Lissa Gilster worked for an oil field catering company in Alaska, taught English in Mexico, Japan, and Venezuela, ran an export-import business, and taught assertiveness skills to Navajo Indians, all before pursuing her advanced degrees. She's a professor, in other words, who's practiced what she teaches, and her students reap the benefits. I try to be as creative as possible because that energizes me as well as the students. It's an energy that spills over to her classes at Roanoke College, where she teaches global marketing, promotion management, sales management, and buyer behavior. For each course, she finds a way to inject an experiential component.
Students get together and go through grammar, present a dialogue, role play.
We'll see videos of firms that follow that paradigm. It's competitive, like a real life situation. She also gets students out of the classroom for real life assignments. Marketing management students recently had to pick a product and go to three local stores to compare pricing, promotional strategies and other marketing variables. They interviewed salespeople and, using techniques learned in class, came up with suggestions on product line additions and promotion activities.