teaching

Teaching Philosophy

My teaching is shaped by the idea that students should move behind understanding concepts and become able to work with them. Knowledge becomes meaningful when students can apply it to real situations, uncertain decisions, and problems that do not yet have a finished answer.

I therefore design learning situations that combine structure and openness. Students need clear explanations, useful frameworks, good examples, and conceptual orientation. At the same time, they need opportunities to ask questions, test ideas, compare perspectives, create visible outputs, receive feedback, and reflect on what they have learned.

For me curiosity is central to this process. I value teaching situations in which questions open up the learning space: What do we see here? Why might this be the case? What changes if we look at the problem from another perspective? In my own teaching, I try to keep this spirit of inquiry, dialogue, and shared sense-making alive.

My teaching is strongly influenced by experiential, problem-oriented, and competence-oriented learning. I work with case studies, group puzzles, role plays, flipped classroom elements, workshops, business model tools, simulations, and challenge-based formats. These approaches are very applicable and valuable for engineering students in entrepreneurship and management education, because these students should learn how to deal with ambiguity, incomplete information, different stakeholder perspectives, and uncertainty.

I also believe that good teaching requires a warm and non-threatening learning environment. Students should feel able to ask questions, offer ideas, disagree respectfully, and speak from their own perspective without being judged. I value it when students bring in their professional experience, disciplinary background, cultural perspective, or personal way of thinking. Often, these contributions make the classroom more alive and create learning moments that could not have been planned in advance.

Feedback is another central element of my teaching. I use teacher feedback, peer feedback, discussion, presentation feedback, and structured assessment formats to support learning. Feedback should not only evaluate performance; it should help students see what already works, where their thinking can become sharper, and how they can take the next step.

In this sense, I understand teaching as the designing of learning spaces. These spaces need preparation, structure, and conceptual clarity, but also interaction, experimentation, reflection, and trust. Good teaching helps students connect knowledge with action and gradually develop the confidence to engage with complex problems responsibly.

My Path into Teaching

Teaching entered my life early and in several very different contexts: first through a short PowerPoint teaching session during my high school year in the United States, then through language teaching with Chinese and Taiwanese students in Vienna, later through fourteen months of English teaching in China, and eventually through academic teaching in environmental science, ecotoxicology, management, entrepreneurship, and sustainability.

Looking back, these experiences shaped my understanding of teaching in a very practical way. I learned that good teaching needs preparation, structure, and clarity, but also presence, flexibility, experimentation, and a willingness to respond to the people in the room. My early teaching experiences were often improvised and resource-constrained; later, my academic teaching became more systematic through Moodle-based course organization, assessment rubrics, case studies, problem-based learning, thesis supervision, and higher education didactics.

Today, at Graz University of Technology, I approach teaching as an ongoing design and learning process. My work in industry, consulting, environmental research, and psychosocial counseling has strengthened my interest in helping students connect concepts with action, ask better questions, and gain confidence when dealing with complex and open-ended problems. This path has led me to see higher education as a space where students prepare not only to reproduce knowledge, but to engage responsibly with the problems of their time.

My Role as a Teacher

A concept that has stayed with me since my time at the UAS Technikum Wien is the idea of being a “guide on the side” rather than only a “sage on the stage.” I encountered this formulation in the context of problem-based learning and it resonated strongly with me.

Students need orientation, frameworks, examples, and sometimes also a well-structured explanation. I still use PowerPoint and other forms of structured input when they help to clarify concepts. But I do not see my role as being the person who simply transfers knowledge from the front of the room. Especially in times of generative AI and rapidly changing knowledge environments, teaching cannot be reduced to knowing everything in advance and presenting it perfectly.

I understand my role more as one of designing and facilitating learning situations. I try to create settings in which students can work with concepts, ask questions, test ideas, compare perspectives, and gradually develop their own understanding. Depending on the situation, this may involve slides, blackboard work, flipcharts, worksheets, role plays, group discussions, case studies, peer feedback, or visible outputs such as posters, canvases, models, and presentations.

