What makes GSB’s award winning instructors so successful in the classroom? GSB Lecturers and co-instructors of Acting with Power Dan Klein and Melissa Jones Briggs spoke with several to capture their best advice and learn more. They heard from:
Matt Abrahams
Lecturer in Organizational Behavior
Baba Shiv
Professor of Marketing
Anne Beyer
Professor of Accounting
Robert Siegel
Lecturer in Management
Deborah Gruenfeld
Professor of Organizational Behavior
Sarah Soule
Professor of Organizational Behavior
On this page, start with the video on The Dynamic Classroom, which offers broader themes on navigating classroom dynamics. In the next four videos, Dan and Melissa take you more in depth into these topics by sharing instructors’ approaches to classroom leadership, teaching priorities, routines, and challenges.
The Dynamic Classroom
In this video, accomplished GSB educators reflect on their teaching pitfalls, passions, and best practices for navigating classroom dynamics. From the examples instructors provide, Dan Klein and Melissa Jones Briggs highlight how the three key themes of warmth, authority, and mindset matter for educators in the classroom. Dan, Melissa, and this team of GSB instructors also invite you to discuss, share, and learn more about navigating classroom dynamics.
Leadership Styles
GSB faculty share their approaches to leadership in the classroom, sharing especially how they move along the spectrums of being authoritative (powered up) or deferential (powered down) and opening connections (warm) or maintaining distance (cold). Instructors also explain how they leverage physical space and presence when leading a classroom. These instructors ultimately encourage everyone to find the style that feels most authentic to them.
Classroom Priorities: The Preparation Balance
GSB faculty describe what they’ve learned about balancing the work of preparing for a course. Faculty first talk about some of the pitfalls of over scripting and packing in too much content. They then share what they’ve learned to prioritize content, in addition to how to present it, when planning their courses.
Getting Started
The first moments of a class are the best time to establish your classroom culture. In this video, GSB faculty describe their routines for getting started with a positive and productive classroom environment, at the beginning of both a course and a class session.
Challenging Students
All instructors will have challenging students. Students have good days and bad days, and they are working to figure out how to best show up in the classroom and in their future professional lives. In this video, GSB faculty share how they establish credibility when needed, approach challenging students, and sometimes rethink difficult moments.
