In my senior year of my undergrad I took a course entitled “Health Innovation and Leadership”, which subsequently changed my academic trajectory. The lessons I learned in this course included that management scholarship, creative thinking and innovation had not only the potential, but were essential, to transforming health systems. Beyond the scholarly implications, I also witnessed how a class can be effectively taught using a case-study methodology that promotes class participation and collaborative learning.

My teaching philosophy differs between undergraduate and graduate levels of education. At an undergraduate level, my philosophy is steeped with my personal experience in post-secondary education. It goes without saying that any student who is admitted into a post-secondary institution has the potential to achieve academically; this of course is different than having the ability to achieve academically. In fact, many students who find themselves at University have never learned how to properly study. To this end, it is our role as educators to help provide students with the skills to achieve both academically and in their future careers beyond their undergraduate education.

At a graduate level, my teaching philosophy is bifurcated between professional programs (e.g., MBA, MHA) and research intensive programs (e.g., MSc, PhD). Within professional programs the goal is to encourage students to lean on their professional experiences and to think creatively about how to address organizational challenges within their respective professional settings. Within research intensive programs, the goal is for students to learn how to conduct research and meaningfully contribute to a larger body of academic literature.

Within the classroom (either in person or online and at both the undergraduate and graduate level) there is a delicate balance of encouraging classroom discussion and ensuring that the content delivery is amenable to a variety of student learning styles. In particular, I am conscious of the “Bamboo Ceiling” (i.e., as per Lu and colleagues 2022) that identifies that students of different cultural backgrounds may be not be congruent with teaching styles that require assertive class participation. To this end, incorporating learning techniques such as “warm calling” (i.e., preparing discussion questions in advance of class that students can pre-prepare answers to for class discussion) and the ability to text responses to the professor are potential solutions to facilitating classroom engagement that is inclusive of cultural diversity.

As a doctoral candidate on several occasions I have been a Teaching Assistant (TA) to the second year management course “Statistics for Management” (ADM2303) and “Applications of Statistical Methods” (ADM2304). As a TA for ADM2303 and ADM2304 it is my responsibility to develop two 90 minute tutorials per week that compliment the lecture materials. I also learned how to adapt my teaching from an in-person delivery to delivering engaging content on Zoom and MS Teams during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Source(s):
Lu, J. G., Nisbett, R. E., & Morris, M. W. (2022). The surprising underperformance of East Asians in US law and business schools: The liability of low assertiveness and the ameliorative potential of online classrooms. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(13), e2118244119.