I’m making my first steps as a teacher by:

Within a year, I want to teach two classes in business schools in Hamburg or online.

I will continue to improve and use this teaching portfolio as a companion as I move along this fresh path.

Two years ago, a senior at the company I was working for asked me how I managed to keep my team performing. A well respected figure coming to me for advice triggered my thinking. This, and realizing that I loved to support and see my team members develop, lead me to understand I could help others grow through teaching.

Employees are not cogs in a machine anymore. And managers who rely on dated management styles cannot succeed. Also, trainings for new managers which rely on passive consumption of content do not support personal growth or trigger leadership behavior change.

Seeing these two trends, I want to help novice managers and students grow into leaders who succeed by focusing on their team’s wellbeing. I want to help them learn and test the hard and soft skills they need to build engaged, performing and happy teams. I do this by building a teaching experience guided by a clear framework and immediately applicable in a work environment.

I work with a modular syllabus, build around core leadership moments. I work with my students to build custom lesson flows that fit their objectives. It is designed to grow my student’s skills in five directions:

In class, I feel uncomfortable with low engagement. I set the stage for healthy class interactions by:

I run two types of classes, to help students move through the different elements of Bloom’s taxonomy: lectures and workshops.

I attach less importance to formal assignments than others. Still, I use multiple choice quizzes to stimulate memory retention. Other assignments are designed to trigger immediate behaviour change with a combination of self-reflection, tools and role play.

I improve my classes at each iteration. I ask for feedback at the end of each course and I collect informal information by paying attention to class dynamics.

I’m approachable and I easily build trusting relationships.

My teaching journey is starting and I’m enjoying approaching this new phase with humility and curiosity.

I use consistent tools and methods inspired by research to structure my courses and classes. They help me create a learning experience that is transparent, enjoyable and fair. I also use these methods to maintain a high level of quality and to improve my teaching.

I take enough time to bring clarity to my students at the start of each new class.

I'm transparent about who I am and my expectations in terms of behaviour. I invite for feedback and clarify when and how I am available to support them.

I show the students what they can expect of the class by making the learning objectives and the overall flow of the class explicit.

I also explain the different activities we will use during the class and how I will evaluate their progress and mastery of the subject.

As mentioned above, my 1h lectures follow a similar pattern:

Note that some more complex topics might span over 2 lectures.

As an example, I use role play to engage students in learning the basics of coaching. After the presentation:

Coaching is a combination of technique and attitude. It’s difficult to learn, in part because it seems very easy. Role playing primarily helps students realize the difficulty in coaching. It also gives them the opportunity to test out the tools in a safe environment and receive immediate feedback from peers.

To ensure a safe and calm atmosphere, one small classroom or breakout room is needed for each group of four students.

Often, my students expect my lessons to be applicable in their work environment, immediately. To make that happen, I blur the lines between what happens in class and their day to day work.

In some classes I will ask students to start applying a management tool I have just explained, in the context of their work.

I use a more complex active learning activity to engage students when teaching about the concept of "ownership", how they can promote it in their team and what might be working against them. I want to help students develop a critical view of their company’s culture and how it might influence employee’s ability to take ownership of tasks rather than waiting for instructions from their hierarchy.

I ask students to organize a 30 minute workshop in their own company and explore some aspects of their company culture with other managers who are not taking part in the class.

This learning technique helps the students think critically about their company’s culture, create a simple diagnostic of their own work environment and identify possible solutions. It also gets them to confront their point of view with that of real-world colleagues.

Assignments are not as important when teaching management practices to professionals as in other context.

I develop assignments that support the learning objectives and help me understand how my students are progressing.

The assignment example below shows how I can achieve this in a different context, that of a smaller class I’m a teaching, outside my primary field of expertise. This class aims to teach the basic of WP, a software used to build websites.

As explained above, I've built a modular syllabus that can adapt to various environments and course expectations.

I use the syllabus to communicate about my class, to materialise my teaching approach, to clarify the learning flow and expectations to students and to document and facilitate iterative improvements.

Xavier Auclert's teaching portfolio - October 2021