By Arthur Gautier, associate professor at ESSEC Business School and chair holder of the ESSEC Philanthropy Chair.

From July 21st to July 26th, I attended the 2024 edition of the Harvard Business School’s Global Colloquium on Participant-Centered Learning. This program is proposed to management faculty from partner business schools all over the world to rethink their teaching methods and improve their effectiveness as educators.

ESSEC selected me to participate alongside my colleague Rick Marchese. I was excited to learn from some of the best educators. I did not know exactly how I would be impacted by this program. How much would it change my views and practices as an educator at ESSEC?

From educator to learner… and back!

Rohit Deshpande, the Faculty Chair of the program, told us in the first session that we would wear two hats throughout the week: educator and learner. Of course, we wore our educator hats: we talked about pedagogy, shared experiences and tips, and debriefed exercises. Simultaneously, we were learners: We had to read materials, prepare answers to questions, engage in group discussions, and solve challenges. This allowed us to discover participant-centered learning by both experiencing and reflecting on its unique characteristics.

What is participant-centered learning (PCL)? HBS has its own theory. The cornerstone of PCL is that learners are active in the learning process, not passive recipients of knowledge. They receive theories, concepts, and facts (knowing), but they also engage in practical and applied exercises to hone in their skills (doing) while reflecting on their beliefs and values (being).

When I was a student in France, the pedagogy of many courses did not quench my thirst for knowledge. I was disappointed by the lack of critical thinking and frustrated that we rarely dealt with moral dilemmas. We listened to our professors and took notes in silence. We rarely engaged in classroom discussions. I discovered that students voiced similar criticisms in business schools around the world, including at Harvard! PCL was developed precisely to address these concerns.

A key feature of PCL is the case method, a century-old pedagogical innovation at Harvard whereby students learn from real-world business challenges discussed in class through skillful questioning and peer learning. With a focus on practical applications before theory, Harvard has created a blueprint shaping how the case method is used in b-schools worldwide. Cases at HBS are expected to be problem-centered, intellectually and emotionally engaging, interactive, and managerially relevant. Before class, students usually prepare cases individually, sometimes in small groups. In the classroom, educators engage in large group discussions and leverage students’ preparation to generate takeaways from the case. After class, students reflect to generalize what they learned from specific cases.

Here are five “ideas” that I took away from the Global Colloquium on Participant-Centered Learning and that I have applied to my own teaching.

Getting coverage

As educators with 20 to 200 students in the classroom, it is tempting to rely on a small group of familiar faces who actively participate. However, there is a missed opportunity to involve the entire class.

At HBS, I discovered how important it is to obtain “coverage” in the first interaction with the class. In this context, it does not mean covering all the materials in the program. It entails taking up the whole classroom space and engaging with students on the left and right, at the front and rear, as well as in the middle:

• Provide equal attention to all learners.
• Walk, converse, and make eye contact with all learners.

Building tension

Too often, as educators, we want our classes to run smoothly. We have a detailed plan for each session, we create routines with students, and we prepare too many PowerPoint slides. Without any fruitful “tension,” teaching may become boring for both educators and learners.

Teaching with tension allows students to be attentive, alert, and ready to participate. To achieve this, it is key to demand effort from learners and to have them analyze the dilemmas and puzzles stemming from the covered material. Using cases is a great way to build tension:

• Use counterfactual thinking (“Would this other action result in a different outcome?“).
• Encourage learners to compare the material to their own experience or established theories.
• Present an ethical dilemma: ask learners to make a decision and explain their reasoning.

Diversity of pedagogical methods and active learning

Most educators still use the lecture as the default teaching method. In France, it is culturally expected for university professors to give long monologues while students take notes in silence.

However, research on pedagogy suggests that “active learning” is key for students to remember what they have learned in class. As Professor Mel Silberman noted, the average student retention rate increases with demonstration, discussion, practice, and teaching to peers. We an use a variety of pedagogical methods and change during a single class. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, I rarely use a method for more than 30 to 40 minutes, and I like to mix things up by alternating short lectures, case studies, group discussions, debates, interviews with guests…

Educators can increase students’ engagement by using active learning methods such as:

• Launch polls to gauge learners’ views on a topic and ask one learner from an opinion group to elaborate.
• Organize “pair & share” sessions, when two learners debate an issue for 5 minutes. This is a great introduction to initiate a class discussion.
• Use “cold calls” and “warm calls” to generate engagement from everyone—including introverts—and keep the energy flowing.

Using boards effectively

Harvard is famous for its use of chalkboards. A typical HBS classroom contains 6 or 9 sliding chalkboards that professors use as key visual tools for learning. Chalkboards have many proponents among educators, especially in science: they always work, are easier to read, and allow educators and learners to slow the pace and focus.

While having so many boards at hand is rare, educators can nonetheless use one or two boards effectively, especially with active learning methods. With the case method, boards are very useful to sort ideas and present a clear structure to the discussion. As students develop their arguments, I take notes of main ideas and highlight connections or contrasts. Progressively, the board fills up and leaves a trace of the collective knowledge developed during the course:

• Prepare your board structure ahead of class to guide the discussion and save time as ideas start flowing.
• Use one board as a “parking lot” for topics to discuss later, then return to the main board to maintain the flow.
• Create columns to compare ideas and highlight tensions in the case (e.g., opportunities vs. challenges, strengths vs. weaknesses, yes vs. no).

Evaluating student participation

When grading participation, educators are often left wondering: how to be fair and objective in my assessment? What should the performance criteria for student participation be? When talking with colleagues, I realized that it encompasses many dimensions that we need to articulate.

Common criteria include quality of reasoning, clear articulation of ideas, depth of arguments, contribution to class knowledge, alignment with session objectives novelty and creativity (“thinking outside the box”), attention to others’ ideas, effort and merit, individual progression:

• Clarify expectations early on. In your syllabus, be explicit about your criteria for participation and tell students exactly what you expect from them.
• Strike a balance between rewarding learners for the frequency and quality of their contributions.
• Use a consistent grade distribution for participation. The best grade should be given to learners in the top 10-20% of their class.