Why We Urgently Need To Make Great Teaching Happen In B-Schools

Years before the event that shattered our world economies in 2020, the gears of the Fourth Industrial Revolution had already started turning. Slowly but surely, jobs are transforming across all sectors — and with them, the skills needed by workers to thrive. Businesses are among the players at the forefront of this change — and now more than ever we need business schools to produce enlightened, dedicated, and agile business leaders to support this transformation.

According to the World Economic Forum’s The Future of Jobs Report, published in October 2020, creativity, agility, and initiative — along with leadership and social influence — are the top skills to acquire to stay employable at horizon 2025. Among the top 15 list are other soft skills, such as:

• Active learning and learning how to learn;
• Resilience, stress tolerance, and flexibility;
• Emotional intelligence;
• Reasoning, problem-solving, and ideation.

It is the responsibility of business schools to provide students with the skills needed to thrive in a fast-paced, ever-changing world. How can we train future leaders with top-down teaching methods in large lecture halls? We can’t.

OPTIMAL EFFICIENCY IN THE CLASSROOM REQUIRES DOING & CREATING

Business schools are among the most important institutions for developing leaders who can drive innovation and change. The problem is that today most of them are lagging, valuing research more than teaching. They are stuck using outdated approaches to learning that, for the most part, are no longer valuable for students.

Cognitive sciences have demonstrated that the human brain learns best in an active setting — when synapses build connections between neurons within our brains.

When we do things, when we create, when we are actively engaged in the learning process — that’s when learning reaches its optimal efficiency.

Some professors, when they are not pressured to publish, experiment with innovative methods and tools to improve the quality of their teaching. We know this as a fact because we’ve been lucky enough to meet and work with many of them. They are often passionate about their work and an inspiration to their students. Their teaching has a lasting impact.

However, professors embracing these alternative approaches tend to stay under the radar, as they usually don’t find the time and occasion to share their work with a wider audience.

We want to change that.

A CALL TO NOMINATE THE BEST B-SCHOOL TEACHING INNOVATIONS 

We want to share great teachers’ work and innovations with a wider audience, to inspire change. And to spur greater innovation.

This is why we, at LearnSpace, launched a call for nominations: to uncover and share the best teaching innovations in business schools around the world.

If you are making great teaching happen or know people who are, please nominate them here: businesseducationinnovations.com. The deadline for nominations is April 2.

Our goal is to identify hundreds of pedagogical innovations and have our jury select 10 of them. We’ll then publish a publicly available report in Q2 2021 to share these with as many people as possible.

---

Svenia Busson is a global learning innovation explorer. With her think-tank Edtech Tours, she travelled 19 countries to identify the most innovative teaching and learning practices. She is the author of Exploring the Future of Education, about education innovations in Europe, and is the managing director of LearnSpace, a learning innovation hub consulting large businesses and education institutions. She also co-founded the European Edtech Alliance, an industry association representing 1,500 startups innovating in education.