Teaching frenzy"Frenzy" seems to be the buzzword for this autumn. Getting a new job, then a second child, a new apartment. This was coupled with an academic writing frenzy, completing a load of demanding revisions during September and October to meet deadlines. And now, it's time for some teaching frenzy.
What person in his right mind would organize seven hours of teaching for the same day. I had that on tuesday: three hours at the Helsinki University and four at Hanken. Whine Whine. On the other hand, that is what high school teachers do each day. But us academics, we've come accustomed to such a carefree existence...
I haven't taught either course before. I get to teach the course at the Helsinki University, Reputation theories and organizational meaning environments with Pekka Aula, a good friend and colleague. It's extra interesting, because I get to teach at my old Alma Mater, where I studied philosophy so many years ago. And we get to dicuss the results of our book with students. There seems to be a critical and attentive group taking the course. Indeed, the last lecture was done in a discussion, revolving around one slide. I'm really looking forward to the student case works where they look at different cases of organizational reputation strategy.
The second thing at Hanken is part of my regular teaching load, an advanced course on strategic management. The introduction lecture was a great experience. We tried out a working method from high school Finnish, as the students got short excerpts from key strategy texts ( Chandler, Mintzberg, Porter, Hamel & Prahalad - I even threw in a little Taylor to show what a pre-strategy view of the organization looks like) to read at the classroom. We read each text, followed by a reflection discussion about what the text regarded as strategy, and why it was strategic.
Another interesting event during the week was when I got to see external evaluations of my academic work, which were ordered for a job I was competing to get (which I did not get). Boy, this job is good for maintaining one's humility. :-)
posted by Saku Mantere at 10:17 AM
1 Comments:
There's something about the written word, particularly when it's spoken ... and by people when English is not their first language.
I remember a consulting project that I had in Montreal, where we were teaching negotiation skills. We developed a case, but realized that the audience had about the same number of people with English as French as their first language. (Fortunalely, English was the working language, so everyone understood the content).
To make sure everyone in each group stayed together in pace, we asked each group to play the roles in the case, and read the lines out loud. In a classroom-sized environment, the effect was a bit funny -- sometimes the same lines were read within seconds of each other, like an echo -- but it really helped people get into the role that they were supposed to be playing.
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