Stefan Gröschl

I have been contributing to a wide range of graduate and executive management programs for ESSEC in France, Singapore, Bahrain and Germany. The overall aim of my teaching activities can be described as providing students with guidance and support to develop critical thinking and understanding of relevant course related material based on an interactive communication approach.

The notion of guidance and support follows a resource based learning approach focusing on active learning rather than teaching. While students teach themselves and each other by interacting with materials and tasks, I focus on supporting and guiding students in the learning process. Based on the interaction with course related material and independent research, students develop better information-gathering skills and an increased independence and flexibility. This interaction and active learning method has been in particularly successful in, and valued by my students in the different executive education programs and courses.

In terms of critical thinking and understanding, I emphasize a deep as opposed to a surface approach to learning. Thus, combined with the notion of resource based learning, I think of teaching as an open concept with the student making many of the decisions. Ideally, this should help students to develop skills to critically analyze, evaluate, make sense, apply, and justify. In other words students understand rather than memorize and reproduce – which is critical in an increasingly complex (business) world. My numerous engagements at the executive education level and work with experienced managers has re-confirmed and re-emphasized the importance of critical thinking and understanding. The student body at an executive education level often operates within high pressure work environments in which problem solving methods are of an analytical (rather than creative) and superficial (instead of cause searching) nature, decision making and results are often short term oriented, and management actions have a tendency to be reactive. With my deep learning approach I aim at fostering students’ transdisciplinary competencies and their questioning and digging abilities, and help them to become more creative, long-term oriented, and proactive in their future management actions and behaviors. This requires strong self-analytical and reflective skills that are addressed and developed in each of my courses. My continuous revisions and changes to my course outlines, course topics and their content reflect my own self-criticism and reflective approach toward the designing and delivering of programs and courses.

In terms of interactive communication the continuously positive student responses regarding classroom atmosphere and student – instructor communication has confirmed and strengthened my belief in an interactive communication style. The latter assists both me and the students. Classroom discussions benefit me in terms of learning from students (a) how students learn, (b) how students think, and (c) their different experiences, views, and approaches. Class participation and discussions promote students’ interpersonal and communication skills – key competencies in today’s business world. The development of these transferable skill sets are supported by encouraging active learning.
My teaching assignments have brought me to a wide range of academic institutions in Mexico, Taiwan, Spain, New Zealand, Germany, Bahrain, Peru, Panama, Canada, USA, Brazil, Kenya and Cambodia.