Teaching

How I teach

Effective instruction requires clear intent, purpose, and direction. I navigate by four aids — students, andragogy, performance, and expectations — that together shape how I design a course and conduct a class.

Students

Teaching is, in the end, entirely about the transformation of students, and every other commitment I hold answers to that one. As Sam Pickering puts it in Letters to a Teacher, students matter more than we do; my task is not to display what I know but to facilitate their self-discovery. I choose material with an eye to its relevance to their lives and futures, while allowing room for topics I find compelling, because enthusiasm is contagious and a teacher who is bored will teach boredom. I also accept that most specific content will fade. What I want to remain, long after the particular cases and frameworks are forgotten, is the habit of strategic thinking — the disposition to ask better questions, weigh evidence, and reason toward judgment — which I take to be the durable residue of a good management education.

Andragogy

A doctoral seminar introduced me to Malcolm Knowles' distinction between pedagogy, the teaching of children, and andragogy, the teaching of adults, and it reoriented how I understand my classroom. My students are mature, active learners with real obligations and real time pressures, who learn best when instruction connects to problems they recognize and can use. I therefore design toward application rather than accumulation, treat their experience as a resource to be drawn on rather than an obstacle to be corrected, and address the whole person — the working self, the anxious self, the self deciding what kind of professional to become — rather than a container to be filled.

Performance

Class time is a curated performance, and I prepare for it with a practitioner's discipline: lessons scripted, room layout checked, technology tested in advance, and professional attire, because the room reads all of it. Each session is built around terminal learning objectives I share with students and enabling objectives embedded in the instruction, and I reach them through varied methods — short lectures, small-group discussion, think/pair/share, and student presentations — so that attention is renewed rather than assumed. I avoid improvisation as a default, but I plan for spontaneity: I leave deliberate openings for student contributions on current events or the day's reading, so that what looks unscripted is in fact designed.

Expectations

From the first day the relationship is contractual, and I am explicit about both sides of the contract. I commit to arriving fully prepared for every class, and I hold students to a reciprocal standard, with policies on attendance, punctuality, conduct, and communication spelled out in the syllabus rather than left to inference. An open-book quiz in the second class — one everyone should be able to score perfectly — makes those expectations concrete, and direct, early feedback signals that they are consequential. Setting the terms plainly at the outset, I have found, is itself an act of respect: it treats students as adults capable of meeting a standard once they know what it is.

Teaching students to work with AI

My students are entering the digitally mediated workplace I study, one in which AI systems increasingly mediate between people and their work, and I take it as part of my responsibility to prepare them for it. I therefore teach them to work with AI rather than around it, and I approach the task as adoption proceeds in a well-run organization: as a capability to be developed rather than a product to be purchased, with human judgment retained throughout. This orientation is not abstract for me. It derives from applied work advising organizations on how to adopt these systems responsibly, and I bring that same posture — disciplined, skeptical, and oriented toward judgment — into the classroom.

Three principles organize the approach. The first is capability over product: AI fluency is a skill to be developed, not a tool to be bought, so I give students structured practice in applying these systems to the tasks managers actually face — analyzing a case, drafting a plan, stress-testing a decision — and I give them a shared grammar for that work in the six elements of an effective prompt: role, task, context, examples, format, and constraints. The second is honest limits: I teach students to articulate what these systems cannot do as readily as what they can, and to treat every output as a draft to be defended and improved rather than an answer to be trusted. The third is co-design and ownership: students use these tools openly, under norms that mirror a workplace AI policy — disclosing how a tool was used and taking responsibility for the result — because a capability people did not help build is one they will not defend when it fails.

I have redesigned assessment to match. Its weight has shifted toward the parts of the work students must still own — in-class reasoning, the oral defense of their choices in presentation, and evaluation that follows their thinking rather than the polish of a final artifact. The organizing principle throughout is judgment: when the tools can draft almost anything, what distinguishes a capable manager is knowing what to ask of them, what to credit, and what to answer for — precisely the discernment my research finds the digitally mediated workplace increasingly rewards.

Other Ways I Leverage Technology

Beyond AI, I use technology deliberately to change what happens in the room. I created a series of ten-minute concept videos covering the core material of MB 107 and, during the pandemic, ran the course as a flipped classroom; post-pandemic I have kept a modified flipped format that moves first exposure to content outside class and reserves class time for activities, writing, and presentation. I record personalized video feedback on papers and assignments in place of written comments, which students consistently report as clearer and more encouraging than marginal notes, and in class I annotate slides, web pages, and documents directly on a hybrid laptop, posting the annotated files to Brightspace afterward so the record of our thinking is preserved.

I also make extensive use of simulations — high-stakes, decision-forcing exercises that place students in the position of managers who must act under uncertainty and live with the consequences. Students consistently identify them among the most valuable components of a course, and I use them across the curriculum: the Everest team simulation in MB 240, which surfaces the dynamics of asymmetric information and team coordination, and the international-strategy and operations simulations in the senior capstone, which compress a semester of strategic decisions into an experience students remember long after the frameworks fade.