Honing Self-Awareness of Faculty and Future Business Leaders: Emotions Connected with Teaching and Learning

This chapter employs a critical, reflexive, and holistic multiple-case study design at a Canadian polytechnic to demonstrate the value of authentic assessment for improving student self-efficacy across several business courses. Assessment strategies, instructional design techniques, coaching skills, and emotional affect are examined through instructor observation and reflection, yielding actionable insights for instructors and future research directions.

This chapter seeks to investigate the role of student emotional intelligence (EI) in countering in-class cyberloafing behaviour by students, by exploring the mediating role of boredom proneness through a quantitative approach. A sample of 163 postgraduate university students in India was selected. The authors assessed the mediation model using PROCESS macro. The authors found that students who are more aware of their emotions are better equipped to handle internal and external distractions and work towards a desired goal or outcome and therefore are less likely to experience boredom. Results from this study revealed a significant direct and indirect negative relationship between students’ EI and cyberloafing behaviour. This chapter contributes to the body of literature by highlighting the positive effects of EI as an important antidote to student cyberloafing behaviour. On the practical front, the findings of this study can be used by academicians who are charged with the responsibility of understanding and enhancing student learning by diminishing cyberloafing behaviour among them. The proposed framework could provide a foundation for countering cyberloafing behaviour in educational settings.

Business schools need to prepare students for effective, ethical decision-making. When faced with stressful life events that negatively affect wellbeing, making decisions can become more challenging. As future managers, students will need to learn how to make decisions when they are at the same time faced with stress and cognitive overload. In such situations, the brain looks for mental shortcuts in making choices to make things faster and easier, which leads to less optimal decision-making. Research shows that mindfulness meditation can effectively decrease stress and anxiety. Mindfulness meditation increases metacognition and, in the process, reduces the effects of biases, ethical blind spots, and psychological traps. Therefore, introducing students to these techniques has significant pedagogical potential for business education as students learn mindfulness meditation and show a need to include such practices in the curriculum. This chapter sheds light on two mindfulness technique cases with business school students in Lebanon and Switzerland. In these cases, the authors explore the impact of mindfulness practices on students by applying the emotional intelligence mood metre and mindfulness meditation. The authors also apply the ‘response time testing’ (RTT) methodology in the Swiss case to measure students’ attitudes. As a result, the authors provide simple confirmations from their classrooms that engaging in mindfulness activities and meditation is a simple and productive exercise that is essential for student wellbeing, learning, and decision-making. Therefore, the authors’ purpose is to encourage and give mindfulness practices a viable place in business education.

Bullying at the school or college level can have much more serious repercussions for students than educators may be aware of. Neuroscience research is suggesting more than ever that traumatic childhood is associated with the theory of vulnerability – in other words, a greater likelihood of psychiatric disorder spanning across a lifetime. This is the heart-wrenching story of the author’s younger sister, for whom racial school bullying at a school in England wreaked havoc. Almost four decades on she is marked by deep, indelible scars. Since the author’s life is inextricably intertwined with hers, this evocative autoethnographic account is the author’s story too.

Business schools have a moral responsibility to educate students who will behave both ethically and effectively in the workplace. Educating business students to address the complex challenges of the modern business world requires more than helping students understand content; it requires aiding them in developing the social and emotional competencies that they will need to apply regardless of the role or industry in which they work. Viewing the classroom as a complex adaptive system (CAS) can create opportunities to experiment with activities, exercises, and assignments that allow students (and the professor) to develop skills related to self-awareness, interpersonal relationships, and responsible decision-making. This chapter first explores the necessity of social–emotional learning (SEL) for today’s business leaders. Then it considers how a mental model of the classroom as a CAS facilitates a mindset of experimentation and activity development that contributes to student SEL. The chapter concludes with examples of activities that professors have used to facilitate SEL using a mental model of the classroom as a CAS and suggestions for experimentation in the classroom.