I also try to create a classroom atmosphere that is warm, respectful, and intellectually alive. I value it when students bring in their own experiences, disciplinary perspectives, professional knowledge, or critical questions. This diversity makes the classroom richer.

Didactic Influences and Design Principles

My teaching design is guided by a small number of didactic frameworks that I use as practical orientation tools. They help me think about what students should learn, how learning activities should be structured, how assessment can support learning, and how students can become active participants in their own competence development.

The following frameworks have become reference points for me regarding how I design teaching, learning activities, and assessment. I like to see them as practical lenses through which I creatie new learning situations.

Constructive Alignment

Constructive alignment helps me connect intended learning outcomes, teaching and learning activities, and assessment formats. In my teaching practice, this means that I try to design sessions backwards: first asking what students should be able to do, then choosing activities that allow them to practice this, and finally using assessment formats that make these competences visible.

In my courses, this becomes concrete through business plan rubrics, presentation assessment criteria, case-based tasks, worksheets, group artefacts, and classroom discussions. Students are asked to apply concepts in ways that correspond to the intended learning outcomes.

Bloom’s Taxonomy

Bloom’s Taxonomy supports my thinking about the depth of learning. It reminds me to design activities and exam questions in such a way that they go behind the level of remembering and understanding, and move towards the higher levels of applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating.

Examples how I used this so far are: classifying leadership behavior, analyzing organizational structures, evaluating business model options, developing personas and organizatas, creating market-sizing logic, designing business plan sections, and making students actively participate in reflecting the quality of startup ideas of other groups through a role card set.

Education for Sustainable Development

Education for Sustainable Development has become an important reference point for my teaching. It emphasizes competences such as systems thinking, anticipatory thinking, critical thinking, normative competence, collaboration, problem solving, and self-competence.

These competences are difficult to develop through input alone. They require open problems, discussion, perspective-taking, experimentation, and reflection. For this reason, ESD connects closely with my interest in challenge-based learning and in teaching formats that ask students to work with complexity rather than only reproduce established answers.

Five Practices of Entrepreneurship Education

The five practices of entrepreneurship education — play, empathy, creation, experimentation, and reflection — provide a useful language for the kind of entrepreneurship learning I want to create. They shift the focus from merely learning concepts about entrepreneurship toward practicing entrepreneurial thinking and action.

In my courses, these practices appear in role plays, group puzzles, customer personas, business model games, pitch feedback, prototyping exercises, and reflective discussions. Students experiment with perspectives, develop ideas, test assumptions, receive feedback, and revise their thinking. This makes entrepreneurship education more active, embodied, and practice-based.

Course Overview

The following overview provides a compact view of selected teaching activities across institutions and phases of my career. It starts with my current teaching and then moves back chronologically.

Course type abbreviations: VO = lecture, UE = practical course/tutorial, SE = seminar, PR = project, LAB = laboratory, WS = workshop, MOD = module, TUT = tutorial.

Selected Educational Videos

In addition to classroom-based teaching, I develop educational videos that support asynchronous learning, flipped classroom elements, and conceptual preparation for students. These videos are documented as teaching-related outputs in the TU Graz research and knowledge documentation system and are available through TU Graz TUbe where access rights allow.

Note: The videos require TU Graz login credentials in order to be viewed.

Business Model Innovation

This educational video introduces the concept of business model innovation and explains how firms create, deliver, and capture value through the design of their business models. It discusses why technological innovation alone does not automatically generate economic value and why adapting or redesigning the business model can be crucial.

The video also explains how companies develop new business models by moving beyond their core business, exploring adjacent opportunities, and identifying white-space opportunities.

