Active learning is at the center of my teaching, since I strongly believe that students need to experience what we teach them in order to learn it. I attempt to enable students both to think about what they learned and to implement their insights. My classes involve lively, in-depth discussions in which students exchange their points of view on the topic at hand and group activities in which they try to solve actual organizational problems. My students and I cannot discuss every possible situation in which they will find themselves in the workplace. Nor can I teach my students every solution to all the problems they will face. Nonetheless, if I instill in them the correct mindset and the main tools that they need to solve a problem or to develop a creative idea, then they will be able to use such frameworks in contexts that they are not familiar with, or for issues that they have not encountered before.

To this end, I use case studies, material drawn from the business world, videos, and in-class exercises to elicit class discussion. My students are typically very stimulated by the material, and classes are quite lively. In these situations, I see my role as both a moderator and a facilitator, and I thrive in helping students focus their observation on the issues at hand. I liken myself to a personal coach who both helps students do the work and elicits their best efforts without spoon feeding them the material and/or solutions. This approach has resonated a great deal with my classes. Further, I always have students working intensively in groups. I believe that group activities and group projects provide two advantages: they allow students to apply what they have learned to solve actual organizational problems and they get them used to working in teams, which most of them will do during their careers.

As for teaching, I have taught several courses, including "Introduction to Management," "Organizational Behavior" (with a strong macro orientation, focused heavily on topics such as network and knowledge management) and "Organization Theory," and "Current Topics in Management." I have taught both graduates and undergraduates, in classes ranging from eight students all the way to guest lectures in front of more than 500 people. At Boston College, I developed a new format for "Managing People and Organizations" (core MBA class), concentrating it over four, eight-hour Saturdays. I find this format particularly conducive to learning, especially for older students (in this case, part-time MBAs who work full-time), because they are able to focus for longer periods on modules that synthesize several related topics. I have also taught a directed reading doctoral class in "Networks and Knowledge Management" and guest-lectured in several colleagues' doctoral courses.

My performance has been consistently good. At Illinois, I was included twice on the "List of teachers ranked as excellent by their students." At Boston College, I have typically obtained ratings in the 4s (out of 5), ranking consistently above the average for my department. I have done especially well with working/older MBAs. Comments from the open-ended sections of my teaching evaluations reflect and amplify my numeric results

Below, you can find two sample syllabus for classes I have recently taught:

MB021 - Organizational Behavior

MB709 - Managing People and Organizations