Teaching philosophy

Our teaching philosophy in the field of sustainable management

Academic skills are based on solid specialized knowledge. This is what we teach in our courses. In addition, we want to work with students to develop the general skills needed to cope with the complexity of modern business and society. We pursue this teaching philosophy for both skills.

Teaching content, knowledge and personal development

Teaching content can be found in books, magazines, online formats and films. They are plentiful. Knowledge, on the other hand, is constructed individually in each head; it cannot be transferred from one head to another. We construct knowledge together in our events and constantly reflect on its dependence on context.

Personal development is becoming increasingly important in order to be able to make constructive decisions in complex situations. Personal development is still a completely new task for a university. Together, we are approaching the task of self-reflectively and responsibly contributing ourselves as personalities, including us lecturers. To this end, we adopt a coaching attitude in the teaching-learning process, because coaching as a form of support for individual and institutional complexity management seems to be becoming increasingly important in this context.

Values

In the teaching-learning process, we meet as people for whom different things are important and valuable. We want honest and trusting communication and collaboration with the students, with great respect for the different roles we have. Students should be allowed to find their own approach to our topics and be able to pursue the aspects with which they particularly resonate. We want to organize co-creative learning processes in which not only the tried and tested can be reproduced, but also new things can be created. We want to give feedback primarily as constructive and appreciative feedback during the process and not just as formal assessments at the end - in order to stimulate productive learning loops and accompany self-reflection processes.

As teachers, we still have to assess examinations. It is important for us to be able to emphasize very good performance, which can certainly be reflected in terms of commitment and personal development, and to assess it accordingly. We therefore use the full range of the grading scale.

Students responsibility

Students bring with them a wide range of experiences from their previous educational careers. For the most part, they are used to fulfilling external requirements and achieving defined objectives. We, on the other hand, want to open up learning spaces and fields of learning that enable active participation, joint learning and the personal development of students. Our observations show that, after initial uncertainty, students are quite willing to take personal responsibility for their learning content and their learning goals and find this a great personal enrichment.

In this sense, we assume that students, as adults and self-determined individuals, take full responsibility for their learning process and their personal development. As teachers, we guide them through the vast field of theory and practice in the context of sustainability and leadership and enable them to link these contexts with their own personal experiences and resonances.

Teaching methods and forms

In addition to conventional teaching formats, such as those we also offer digitally in the Virtual Academy for Sustainability, the topic of sustainability and leadership also requires pattern-breaking formats and innovative forms of visualization in the sense of deep learning. These are often unfamiliar to students and sometimes pose a challenge. However, we have found from experience that students and teachers go through a deeper reflection process by talking about shared images and experiences.

We therefore work a lot with system constellations as a visualization and exploration format for complexity and encourage open self-reflection in check-in and check-out rounds. Students are invited to learn not just with their heads, but with their whole bodies. In addition, students are encouraged to give each other feedback on their personal development via student-peer review procedures. The experience of group work is an essential component of our teaching formats.