Language: English
Subtitle: How firms create, deliver and capture value through innovative business models
Video: Watch on TUbe
Documentation: TU Graz Pure / OKD entry

Circular Economy

This educational video introduces the circular economy as a systemic perspective on material and energy flows between the technosphere and the biosphere. It explains why circularity was historically the default condition of materially constrained societies and how industrialization enabled the emergence of the linear economy.

The video presents circular economy as a design challenge that goes beyond recycling and focuses on reducing resource inflows, strengthening internal loops, preserving product and material value, and limiting waste outflows. It also introduces the R-Hierarchy of circularity and connects circular economy to the ecological-economic distinction between an “empty world” and a “full world”.

Language: English
Video: Watch on TUbe
Documentation: TU Graz Pure / OKD entry

Sustainable Business Models

This educational video introduces the concept of sustainable business models and explains how business models can contribute to addressing sustainability challenges. It discusses different levels of sustainability ambition, ranging from eco-efficiency and net-zero approaches to circular economy, sufficiency, net-positive, and flourishing perspectives.

The video explains how business models create, deliver, and capture value, and how sustainable, circular, and regenerative business models extend this logic by integrating environmental and social value creation.

Language: English
Video: Watch on TUbe
Documentation: TU Graz Pure / OKD entry

Selected Teaching Examples

The following examples illustrate how I have translated conceptual frameworks into applied learning formats. Many of these formats emerged from a very practical question: how can I move students from listening to concepts toward working with them?

Entrepreneurship: Business Plan Group Puzzle

In the Entrepreneurship course, I redesigned the business plan module. Previously, this part of the course was more input-heavy. I transformed it into a group puzzle.

Each group receives a text on one section of the business plan. Students read the text, highlight the most important ideas, discuss the content, and develop a graphical representation on a flip chart. They then present their section to the class.

This format changes the energy of the session. Students work actively with the material, negotiate what is important, create a visual synthesis, and explain the content to their peers. It also makes the business plan feel less like a static document and more like a structured tool for developing and communicating a venture.

Entrepreneurship: Promoter vs. Trustee Role Play

One part of the Entrepreneurship course deals with different forms of entrepreneurial and administrative behavior. In the past, I explained the distinction between promoter and trustee logic mainly through theoretical input. I noticed that this became quite demanding for students, especially when the input block became too long.

I therefore redesigned this part as a role play. Students work in pairs and take opposing roles: one person argues from the perspective of a promoter, the other from the perspective of a trustee. They choose from several startup-related scenarios and discuss the situation from their assigned perspective. In a second round, they switch roles.

The aim is that students experience what it feels like to argue from these positions. This helps them understand that both perspectives can be part of entrepreneurial thinking and behavior. The format has led to more energy in the classroom and has received very positive feedback from students.

Entrepreneurship: Market Sizing and Customer Segmentation

In the marketing part of the Entrepreneurship course, I introduced several worksheets to make core marketing concepts more tangible. For market sizing, I work with the concepts of PAM, TAM, SAM, and SOM. I first go through an illustrative example with the students and then use a mix-and-match exercise where they connect the terms with the correct definitions and interpretations.

I use a similar approach for traditional marketing numbers such as market volume, market potential, and related concepts. These terms can easily remain abstract if they are only explained verbally. By turning them into a matching and application exercise, students engage with the distinctions more actively.

I also introduced visual organizers such as personas (B2C) and organizatas (B2B) to help students better understand customer segmentation and customer targeting. These materials help students move from abstract market definitions toward a more concrete understanding of customer groups, needs, frustrations, and decision-making contexts.

Entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurial Marketing Activities

In the entrepreneurial marketing section, I use another mix-and-match worksheet to help students distinguish between different marketing approaches such as guerrilla marketing, viral marketing, and word-of-mouth marketing.

The purpose of the exercise is to make students actively work with the language of entrepreneurial marketing. Instead of only hearing examples, they identify, compare, and classify different activities. This has made the marketing section more interactive and easier to grasp.

