Over the years, teaching has become the part of my academic work where I feel I can have the most sustained and meaningful impact. My understanding of teaching has also changed considerably. Earlier in my career, I thought about teaching primarily in terms of preparation, clarity, enthusiasm, and the ability to make sessions engaging. These remain important, but I now see teaching as something broader and more deliberate: the careful design of learning environments in which students are invited to think critically, practise judgement, build confidence, and begin to see themselves as capable contributors to professional and organisational life. Teaching is demanding, emotionally involving, and often time-consuming, but it is also one of the few areas of academic work where the effects of what we do can be seen directly in students’ growth, confidence, and ambition.

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This commitment to student development has shaped the way I approach learning and teaching. I do not see my role as simply explaining management theories or introducing students to a set of tools. My aim is to help students understand why those tools exist, what assumptions sit behind them, where their limitations are, and how they can be used thoughtfully in real situations. This is especially important in the areas I teach, including project management, digital innovation, information management, and business education more broadly. These are not fields where students can rely on fixed answers. They require students to make sense of complexity, work with incomplete information, communicate across differences, and make decisions under uncertainty. Because of this, I try to teach students not only how to apply frameworks, but how to think with them, question them, and adapt them.

The development of this approach has made constructive alignment central to my teaching practice. When I design a module, a class activity, or an assessment, I try to ensure that students can see how the different parts of their learning connect. Clear learning outcomes matter, but they are only useful when students understand how those outcomes translate into classroom participation, independent study, group work, assessment, and professional practice. I therefore try to make the architecture of learning visible. Students should know what they are being asked to learn, why it matters, how they will practise it, and how they will demonstrate it. In my experience, this clarity is particularly important for students who may be highly capable but uncertain about what university-level learning expects from them.

At the same time, clarity alone is not enough. Many students arrive at university with a tendency to approach learning strategically or instrumentally, particularly when they are under pressure, anxious about marks, or unfamiliar with a subject. Rather than criticising this, I see it as part of the educational context in which we teach. My responsibility is to design learning experiences that encourage students to move beyond surface learning and begin engaging more deeply with ideas. I do this by connecting theory to lived experience, current organisational challenges, consulting practice, digital transformation, sustainability, and the kinds of decisions students may later face in their careers. When students can see the relevance of a concept, they are more likely to examine it seriously, challenge it intelligently, and apply it with care.

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​This is why active and experiential learning have become so important in my teaching. I want students to do more than listen, take notes, and reproduce knowledge in assessments. I want them to experience, even in small and structured ways, the kinds of ambiguity and interdependence that make management work difficult. In project management, for example, students need to understand planning, risk, leadership, communication, and stakeholder engagement not only as concepts, but as lived dynamics. They need to feel what happens when resources are limited, when teams misunderstand each other, when priorities shift, when time runs out, or when a decision that seemed sensible at the beginning becomes problematic later. These experiences create a much stronger basis for reflection than abstract explanation alone.

One activity that captures this philosophy asks students to work in teams to reproduce a complex map under time, resource, and communication constraints while responding to unexpected events as the task unfolds. The activity almost always becomes messy, and that is precisely why it is valuable. Students quickly realise that project management is not a neat sequence of stages, but a social and organisational process shaped by uncertainty, coordination, assumptions, and trade-offs. The learning does not come from producing a perfect output. It comes from the debrief: what the team noticed, what they missed, how they distributed responsibility, how they responded to disruption, and how their experience helps them understand project management theory more deeply. This kind of activity tends to stay with students because it allows them to connect intellectual understanding with embodied experience. It also reflects the long-standing emphasis in my teaching on active learning, practical application, and reflective practice.

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As my teaching has developed, I have become increasingly interested in the role of playfulness, creativity, and simulation in serious learning. I do not use playful or game-based activities as entertainment or as a way of making learning easier. I use them because they can make difficult concepts more accessible, lower the fear of getting things wrong, and create conditions in which students are willing to experiment. In management education, this matters. Students often need to practise behaviours such as negotiation, prioritisation, communication, leadership, and adaptation before they fully understand them. A well-designed activity gives them permission to try, fail, observe, and reconsider. The playfulness is therefore purposeful: it creates a safe but demanding space in which students can encounter complexity before being asked to analyse it.

