No. 25, January-February 2024.
The conversation with the executive was very pleasant. We were sitting around a round table in the living room of his private home, drinking tea and reminiscing about our MBA experiences at Harvard Business School (HBS).
"I will never forget the first session," the executive, now a partner in one of the largest German multinationals, told me. "The professor personally introduced himself to each member of the class and there were more than eighty of us. He already knew each of us. It was so different from my previous educational experience, at a prestigious university here in Germany."
When you are able to establish a connection with students from the first session of the course, it greatly facilitates the development of a teaching-learning contract-theme of issue 12 of this blog.
This connection does not happen by accident. It is the result of intentional teaching practices and an educational infrastructure designed to foster a culture of learning.
It begins with the student cards that each faculty member receives several weeks before the start of the program. These cards contain information about the student's educational background and professional experience, achievements, sports, hobbies and other personal details. Some faculty members are able to memorize the information on these cards.
Diana, a Peruvian colleague in the doctoral program, told me how her daughter would show her the back of the cards and ask her several questions to test her knowledge about each student.
With the increasing pressures for academic publication, it is not always possible to devote so much time to this task. But you can take advantage of the information on the cards to identify outreach opportunities and avoid awkward situations.
When you receive the cards, you can compare the students' companies and areas of expertise with the industries and topics of the cases in your syllabus, thus enriching the discussion with classroom experience. After a session on a high-tech firm, one student asked me why I hadn't given him the floor, since he had several years of working with that company. "I could have made some valuable observations to the discussion," he told me. Missed opportunity.
Reviewing student flashcards can also prevent blunders. When a strategy professor cold-called a student, as was his custom, to start the session on a liquor company, there was silence in the classroom: what everyone knew but the professor was that he had asked a teetotaler preacher to speak.
Few schools, even those claiming to use the case method, give student cards to faculty members or take into consideration other elements of the infrastructure such as classroom design, individual student labels, and schedules that allow for group meetings or exchanges between students and faculty. Are there opportunities for interaction outside the classroom? Prof. C. Roland Christensen always insisted on teaching in the first morning slot and always arrived half an hour early, to talk informally with students who arrived early.
Creating a culture of connection requires not only good preparation of the case, but knowledge of the students from the beginning of the course.
John C. Ickis
Image by pch.vector on Freepik
