As a teacher, I went through a transformation in 2011, when I first started teaching at the university level. I was curious, and eager and attended most CTLS workshops. I was aware that my lack of experience compared to other faculty members would catch up to me, as Dr. Meral Buyyukurt mentioned to me “You are very young, students will be aggressive, be aware”, she has tremendous experience in teaching and I listened to every advice I could get.

I was stressed and sweating when I was about to face a classroom of 118 students questioning my every move. My challenge was to face a group of individuals who did not trust that as a teacher, I have their best interests in mind. This is a situation where both, me and my students fear to transform.

The course I teach has a bad reputation for being horrible, nasty where everybody fails. Hence students are a lot more aggressive by nature. The first few weeks were rough, my quizzes were very tough and in addition to the lack of trust, my students were angry, very angry. They did not understand why I was being so hard on them. And I embraced my role to communicate to them my strategy.

Week after week, I listened to my students’ challenges, I communicated to them that I had their back, that I will be very strict and give them challenging questions because I believe in them working hard. That if they do not understand a problem, I am here for them and will explain until it makes sense.

At the end of the semester, students realized their hard work paid off because they trained and performs exceptionally well in their final exam.

I am aware students fear transformation of themselves, meaning as they learn, they change. As a teacher, it is my role to support them and encourage them to embrace the new knowledge they are about to acquire. Just like a gym workout, if you did not sweat, you don’t get stronger. As a teacher, I succeeded in transforming as well, into someone who now has learnt how to communicate with students

I am a strong believer that knowledge should be shared, hence my involvement for many years in case competitions both at the undergraduate and masters level. I want to break the ice of selfishness and teach selflessness.

Many students hold pride when they are part of a case competition team due to the hype of dressing up and presenting in front of reputable judges. It is something we brag about. During my 2 years of presidency at the MBA Case Competition Club, 5 years as the head coach of the Operations Management Jeux du Commerce Teams, 5 years as the head coach of the Project Management Institute KGP challenge and many other competitions. I took upon myself the objective of breaking down the bragging and introducing more learning and collaboration. Instead of beer parties, my team and I created educational seminars on case cracking, presentation skills and case simulations to allow more students to participate. We also broke down the barrier between undergraduate and masters students by training 4 teams (2 undergraduate, 2 masters) together. Undergraduate students were quick learners and great at regurgitating theory, but they lacked real life experience. Masters students had too much confidence in their experience that blinded them from learning from undergraduate’s theories. The mixture, first seemed inadequate, but resulted in a lifetime experience for all 4 teams. Our coaches of various experience (senior management, entrepreneurs, consultants) all contributed to the success of this experience. When everyone puts their egos outside, we all focused on the actual learning from one another. This is simply one of the many experiences.

As a teacher, I convey the message that sharing knowledge is everyone’s responsibility. Not only do you learn a subject better when you teach it, different minds see things differently and it is by collaborating that creativity begins.

One sentence I keep repeating, “Don’t waste your time memorizing, you will forget it. Spend the time to understand it and you will remember it 10 years from now.” Students, and myself, we live in a world filled with distractions and we are always pressed on time that we do not truly take the time to reflect and understand. The classroom is a sacred place that allows us to reflect. Therefore in my classrooms, we spend the time to question everything. “Why do we do this?”, “Why doesn’t it work?”, “Why did we do it this way?”. I would rather spend more time understanding 3 fundamental concepts than speeding through 15 concepts that my students will not understand.

On the other hand, I have used multiple techniques to build memories. In COMM 215, I teach sampling distribution by asking each student to toss a coin 10 x, during the following class, we observe the compilation of all results. At first, the data is everywhere, but eventually when we compile all students’ tosses, a normal distribution appears. This is a concept many teachers brush through but forget to give students time to understand. The activity usually takes 10 minutes, and it is definitely well spent.

In MARK 201, students collected survey data by going into a company and asked questions. They then face errors, biases, vague questions, unidentified data points, all these are textbook issues to data collection, but it was experienced by them making the mistakes and learning.

In BSTA 378, students collect their own data, run statistical models and stumble upon realistic results. It comes as a shock to them that their results do not mimic the perfectly presented examples from the book. In the textbook, we always obtain R² above 0.75 which is considered acceptable. In real life data, all students say “my data doesn’t work! My R² is so small, it is 0.45.” But it is perfectly normal, these are real results.

Students need to experience, they need to fall down, they need to try and as a teacher, it is important for us to let them fail. It is important for teachers to create activities that enhances the process of learning and understanding by experience. An experience they will remember 10 years from now.

It is obvious that a teacher must continue to learn, hence continue to do research. After my first semester in 2011, I knew how to handle my class, but how can I do better? Fall 2012 was the beginning of a frivolous adventure as I enrolled in the MBA program, and later in 2014, in the PhD program. I wanted to learn more, I wanted to see different teachers teach. Just to name a few highlights, in Dr. Ohjin Kwon’s class – Consumer Behaviour, I learnt how he pushed us to the limits with an impossible final exam and extensive calculations. I understood that his goal was to pick out the students who persisted through the tension. In Dr. Raafat Saade’s course, he was suppose to teach Project Management by the book, but he instead asked us to interview a real business and write our own case. In Prof. Tim Field’s Strategy class, he strategically chose cases, videos that tie together how to write a structured analysis of a case. In Prof. Harold Simpkin’s Integrated Marketing Communications class, he invited companies to pitch us a problem and we had to create recommendations. In Dr. Takecheun’s class, he provided the most meticulous Managerial Accounting slides.

As a teacher myself, I continue to take a combination of these great approaches and integrate them into my classes. These 5 professors and many more have contributed to how I teach today, pushing students to their limits to discover their potential, asking them to take on real life experience, provide them with guidelines to build structured analyses, introduce them to real companies, real problems, and provide them clean, clear resource material that they can refer to.

On a similar line of thought, students themselves want to continue learning. As a teacher, I want to open doors for them. When a student approaches me and asks if they can continue learning more about Statistical Modeling, I tell them “Absolutely!”. As a result to many students’ request and my own interest in the field of Data Science, I have create a Research Group consisting of students who are interested in learning different programming languages, and statistical techniques to share their knowledge. Each student is given a specialization to learn, and the team meets to teach each other. It prolongs their interest and allows them to develop more skills in a particular area, in a optional manner, that interestingly is more productive.

To me, teaching is important, research is important, but ultimately, taking the seat of a student from time to time allows us to stay humble in our methods of teaching. To be empathetic of the stress that students face in their studies that sometimes, we forget how hard it is to memorize books. That instead, it broadens our creativity in building activities to truly prepare students to become better leaders. We should continue teaching students how to be persistent, how to be optimistic, how to be collaborative, how to be respectful.