Teaching
Teaching is a shared experience in knowledge — a catalyst to an intellectual journey in which students and professors are both the protagonists and the destination.
How I teach
Effective instruction requires clear intent, purpose, and direction. I navigate by four aids: students, andragogy, performance, and expectations.
Students
The teaching endeavor is entirely about the transformation of students. As Sam Pickering puts it in Letters to a Teacher, students matter more than we do; my role is to facilitate their self-revelation. I select material with their relevance in mind while including topics I personally enjoy, because enthusiasm transfers. Specific content fades. What should remain is the value of strategic thinking as a source of knowledge and wisdom.
Andragogy
A doctoral seminar introduced me to Malcolm Knowles' distinction between pedagogy, the teaching of children, and andragogy, the teaching of adults. I treat students as mature, active learners with real time pressures who deserve instruction that speaks to everyday life and to the whole person.
Performance
Class time is a curated performance, and I prepare for it meticulously: scripted lessons, checked room layouts, tested technology, professional attire. Each session has terminal learning objectives shared with students and enabling objectives embedded in the instruction, delivered through varied methods — small-group discussion, think/pair/share, presentations. I avoid improvisation, but I build in moments for it: student contributions about current news or readings can be scripted into the performance.
Expectations
From day one, the relationship is contractual. I promise to bring my "A" game to every class and expect the same in return. Policies on attendance, punctuality, behavior, and communication are spelled out in the syllabus. An open-book quiz in the second class reinforces them (everyone should score 100%), and direct, early feedback signals that the expectations are real, not decorative.
Technology as a force multiplier
Technology cuts both ways in a classroom, so I use it deliberately. 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 keep a modified flipped format that reserves class time for activities, writing, and presentations. I record personalized video feedback on papers and assignments in place of written comments. In class I annotate slides, web pages, and documents directly on a hybrid laptop, with the annotated files posted to Brightspace afterward. And I lean on simulations — high-risk, high-reward exercises that students consistently name among the most rewarding parts of a course — including the Everest team simulation in MB 240 and international-strategy and operations simulations in the capstone.
Courses
Introduction to Business and Organization Management
The department's foundational course, which I coordinate. Rather than a sequence of disconnected lectures, it runs as integrated modules: fundamentals in the first four weeks, then analytical frameworks built on them, then implementation, ending in executive presentations to the full group. It also socializes students into higher education and into semi-autonomous adulthood, with expectations enforced accordingly — better to learn the consequences at Skidmore than at a first job.
Business Strategy (senior capstone)
The inverse of MB 107: students who have finished the required coursework and are preparing for the workforce. The first half pairs a complex group simulation in product development and market entry with case instruction on major management topics. The second half turns over the case selection to the class (from a vetted list) and adds an individual operations simulation running a multi-location rental-car business.
Coaching and team leadership
Paired student coaches oversee small groups of MB 107 students through an online workspace that mirrors workplace communication norms: weekly updates, schedules, and concerns posted by the coaches, monitored and coached by me, with MB 107 faculty and coordinators in the channels to support the teams. Features the Everest simulation on asymmetric information and team dynamics.
The American Immigrant Experience (first-year seminar)
An immersive, multidisciplinary seminar on four immigration statuses, built to engage more than one sense: a field trip to Ellis Island and a tenement tour, themed meals prepared by dining services to match the readings, student presentations on immigration policy, and a semester-long podcast project in which students produced episodes built around interviews with immigrants.