Launching an Externally Oriented Classroom-as-Organization as Untenured Faculty

The Classroom-as-Organization (CAO) is an experiential educational approach where students create and run an organization as part of class activities. CAOs contribute to student development in many ways as they experience managerial skills, attitudes, and decisions. Yet, the adoption of the CAO in management schools remains limited. Part of the problem is our limited understanding of instructors’ experiences launching new CAOs, particularly externally oriented ones. We attempted to address this lack of knowledge through collaborative self-ethnography involving qualitative analysis of interviews with two untenured faculty members who launched their first externally oriented CAOs. Findings show that instructors of externally oriented CAOs must build and manage relationships with a variety of campus stakeholders, manage contradictory forces while coordinating their classes, and experience intense cycles of positive and negative emotions. We discuss implications for instructors interested in implementing new CAOs and how business schools can increase their adoption.