The reflective element of this process is essential. I do not assume that students automatically learn from experience simply because they have taken part in an activity. Experience needs to be examined, interpreted, and connected back to theory. For this reason, I often use structured debriefs, learning diaries, reflective writing, and guided discussion to help students make sense of what happened and why it matters. Reflection allows students to move from “what we did” to “what this reveals”. It encourages them to identify assumptions, recognise patterns, consider alternative choices, and understand their own role in group and organisational dynamics. This is particularly valuable in project management education, where the most important lessons often concern judgement, communication, uncertainty, and responsibility.

My approach to feedback has also evolved through this broader commitment to student development. I see feedback not only as a response to completed work, but as part of the learning process itself. Good feedback should help students understand standards, diagnose weaknesses, recognise strengths, and make better decisions in future work. I try to be clear, specific, and developmental, particularly when supporting students through extended projects, dissertations, consultancy work, and reflective assessments. At the same time, I want students to become less dependent on constant reassurance from the teacher and more confident in evaluating the quality of their own thinking. Feedback, in this sense, is not simply something I provide to students. It is also something I want them gradually to internalise as a form of academic and professional judgement.

This balance between support and independence is central to how I understand inclusive teaching. Students come to university with different backgrounds, levels of confidence, language experiences, educational histories, and assumptions about what it means to learn. Some are highly confident but need to develop greater intellectual humility. Others are capable but hesitant and need structured opportunities to participate. Some students thrive in open discussion, while others need time to prepare, write, reflect, or test their ideas in smaller groups. I therefore try to design learning environments that offer multiple ways into participation without lowering expectations. Inclusion, for me, is not about making learning less challenging. It is about making challenge more accessible, purposeful, and transparent.

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​​​This understanding of inclusion has become even more important through my programme leadership work. Teaching individual modules is important, but students experience their education as a whole journey rather than as a collection of separate classes. In my work on the BSc Information Management for Business, I think carefully about how students move through that journey: how they transition into university, how they develop confidence across levels, how assessments build on each other, how industry engagement supports employability, and how students begin to understand the relationship between academic learning and professional identity. This programme-level perspective has made me more attentive to coherence, workload, communication, student voice, and the cumulative development of skills over time.

​​​​​​​​​Working closely with students across modules, projects, and programme-level activities has also reinforced my belief that employability should be embedded in intellectually meaningful ways. I do not see employability as a separate add-on to academic learning. Rather, I see it as part of helping students understand how knowledge is used, questioned, communicated, and applied in the world. Case studies, consultancy projects, employer engagement, simulations, and live challenges can all help students develop professional capabilities, but their educational value depends on how they are framed. The aim is not simply to make students more employable in a narrow sense. It is to help them become thoughtful, adaptable, and ethically aware professionals who can work with complexity and contribute meaningfully to organisations and society.

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​​In recent years, my teaching has also been shaped by the changing role of technology and artificial intelligence in higher education and professional work. These developments have made it even more important to focus on judgement rather than simple knowledge reproduction. Students need to know how to use tools, but they also need to understand evidence, ethics, authorship, responsibility, and the limits of automation. In this context, teaching has to help students develop the capacities that remain distinctively human and professionally valuable: critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, communication, ethical reasoning, and the ability to ask better questions. My teaching increasingly tries to prepare students for this environment by giving them opportunities to work with uncertainty, evaluate information carefully, and reflect on the implications of their decisions.

Across all of these areas, the thread that connects my teaching is the belief that students learn most powerfully when they are treated as active participants in their own development. I want my classroom to be intellectually serious, but also humane. I want students to feel supported, but not passive. I want them to enjoy learning, but also to understand that meaningful learning often involves discomfort, ambiguity, and revision. The best moments in teaching are often those in which students begin to see that they are capable of more sophisticated thinking than they initially assumed. My role is to design the conditions in which those moments can happen.

Ultimately, my teaching philosophy is built around the connection between knowledge, practice, reflection, and confidence. I want students to leave my modules not only with a stronger understanding of project management or business theory, but with a clearer sense of how to think, decide, communicate, and act in complex situations. I want them to become graduates who can question assumptions, work constructively with others, use evidence responsibly, and approach uncertainty with both rigour and imagination. Teaching, for me, is therefore not only about what happens in the classroom. It is about helping students build the habits of mind, confidence, and professional judgement that they will carry into the rest of their lives.

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