However, we found that instructors often fail to capitalize on opportunities for critical reflection that arise from classroom diversity and dynamics. Despite the emancipatory intent that underlies program design, interview data reveals three specific areas of interest: the diversity of instructors' interpretations of what constitutes being critical in asynchronous discussions, a range of individualized facilitation strategies and the impact of imposed design constraints. We offer suggestions as to how to improve the facilitation of critical reflection through asynchronous discussions as well as directions for future research.

To prepare their students for the increasingly demanding workplace of the 21st century, business schools resort to using experiential learning techniques to make explicit connections between knowledge and experiences students already have, encouraging them to make their own interpretations. In this case study, 50 multilingual students participated in a LEGO Serious Play (LSP) intervention for one academic semester. Due to the continuous rise of the numbers of international students in management schools in the UK in the post-COVID-19 era, researchers and lecturers indicate that additional support is often deemed necessary to promote social justice for multilingual and multicultural students and support their well-being. These students used LSP to make better sense of the assessment criteria and the theories they had to use to respond to the instructions and prepare a group paper and a group oral presentation in terms of a module on intercultural management. Findings revealed that these English as a Second Language (ESL) students were inspired by the use of LSP as it allowed them to reflect on the theories and apply them in creative ways fostering collaboration and creative problem-solving. Students initially felt uneasy to engage in this new approach but then enhanced their performance in their group oral presentations by 35% as they were able to improve their second language competence and intercultural awareness. The article concludes by discussing implications for using LSP with multilingual ESL students to help them overcome linguistic and cultural barriers, offering suggestions for the effective use of game-based techniques in Higher Education.

This article investigates entrepreneurial marketing (EM) and use of business recovery frameworks within experiential learning cycles (ELC)s to investigate post-COVID learning techniques during the learning process. Three distinct post-graduate learner cohorts took part in the study consisting of part-time MBA entrepreneurs from the United Kingdom, part-time upGrad MBA students from India (managers and marketers in large firms) and full-time MCom (Masters in Commerce) marketing students in New Zealand. This inductive study uses coursework artifacts, student feedback with thematic coding, and analysis from live business projects. Use of the post-disaster business recovery framework led to deeper learning, increased understanding, and generation of insights and new knowledge. Both student learner and entrepreneurial marketer skills and competencies are evidenced as essential for business resilience and growth in post-pandemic environments, while the framework aided co-creation of learning between the student and the focal business. Implications for marketing educators are offered together with future opportunities for education research in the EM education, entrepreneurship education and marketing fields. The study will allow educators to understand the three student typologies, leading to effective and impactful pedagogy in EM education.

Improving perceptions of graduate utility is fundamental to Higher Education's employability and skills agenda. However, utility enhancement is a ubiquitous consequence of all learning. Therefore, motivating students to engage in deep learning to improve their utility is problematic. Using the student voice, in this article, I explain how prompts endorsing marginalism as a benefit of attaining superior utility with higher subjective value informed and motivated meta-learning approaches. Drawing on data from an ethnography and interpretive phenomenology situated in the unique learning environment of the COVID-19 pandemic, findings reveal students were motivated to seek utility attainment opportunities that marginally enhanced self-perceptions, transferability of learning, and employability. This article is among the first to explain why the attainment of knowledge and can-do competencies associated with marginalism, superior utility, and higher subjective value, motivates learners' present and future time perspectives.

This account of practice describes an experiential learning approach used for enterprise and entrepreneurship education in a UK higher education setting. Module design and delivery insights are drawn from the methods employed by an entrepreneur turned educator to facilitate learning via pop-up shop/event activities financed by a £50 seed fund. Feedback showed that the approach was highly valued by students, who reported significant personal development and enhanced entrepreneurial understanding. Considerably improved student attainment was also measured. The educator reflects on how his experiences as an entrepreneur helped shape the activities and their delivery, and the impact on his own pedagogical and academic development.

In this article, we illustrate how ideas and practices of mindfulness can be integrated into management education, drawing from our work on postgraduate programs run with working managers. Our purpose is particularly to show how mindfulness can be introduced into the curriculum in a way that is acceptable for participants and clients, and brings benefit to participants. Following a brief review of literature on mindfulness in organizations, we share the curriculum innovation we designed and provide detail of its effectiveness derived from our follow-up evaluation.

Within the currently diverse UK higher education environment, one important aspect of learning is the development of intercultural competence. The study that informs this paper investigated the ways intercultural competence was perceived as being enhanced or inhibited through current language and educational practices at a university that positions itself as internationally engaged and globally recognised. The project employed a multiple-case study design, examining eight academic programmes drawn from four different broad disciplinary groupings: social sciences, science, engineering, and management. Data were collected through individual, focus group and stimulated recall interviews, the latter using class observation recordings as a stimulus. The study revealed the ways in which language was exploited by both staff and students to convey particular meanings within an intercultural context. It was found that language choices, register and style were perceived as contributing to the pragmatic impact of either reinforcing barriers to or promoting intercultural competence development.

