Transforming Teaching Through Play - Inside Liverpool Business School's PRME Pedagogical Workshop
- mduffy486
- 10 hours ago
- 3 min read
Dr Konstantina Skritsovali Senior Lecturer in Strategic Management
Sarah Williams Senior Lecturer in Human Resource Management
Our PRME Blog is back, this time considering a recent PRME Pedagogical workshop, hosted by Liverpool Business School. Considering writing a blog for PRME UK & Ireland, got your own story to tell? Contact us at PRME@bcu.ac.uk
In today's volatile and uncertain world, business schools face a critical challenge: how do we prepare students to become responsible leaders who can navigate complexity whilst maintaining ethical integrity? Liverpool Business School organised a PRME i5 workshop, delivered via the Sustainability Accelerator, providing a solution through creativity, play, and deep reflection.
The Liverpool Business School Sustainability Accelerator: A Strategic Hub for Change
The Sustainability Accelerator was established at Liverpool Business School as an innovation hub designed to accelerate applied work in responsible management education. Rather than operating as a peripheral initiative, the Accelerator functions as a strategic hub, bridging academic research with pedagogical practice to create tangible pathways toward greener, more sustainable economies.
The Accelerator operates with an established annual agenda that ensures momentum rather than sporadic activity. Throughout each academic year, the programme includes pedagogical training workshops that equip educators with innovative teaching approaches and theoretical frameworks for embedding sustainability across curricula. Regular, structured, and unstructured forums offer colleagues a space to share emerging findings and explore their pedagogical applications, ensuring that cutting-edge sustainability scholarship directly informs teaching practice.
The Workshop: Walking the Talk
Led by Professor Natascha Radclyffe-Thomas, the Stage 2 PRME training exemplified the Accelerator's pedagogical philosophy. Rather than solely sitting through PowerPoint presentations about sustainability education, participants experienced the kind of engaging, transformative pedagogy they were being encouraged to adopt in their own teaching. The training extended beyond reflection and discussion to provide concrete resources and tools. Participants engaged deeply with the PRME i-5 Framework, which offers a structured approach encompassing Intent (articulating purpose), Insights (gathering evidence), Ideas (designing innovations), Implementation (putting plans into action), and Impact (measuring outcomes). This framework helps educators systematically develop and refine their responsible management teaching whilst maintaining focus on meaningful change rather than superficial adjustments.
The session opened with a crucial invitation: step back from daily teaching routines and examine your own educational approach, recognising that meaningful change starts with questioning our assumptions about what and how we teach. Participants explored how they currently address sustainability and ethics in their teaching, what values underpin their pedagogical choices, what barriers prevent them from teaching more transformatively, and, crucially, how they can make sustainability integral rather than supplementary in their modules.
Participants were also introduced to LEGO® Serious Play and used LEGO bricks to build three-dimensional models that represent how their teaching approaches connect academia with external stakeholders, consider the challenges they face, but also the enablers that provide opportunities for transformative education. Building physical models bypasses some of the defensiveness that can arise in traditional discussion-based training. The metaphorical nature of the models facilitated rich discussions about complex pedagogical challenges. Participants shared their constructions, explaining their design choices and what they revealed about teaching dilemmas and aspirations. Rather than working in isolation, which remains the default mode for many academics, participants engaged in a dialogue about their teaching practices and learned through shared experience and collective problem-solving.
Looking Forward
Liverpool Business School's Sustainability Accelerator demonstrates that transforming management education requires more than isolated workshops. It requires sustained institutional commitment through year-round programming, research-practice integration, and partnership between staff and students. The PRME Stage 2 training exemplifies how the Accelerator's approach combines innovative, experiential pedagogy with strategic foundations for continuous improvement.
By creating dedicated spaces for co-creation and establishing an annual rhythm of innovation, the Accelerator ensures that responsible management education evolves continuously rather than episodically. This model empowers both educators and students as active agents in pedagogical transformation, equipping them with creative tools, theoretical frameworks, collaborative networks, and practical resources to cultivate the responsible leaders our complex world desperately needs. The question facing other institutions is not whether to engage in this work, but how to build the infrastructure and sustain the commitment necessary for genuine transformation.
