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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.