C. Roland Christensen Center for Teaching and Learning, Harvard Business School

Developing as a Teacher at HBS

The mission of HBS is to educate leaders who make a difference in the world. The pursuit of this mission requires a strong culture of teaching, where learning is pursued along multiple dimensions. A carefully calibrated progression of teaching assignments allows faculty to excel in addressing the lifelong learning needs of future and current leaders who attend the school's MBA and Executive Education programs. HBS encourages faculty to leverage synergies between research and teaching, with the goal of generating intellectual capital that is both innovative and managerially relevant.

A Culture of Teaching

Harvard Business School has a deeply engrained commitment to teaching, reflected in everything from the school's mission of "educating leaders who make a difference" to the design of its classrooms. Unlike many other institutions, where teaching is largely a solitary pursuit, HBS treats teaching as a collaborative, communal activity. New instructors are supported by a broad and deep network of mentors and colleagues. Extended orientations for incoming faculty, colloquia and workshops on the practice of teaching, multi-faculty teaching groups, individual peer mentors, and the Christensen Center all play key roles in helping faculty develop and mature as case method instructors.

Multiple Dimensions of Learning

At HBS, teaching means more than simply transmitting information. "We do not bring the material to the students," explained one faculty member, "but help them find their own ways to it." Developing as a teacher means recognizing and embracing this delicate balance, learning how and when to ask the right questions, follow the class's lead, and actively guide students toward key insights. Instructors in the field of management education strive to develop their students into critical thinkers, thoughtful leaders, and successful practitioners. The best teachers at HBS recognize that to do this successfully, they need to satisfy students' learning needs along three dimensions: knowledge (mastery of information, concepts and frameworks, tools and techniques), skills (capabilities with respect to analysis and judgment, and execution), and self-awareness (professional identity and leadership, especially issues of ethics, values, and the capacity for continued learning).

Progression in the Classroom

Most instructors begin by teaching in the MBA Required Curriculum-a set of courses that introduces students to the foundational ideas of core practice areas such as accounting, finance, marketing, strategy, and technology and operations management. After several years, instructors usually progress to teaching in the second-year, MBA Elective Curriculum. As instructors master the School's teaching culture and begin to learn the skills of case writing, they may widen their teaching scope by working in the school's Executive Education programs and developing new courses, based on their research, to be taught in the Elective Curriculum.

Synergy Between Teaching and Research

Harvard Business School commits substantial resources to developing and innovating content that is close to practice and managerially relevant. Faculty members frequently find that their own research and teaching mutually support one another: in the classroom, innovative ideas drawn from academic research and practitioner experience reinforce long-standing concepts and introduce new ones. In the same spirit, the classroom frequently serves as a laboratory, where teachers can test new ideas and work inductively toward refining and developing research on and approaches to management challenges.

This section details some of the resources available to incoming and experienced HBS faculty in the areas of teaching and course development.