For much of the past half-century, scholars from various parts of the world have studied the early stages of school principals' careers. This article presents the results of a review of research on novice principals (NPs) regarding its current status, intellectual structure and conceptual structure. The review conducted bibliometric and content analysis of relevant articles accessed through Scopus. The findings primarily concerned patterns in the knowledge production related to novice school principals. Our findings indicate that this line of research is still in its infancy, but has been growing rapidly in recent years. Related studies have mostly focused on three broad areas: "preparation and development of NPs"; "NPs' socialization process and the challenges they face"; and "NPs' role in school improvement." Most of the related studies are found to be lacking in terms of a solid theoretical grounding. The implications of the results for the related literature are discussed.

The experiment tested overconfidence in number skills among British graduates and non-graduates. The data were collected at a residential management training programme for part-time professional students. The aim of the research was to test whether graduate professionals, due to their higher qualifications, overstated their numeracy abilities compared to non-graduates. The experiment, conducted using E-prime, showed a significant interaction between the level of qualification and the overstatement of numerical abilities. The results support the hypotheses and showed that graduates rated themselves higher than their actual abilities: their test performance was not consistent with their confidence estimates. The findings are significant in relation to rethinking higher education curricula, which are currently under pressure to align with the needs of the economy. The authors advocate more inclusive and interpretive research for a greater understanding of the relevant issues to offer useful policy data and help higher education institutions prepare their graduates for task fulfilment and decision-making in a dynamic workplace. To date, few experiments have tested the numeracy level of graduates to corroborate the narrative communicated by employers. This study, despite the limited sample, is a first attempt and will serve as a reference for future, wider studies.

The received wisdom is that mobility programmes considerably contribute to students in terms of the development of generic skills, language and multicultural competence and competitive advantage in the global labour market. Surprisingly, the impacts of mobility programmes on academic learning have received very limited research interest in the literature. This study uses students enrolled on international management and modern language degrees in a British university to investigate the benefits of a yearlong study abroad programme, on the development of linguistic and multicultural skills measured by their academic results pre- and post-international mobility. Using a control group of students who stay on campus, quantitative data drawn from a longitudinal study over 8 years conclusively suggest that study abroad students academically outperform control group students after controlling for gender, domicile, ethnicity, socio-economic status, prior academic performance and age. The implications of these results on higher education and policy-making are discussed.

Purpose: This paper aims to identify the ethical foundations and principles underpinning the learning organization (LO) concept. Design/methodology/approach: By interviewing one thought leader in the field, Professor Robin Snell, this paper traces how his early days in academia shaped the development of an ethics-driven research agenda on LO. Findings: An ethical perspective advocates the importance of establishing a covenant or constitutional foundation of rights that would enable and empower organizational members at all levels to enact the processes of LOs, thus signifying the importance of employee development and a more sustainable approach for developing LO. Originality/value: A personal reflection of Robin Snell on his own academic career development and research trajectory offers some insights into how an ethical perspective of LO evolved and flourished as a field of study.

This four-country study compares business students concentrating in marketing, accounting and finance (AF), and management with respect to five motives: lifestyle aspirations, reputational effects, relative ease of completion, career outcomes, and developmental skills. We find that, except for the developmental skills motive, the importance of different motives varies with concentration choice. Lifestyle aspirations and relative ease of completion motives tend to be generally more important to marketing than AF and management concentrators, while career outcomes are more important to AF concentrators compared with marketing and management concentrators. Comparing marketing students in the United States to their counterparts elsewhere, those in China are significantly less attracted to lifestyle aspirations, reputation, and career outcomes, while those in the United Arab Emirates show no significant differences in career outcomes or reputation compared with those from the United States. The implications of these findings are discussed in the context of variations in cognitive styles of concentrations, cultural norms, and market forces between tight and loose societies, with implications for managers of educational institutions.

Practitioners consider critical thinking skills to be vital for survival in business. Business schools should use such insight wisely by strategically embedding critical thinking skills in the curriculum at module and program levels. Practitioners even go further and say it is the one aspect that cannot be automated and probably the most valuable in functioning as an oppositional power to the "shallows of the internet." However, we have to keep in mind that developing critical thinking skills is a learning process in itself, one that is cyclical, multilinear, and omnidirectional, and it needs to be integrated as a pedagogy, not just a learning outcome, so it can become an academic habit of mind. The article demonstrates how critical thinking can be enhanced by embedding it as a pedagogy at module level.

In the context of public value, it is argued that there is a need to adopt the learning organisation philosophy to manage public service organisations better. For collaborative work with public sector managers or in management education, a fictitious scenario is presented to develop the concept of the learning organisation as paradox. Faced with multiple and conflicting demands, public managers find it difficult to change organisational behaviour in response to new knowledge. The scenario demonstrates "how" learning organisation philosophy can be used to translate new knowledge into new behaviours. Key skills required for public managers to exploit the knowledge of all organisational members and confront the challenges of a contested concept, such as public value, are developed and comprise summarising evidence, making judgements, sharing thought processes on a contentious issue, and arriving at a consensus together. Contributions to public administration theory and practice are discussed.

