According to a course catalog or syllabus, I teach Business Model Strategy or Micro-economics. That is just the cover. The core aim of my teaching is student empowerment: to build their confidence in their own abilities – including their capacity to learn relevant and impactful skills from scratch, especially from their peers.
A recent video in a classroom at the Hult International Business School illustrates my primary tools: student-to-student interaction, engagement with humor, and instances for affirmation. The first relies on a wide array of exercises. Indeed, that’s how I start every class: with students talking to students. Better than me telling students that they own the pace, ambition, and culture of the classroom, I show them with these exercises that the room is theirs. The pinnacle of my teaching occurs when students forget that I’m in the classroom as they move through the agenda, understanding and applying new concepts to develop skills that will make them more productive professionals.
These exercises usually generate hilarity. Just as I reject the notion of a professor as a “sage on the stage”, I also reject the tradition that classrooms must resemble churches where laughter must be smothered to allow for “serious work.” By making learning joyful and irreverent, fast-paced and slightly unpredictable, I do not worry about students diverting their attention towards social media. That’s why I do not ban Facebook or TikTok. To the contrary, I welcome it because, when students’ eyes migrate from each other towards their phone screen, I know that we need to change the exercise and tempo immediately to regain attention. I do not fear the allure of social media in class because we, together, can top it.
The third tool is affirmation. Not everyone gets a prize. Yet those who demonstrate excellent preparation and thoughtful contemplation deserve public kudos. Notice that I did not say that I only affirm those with the “right” answer. To the contrary, those with the “wrong” answer can show novel thinking, interesting recombinations of disciplines, and courage for introducing counter-intuitive ideas. These also deserve appreciation. My hope for my students is to have global impact, which means that they need traditional, foundational skills and the confidence to reject tradition and build a new foundation when necessary.
While most formal assessments have objective measures of quality (i.e. a score of 90% on a quiz earns an A), students can have different triggers for affirmation. More than 95% of students at the Hult International Business School are from outside of the U.S. They arrive from 120 countries with an enormous range of cultural values, preparatory education, and career expectations. This diversity can sometimes create tension until everyone recognizes that different people have different goals, talents, skills, and methods of expression. An already confident professional with 20 years of experience who delivers a thoughtful comment might only merit a “oh, that’s interesting” from me, whereas the same statement from a person with little professional experience and low self-esteem might evoke a more effusive and detailed affirmation.
At first, the impact of my affirmations emanate from my formal title as a professor and from the fact that I am a large, white, affluent, white male with a a long string of diplomas from top schools and employment experiences from well-known technology companies. Although these are notoriously unreliable signals of credibility, I am happy to use them to bolster student confidence and performance.
As cohorts of students gain collective confidence, they embrace this spirit of affirmation to actively support each other, praising good work and risk-taking and simultaneously supporting those who stumble. Eventually, they realize that I am a flawed human with my own insecurities and off-days, whose wisdom is finite sometimes out-dated. Towards the end of a course, the power of my affirmation emanates not from my demographic traits but from my explicit, demonstrated concern and ambition for each person in the room. Student perceptions of me evolve from Professor Ladd to Uncle Ted. And their perceptions of their peers evolve from potential competitors to unabashed and reliable cheerleaders. At the end of a course, we emerge as a tribe who discovers new knowledge and elevates each other’s dignity and self-worth.
This is why I teach.
Read the full article here