In this chapter, the authors explore emotional discomfort and the use of live polling to enable business leaders on executive education leadership programmes to move beyond their emotional comfort zones, to facilitate self-awareness and enhance reflective practice. Openly acknowledging and discussing one’s leadership weaknesses produce emotions which are not always easily shared, especially among business leaders. Yet, identifying emotions and acknowledging discomfort is key for reflective practice and a common failure in many leadership development programmes (LDP). The authors reflect on their experience in designing and delivering a custom LDP commissioned by a UK-based corporate client. The authors draw on the pedagogy of discomfort, emotions in leadership development, and the use of audience response system (ARS) technology to enable and facilitate the development of learner self-awareness.

An educator’s work is gratifying but highly stressful. Stress arises from external factors such as school, accrediting agencies, students, and parents, as well as internal factors like the teacher’s own skills, beliefs, and emotions. The phrase ‘to catch stress’ is used metaphorically in this chapter as it refers to an individual reaction to a situation that has a negative impact on the educator’s wellbeing, just like catching a disease has a negative impact on a person’s health. Working with people of different ages and personalities creates a variety of stressful situations that can negatively impact the ability of educators to do their job effectively. Stress might lead to job dissatisfaction and the desire to quit. Teachers’ stress also impacts students, since educators may become less concerned about students’ learning and put less effort into teaching when under stress. While the external causes of stress cannot be eliminated, educators can use techniques that reduce internal stress. This chapter offers a list of practical recommendations that might help educators manage their emotional reactions to stressful situations.

Developing self-awareness as a management instructor and modelling this process for students’ similar awareness has benefits in classroom learning environments. In this chapter, the authors reframe faculty and student traditional roles and responsibilities, providing an iterative, holistic process of embedded interdependent self-awareness development where students experience a sense of empowerment and control over their learning, integral to mutual success. The authors’ experiences draw on aspects of experiential learning, Gestalt psychology, and self-determination theory (SDT). To create an intrinsically motivating, student-centred learning environment in an undergraduate leadership course, the authors reframed teaching to include course design, opportunities for student autonomy, co-creation of psychological safety, and the instructor’s use of self. This evidence-based reflection for self-awareness included examining behavioural patterns, feelings, and thinking. Finally, the authors discuss lessons learned and practical applications, identifying reflexivity, psychological safety, iterative feedback, student autonomy, and modelling as key to the process.

As faculty, we often hear conversations and perceptions on student performance from our colleagues. The topic of student success, or lack of it, is generally framed with the assumptions that students today are too entitled (wanting high grades for substandard work), are looking for shortcuts (and not interested in learning), cannot be trusted (and must be monitored), and are not well positioned to provide reliable and valid evaluations of faculty teaching (as they are not our customers). It is a common set of assumptions about students that we have heard too often in our interactions with colleagues. But what if the problem is not our students, but us? What if it is our own lack of self-awareness, consideration of others, relationship building, and influence orientation that results in an increase in dysfunctional conflicts, and a reduction of meaningful communication with our students? This chapter leverages the model of personal–interpersonal capacity to provide a constructive lens to unpack our assumptions about our students and shift our focus to what we can control, us.

While literature offers substantial evidence regarding both strengths and shortcomings of experiential learning for learners, far less is known about how educators reflect on, make sense of, and learn from experiential teaching, let alone address emotions that invariably affect the process (Pekrun & Linnenbrink-Garcia, 2012; Wright, Lund Dean, & Forray, 2021). The purpose of this chapter is to explore the dynamic nature of emotions in the context of experiential teaching, that is, the facilitation of experiential learning activities, by examining critical incidents from the educators’ perspective. The chapter begins by introducing literature on experiential teaching and emotion. The authors then present the empirical findings from a critical incidents study, noting how participants succeeded or failed to catch the waves of emotion that emerged while facilitating experiential learning activities. The authors connect the findings with the existing literature, taking into consideration both sensemaking and reflective practices during and after experiential teaching. The authors close by identifying ways educators can learn to surf the inevitable waves of emotion that can emerge within themselves and in learners, offering specific tools to maintain balance and develop further competence in the midst of experiential learning.

