Knowing how to serve is essential in a tennis match. Serving was also an essential element in Peter Tennis’s fall 2024 organizational behavior course, but instead of serving on a court, his students were serving their community.
Tennis, an adjunct professor of management, incorporated service projects into his two sections of Human Resource Management 391: Organizational Effectiveness. This approach—which Tennis says came from a stroke of inspiration—allowed students to analyze real-world concepts through the lens of service. “Learning comes through experience,” he points out, “and I wanted to create a unifying experience.”
The course was divided into three phases that correlated with levels of analysis—individual, group, and organizational—and Tennis assigned corresponding service requirements. “Service was something I could string through all of the levels,” he says.
As students studied how individual traits and group behaviors impacted organizational effectiveness, they saw those dynamics play out in their service projects. “We talked about how to analyze organizations to see where we might improve effectiveness—what’s working well, what’s not working well—which students also applied to their service experiences,” Tennis says.
During the third phase, Tennis’s 170 students set service-hour goals as a class and ended up exceeding their goals by accumulating 1,340.78 hours. To sweeten the experience, for every service hour completed, a donor offered to match the hours with Giving Machine purchases. The net result: nearly $4,000 of humanitarian aid donated.
Gracie Quinn, an ExDM student from Pleasanton, California, was initially surprised when she heard about the service assignments, but “as the semester progressed, I realized the magnitude of the entire class engaging in service projects,” she says. Quinn’s service hours included an individual project baking pumpkin muffins for her sister, a small group project writing letters to seniors at Provo Rehabilitation and Nursing, and a class project picking up trash at Deer Creek Reservoir. Quinn also participated in other volunteer opportunities provided by BYU and was able to include one temple session in her service hours.
Since HRM 391 is required for all BYU Marriott undergrads, the group projects in Tennis’s class helped connect students across different majors. “Everyone brought a diverse set of skills to the table,” Quinn says. “We learned how to work with people who approached things from a different perspective, which made our projects well-rounded and prepared us for the real world.”
The class’s unique spin helped students create new habits, Tennis notes. “Students’ everyday outlook changed as they started to see opportunities to help others everywhere,” he says. “Instead of looking for a service project, they were just looking for people who needed something.”
Tennis also noticed a “positive, cohesive vibe” as the students shared their experiences through reflective writing assignments, status meetings, and presentations. “For me, ‘Enter to learn; go forth to serve’ is not just a motto but a blueprint for experiential education that also makes a difference in people’s lives right now,” he says. “Teachers often orient students toward the future, but students’ lives are occurring right now, right here, and they have so much to offer.”
While the term love may mean nothing in tennis, love was everything to Tennis and the undergrads in his class. “What I wanted the most,” he explains, “was for them to know that they’re loved, that their Heavenly Father loves them, and that they’re never alone.”
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Written by Emily Edmonds