This article sets out to capture the benefits of business and universities working together to create robust management development programmes for the competitive markets ahead. It attempts to illustrate the changes in business approaches to providing people with management development, given the increased mobility of individuals from company to company, the pressures on budgets in more restricted financial times and the benefits of partnering with university provision. Using qualitative data sourced from both business organizations and higher education institutions (HEIs), underpinning a more detailed pivotal case study, themes are extracted on the current provision from institutions to business, bringing to light the reality that desire and actual outcome are two different things. The systems created for institutions before their contemporary dealings with business are still used to serve current needs, and it is clear from early research and practice that they are not fit for purpose. The result is a slow service for business clients and a loss of potential third-stream income -- valuable to HEIs in a new competitive market. In the light of this research, recommendations are offered for HEIs to become more competitive when trying to penetrate commercial markets for this income.

Research on the education of international students sheds light on the difficulties of studying in a foreign language, but often underplays the opportunities provided by cultural diversity in the classroom. This study, prompted initially by the authors' experiences of the contrasts between East/West learning styles, explores how education systems, language, and cultural orientations inform students' approaches to learning. It explains how role reversal in the classroom can be implemented in higher (university) education settings, to generate deeper perspectives of meaning and understanding when teaching internationally diverse cohorts to show how imaginative postgraduate student engagement can not only bridge cultural differences, but also capitalize upon them. While the apparent polarization between East and West educational system stereotypes served as the catalyst for the search for effective pedagogies of engagement, the proposed methods were found to have universal application, clearly resonating with culturally diverse cohorts studying in the UK. The approach benefits international business teaching as cultural, national, and institutional perspectives become explicitly incorporated into course material, using the students' own background, knowledge and experience as resources to add value.

A considerable amount of research has been conducted into women's experiences of leadership in the education sector with calls to further promote equality, increase diversity and foster inclusion but ways forward seem less easy to implement with the same experiences and frustrations continuing to emerge. This article applies insights from critical realism to educational leadership development to seek a fuller understanding as to why these concerns remain and how they might be addressed. The article begins by considering barriers to women attaining leadership positions and accessing leadership development including those posed by the 'leadership turn' and new managerialism. Some ideas behind critical realism are briefly introduced before exploring the possible implications for educational leadership development. It is argued that a fundamental challenge to, and changing of, the dominant concept of leadership must take place before progress can be made. Directions are proposed for critical realist work in the theory and practice of educational leadership development and the wider field.

Pro-Vice-Chancellors (PVCs) form the second-tier leadership of UK higher education institutions. However, their role and position remain under-theorised and under-researched. The present article explores the extent to which a PVC Education role requires core expertise in education or generic managerial skills. Using a mixed-methods approach, we first establish the disciplinary backgrounds of PVCs Education in Russell Group (RG) and post-1992 institutions. Fewer than one in five PVCs Education have a disciplinary background or additional formal training in education. Second, we conducted 24 semi-structured interviews with PVCs Education, Heads of Education Departments and Heads of Learning and Teaching units. These interviews suggest the PVC Education role requires managerial skills, usually acquired in previous headships, as well as academic credibility and knowledge of institutional processes rather than particular expertise in education. In sum, generic managerial skills rather than educational expertise are paramount for understanding the profile of PVCs Education in UK universities.

In the United Kingdom, a hegemonic view of the purpose of educational leadership is summarised by the National College for School Leadership (NCSL) as "transform[ing] the quality of learning for all pupils." School leaders are assumed to be committed to this aim, leading to a view of schools, embedded in preparation programmes, as benign places, focused on equity in learning, and working for the good of all. Yet evidence on the differentiated and inequitable pathways of learners, and the continuing exclusion of those deemed "other" from leadership roles suggest a different interpretation of the purpose and enactment of leadership. As Quantz and Rogers (1991) point out, there is overwhelming research evidence that "schools work for the very special interests of the status quo" and that "active denial" is needed to remain ignorant of the exclusion of groups of learners and potential leaders indicated by research. The causes of inequity are highly complex, contested, and contingent. In this paper, the author suggests that among many causes, both the theory of leadership and, relatedly, leadership preparation and development are profoundly implicated in the continuation of inequity.

The professional development of middle leaders in higher education is little considered in existing research, though there are general concerns being raised about the suitability of the professional development opportunities currently available. This article develops and explores the use of meta-reflection as a method for professional development, particularly of academics with direct responsibilities for courses and programmes such as course leaders, directors and co-ordinators. As an extension of reflective practice, (co)meta-reflection is proposed as a joint activity involving two or more people, seeking to develop their thought and practice by moving from descriptive to analytical levels of reflection. We provide an example of a (co)meta-reflective exercise and identify it as an approach with considerable potential to address the problems that middle leaders face, and call for further exploration of it as a method for professional development.

This paper considers the case for reform of management structures in UK universities and offers proposals for change. The model of top-down, performance-led management that characterises many institutions is both outmoded and ill-suited to the challenges of an increasingly turbulent higher education sector. Drawing on the experiences of a university that introduced a new scheme of performance management, I explore alternative approaches to leadership and management, collaborative or partnership working designed to improve employee voice and the need to re-evaluate approaches to Human Resource Management. I conclude with a five-point model for change.