Teaching Philosophy

In his Parable of the Cave, Plato describes a group of people who have been living all their lives chained to the walls of a cave, facing a blank wall. All they can see are shadows projected on that wall, cast from people and things that pass behind them. Those shadows are the closest to reality that the prisoners get to see. Therefore the prisoners believe that this is reality. But then comes the teacher, the mentor, unchains the prisoners, lead them out of the cave and shows them what is there outsided (the real reality). I use Plato’s parable as guidance in my teaching: First, by the time the teacher comes, many prisoners wouldn’t feel imprisoned, they would feel comfortably “at home” in their cave. The shadows would be the most familiar items in their lives. Why would they want to replace their conceptual world with searching for anything new? It is the teacher’s job to demonstrate to the prisoners the advantage of new knowledge and of change to perceptions. I understand that the “trail” leading from the “cave” to the “sun” is not easy and the prisoners are not used to “travel”. The teacher must have the compassion and the understanding for the pain and difficulties the prisoners feel on their way, and must be able to support them. In classroom environment, this task is especially difficult, as one of my roles is to educate the students to get into an autodidactic mode (“it is not high-school anymore”, so to speak).

When the prisoners finally step out of the cave, they are skeptical about what they see. They see what the teacher calls “reality”. But for them, the shadows were reality and the current views are something new and frightening, something they do not recognize or understand. Here, my job as the teacher is to be able to explain to the students the links between the objects they see and what they already know. The final step, which is in my opinion the most important, is teaching the students how to live a “free” and unchained life. The students are used to see and accept only what they are shown; the teacher’s job, then, is to guide the students to independent exploration of the world. This task is incredibly difficult, especially if not inculcated earlier.

This is how I see my job as a teacher. My teaching experience starts about 15 years ago, as preparation tutor for university exams. After that, I taught university courses for 10 years on various levels, including undergraduate, graduate, Ph.D., MBA and executive MBA level. In all classes, at all levels, I feel like the teacher from Plato’s fable. I feel my job is to sensitively reveal additional points of view, other “truths”, and to convince the students to unchain themselves from the comfy familiar concepts they already have. To do this, I try to put the most rationale in everything I teach and show students “here’s why you want to know this”.

A follower of the famous educator Dr. Dreikurs, I create an interactive autodidactic atmosphere in both my undergraduate and graduate classes. Autodidactic learning is essential for self-development in one’s career. In a work environment you can see people who were spoon-fed all their lives and consequently are unable to think of a way to learn something on their own. Those people may progress due to natural accumulation of experience, but in my humble opinion such progress is in fact standing on one spot, since the environment is also progressing in the same direction. Autodidactic people would be those that stand out of the crowd, those who lead others and those who make progress beyond the mass around them. I strive to prepare my students to be able to make the second kind of progress.

In my classes I implement the innovative Peer Instruction method, initiated by Dr. Mazur of Harvard University, and now widely applied in various institutions. The fundamental point of this method is that a teacher has a limited idea of the level of understanding their students have of the subject. The students and their peers are much more informed of the depth of comprehension they already have, and what they are missing. Therefore, instead of conventional lectures, most of the lessons involve a big portion of group discussion of pre-designed questions. In practice, students receive specified reading before class. In class, then, I ask questions pertaining to the reading. The questions are not about the contents of the reading (for example, what is a SWOT analysis), but rather what do you do with it. Students are required to make decisions based on their understanding of the reading. For example, a question about SWOT analysis – what aspects of the four SWOT dimensions would be the most critical in your decision about terminating a business project?

As Marketing is an applied social science, I emphasize in class that there are no final answers, and that I do not have final answers. There is no single good way to go. Some students, who were used to learning facts and being examined on memory of those facts, find it difficult to accept this approach and try to get “the answer” from me. While I am not convinced that I have a magical formula for making lessons thought-provoking, I try to guide class discussion in such a way that it demonstrates that by only recognizing the validity of alternative perspectives. I let students know that I do not have a monopoly on ideas and that not every topic presented in class is the “gospel.” For this reason and with the hopes of fueling intellectual curiosity, I strongly encourage students to explore plausible alternative explanations. Finally, I challenge them to become their own teachers and to make life-long learning a habit.