Entrepreneurship: Design Thinking Session

In the Entrepreneurship course, I facilitate a Design Thinking session based on the Stanford d.school “Lunch Experience” materials. I did not develop this format myself, but I deliberately integrate it into the course because it allows students to experience a complete innovation process in a short and accessible way.

Students move through the process of understanding user needs, interviewing, ideating, prototyping, testing, and reflecting. This makes Design Thinking more tangible than a purely conceptual explanation. The session is often lively and helps students experience how customer orientation, rapid prototyping, and feedback can support the development of entrepreneurial ideas.

Entrepreneurship: Pitch Feedback Role Cards

For the summer semester 2026 iteration of the course, I developed a role-card format for pitch feedback. Students listened to the pitch of another group from a specific role perspective, for example as an investor, media reporter, business angel, rhetoric coach, or potential customer.

The goal was to make feedback more structured and more diverse. Instead of general comments such as “I liked it” or “the pitch was good”, students are encouraged to ask questions and give feedback from a defined role. I expected this to support deeper peer learning and help students understand that pitches are evaluated differently depending on the stakeholder perspective. The activity was very well received by both my colleague that I am co-teaching this course with and the student groups and led to deeper, more alive and more honest feedback and audience questions.

General Management and Organization: Leadership Module

In General Management and Organization / Unternehmensführung und Organisation, I developed a module on leadership and organization. One part of the module works with leadership profiles and the Blake and Mouton Managerial Grid.

Students first complete a self-assessment to reflect on their own leadership style. They then work with two leadership profiles and classify leadership behavior according to task orientation and people orientation. In groups, they identify patterns and clusters in the leadership behavior described in the case material.

At the end of the session, each group adds its results to a shared matrix on the blackboard. We then discuss the emerging clusters as a class: where do we see task-oriented behavior, where do we see people-oriented behavior, and what do the patterns tell us about leadership in practice? I also show a worked-out solution that I prepared myself. Often, the collective interpretation developed by the students comes very close to my own analysis, which creates a good basis for deeper discussion.

In the same module, I also introduce the Hersey and Blanchard model of situational leadership. I work through an example with the students and draw the logic of the model on the blackboard. This helps slow down the conceptual input and creates space for questions, interpretation, and discussion.

General Management and Organization: Organizational Design Cases

For the topic of organizational design, I developed case studies that allow students to practice drawing and interpreting organizational structures.

One case focuses on Alphabet and Google. Students analyze the relationship between Alphabet as a holding company and Google as one of its core subsidiaries. They also examine matrix-like elements and other structural features within Google. The task is to draw an organizational chart based on the case description. One student group presents its solution at the board, and we discuss it as a class. I then redraw and refine the organizational structure together with the students. This format helps students see that organizational structures are rarely as clean and simple as textbook examples suggest.

A second case focuses on Soulbottles and its adoption of holacracy. I researched the central concepts of holacracy and prepared the case so that students can work with a less traditional organizational form. Students are asked to visualize the structure and logic of the organization. The case often leads to lively discussions, because holacracy challenges many assumptions about hierarchy, authority, roles, and decision-making.

Gründungsgarage / Startup Garage: Business Model Development Workshop

As part of the Gründungsgarage / Startup Garage, I co-teach a workshop on business model development together with a colleague. The workshop uses the Leap Game, an interactive format that helps student startup teams develop and challenge their business model ideas.

The workshop starts with the formulation of a design challenge. Based on this challenge, students work in teams and use a set of cards to expand, question, and refine their business model canvases. The logic of the workshop is based on the business model framework by Osterwalder and Pigneur, but the game format makes the process much more active and exploratory.

A central part of the format is that student teams challenge each other. They work in pairs of teams, go through different cards, and use them to identify assumptions, weak points, opportunities, and possible extensions of their business models. This creates many ideas in a short time and helps teams move beyond their first version of the business model.