At the dawning of the twenty-first century, The Courage to Teach was a tipping point that shifted our conceptualization of faculty development to consider the heart of the teacher, ‘the place where intellect and emotion and spirit and will converge in the human self’ (Palmer, 1998, p. 11). So inspired, a study was designed to inquire into the lived reality of teachers to better understand how teachers experience and make meaning of the phenomenon of teaching (Natoli, 2000, 2006). The objective of the Self as Teacher Study was to interview and observe those who teach to capture how they come to know their subjects and their students with attention to the selfhood of the teacher. Analysis of narratives collected through autobiographical interviews with K-12 instructors and university professors from Boston to Barcelona to Brazil evidenced astounding epistemological patterns – distinctions between teacher ways of knowing and being – which provided insights into the construction of teacher identity and integrity (integritas or wholeness). Ultimately, human virtues are represented in the embodied mind as higher-order cognitions and emotions and manifested as actions through qualitatively different self-states, our better angels. Consequently, faculty development is about human development, expanding consciousness, enhancing capacities for relationship, shifting awareness to integrate new perceptions, and incorporating previously isolated mentalizations. The Model for In-depth Faculty Development is introduced as a grounded theory framework highlighting teacher characteristics and potentials for personal and professional growth through a shared community culture while the POISE® Curriculum offers a system for implementation.

There are well established studies on how adult learners need to be treated differently by instructors. In this chapter, the authors add to the literature by suggesting that instructor competency needs to include a high emotional quotient. In other words, teachers would need to demonstrate caring and helpfulness to adult learners who come to the class with multiple (often rich) experiences. The skilful instructor is expected to make an open display of emotions to establish rapport, while raising the group emotional intelligence of themselves and the class. Furthermore, managing emotional experiences in the classroom can be aided by qualitative research methods such as collaborative autoethnography (CAE). Overall, this chapter provides guidelines for instructors to get a good sense of how to work effectively with adult learners.

Emotional intelligence (EI) has been known to play an important role in teaching for long. Interactions, teaching environment, and emotional responses of students and instructors all have a demonstrable, complex interplay which spills over to behaviour. Particularly predictive and powerfully pattern-inducing in this regard, are emotional responses to events in the external environment. COVID-19 was a critical disruption in the teaching environment on account of its far-reaching effects over the modes and contents of instruction. Thus, there is a clear and present need to connect the emotional responses among students and instructors due to COVID-19 with the practice and interactions occurring during teaching. The authors present a narrative analysis based on qualitative inputs from instructors in a graduate course setting to find the effects of emotional responses to COVID-19 on teaching virtually. The authors bring in the concept of EI to explain the observations made from the analysis. The conclusions drawn are of direct and immediate importance for the future of teaching and learning in times of disruptions such as COVID-19. The study contributes by updating the knowledge base on emotion management in the classroom on the one hand, while adding to newer streams of research on virtual classroom settings and disruption-induced changes in teaching on the other hand. Some significant directions for praxis of business are also included.

Historically business education has put greater emphasis on rational analysis and the acquisition of instrumental and technical knowledge, while paying relatively scant attention to developing business students’ soft skills such as self- and social awareness and emotional intelligence through contemplative learning. In light of the growing need for more open and diverse ways of knowing that are more holistic, emotional, and aesthetic in management education, the authors present a 2 × 2 framework of arts-based pedagogy which helps organize various arts-based practices currently used in management education. The authors also share their personal reflections on using artful practices, specifically focussing on two individual-level experiential learning activities (i.e. museum visits and e-portfolio projects) and one group-based participatory art project. The authors further discuss why creative thinking and innovative arts-based practices can open up a new possibility for filling the gaps in current management education, especially in regard to developing students’ self- and social awareness and environmental consciousness in a more creative manner.