At the end of the workshop, the teams work toward a clearer understanding of how their ventures could generate revenue. This is often a productive moment, because the game makes business model development tangible, social, and iterative. The format is highly interactive and has received positive feedback from students.

Early Teaching Example: World Affairs Discussion Format

During my teaching year in China, I experimented with an alternative to traditional student presentations in English communication classes. Instead of asking students to give short monological presentations, I asked them to prepare a short opening statement on a topic from world affairs and then moderate a discussion with their classmates.

The aim was to move students from prepared speaking toward communicative action: asking questions, responding to others, guiding a conversation, and keeping a discussion alive. Together with my mother, who was an English teacher, I developed a simple grading rubric for this format and made the assessment criteria transparent to students. At the end, students also submitted a short reflective statement summarizing the discussion.

Looking back, this was one of my first experiences of aligning task, assessment, and learning outcome. The format worked very well and received positive feedback from students, because it allowed them to practice communication in a more authentic and interactive way than a traditional presentation format.

Thesis Supervision

Thesis supervision is an important part of my teaching profile. I understand bachelor’s and master’s thesis supervision as a mentoring process in which students often make their first steps with scientific working.

Many students at this stage are still learning what it means to work scientifically: how to find good sources, how to distinguish description from analysis, how to build an argument, how to reflect critically, and how to handle uncertainty in a research process.

For me, thesis supervision means helping students move from a first idea toward a clearly structured academic project. This includes an initial orientation, regular feedback checkings, methodological guidance, and encouragement.

My supervision activities include completed and ongoing theses at TU Graz and previous thesis-related guidance and assessment activities at UAS Technikum Wien. The table below includes publicly listed theses with catalogue links, as well as selected ongoing or recently completed supervision activities that are not yet listed in public repositories.

Executive MBA: Digital Leadership - Green Microelectronics

As part of my teaching at TU Graz, I contribute to the Executive MBA in Digital and Green Transition. I teach within the modules Digital & Green Economy and Digital Strategies & Business Modelling, focusing on digital transformation, data-driven value creation, servitization, platform dynamics, and strategic business model change.

From a teaching perspective, I value the executive education setting because it combines conceptual input, case-based discussion, simulation-based learning, and transfer to participants’ own organizational contexts. Participants bring substantial professional experience, which makes it possible to connect theoretical frameworks directly to strategic transformation challenges.

Business Model Lab: Sustainable Business Models

In the Business Model Lab, I teach a workshop on sustainable business models for small and medium-sized enterprises. The format helps participants move from broad sustainability challenges toward concrete business model ideas and prototypes.

The workshop combines conceptual input on circular economy and sustainability with design thinking, sustainable business model patterns, prototyping, and work with the Flourishing Business Model Canvas. Participants use these tools to open up the solution space, develop initial ideas, and connect business model innovation with economic, environmental, and societal value creation.

From a teaching perspective, this format reflects how I like to work: conceptual orientation, structured creativity, hands-on development, visual tools, and reflection come together in one learning process. The aim is that participants leave with a more concrete understanding of sustainable business model innovation and with an initial prototype they can further develop.

Assessment and Learning Outcomes

My teaching aims to connect learning outcomes, learning activities, and assessment formats. I use transfer tasks, case analyses, worksheets, group products, presentations, rubrics, and reflective discussions to support competence-oriented learning.

A recurring principle in my course design is that students should produce visible outputs: organizational charts, matrices, posters, business model elements, persona profiles, market sizing exercises, pitch feedback, written business plan sections, or prototypes. These outputs make learning more concrete and give us something to discuss, compare, and improve in class.

Rubrics are an important part of this approach. In both Entrepreneurship and General Management and Organization, I introduced grading rubrics to make assessment more transparent and consistent. In the Entrepreneurship course, the rubric supports the assessment of student business plans and provides a shared reference point for lecturers, students, and external startup guests involved in the course. In General Management and Organization, I introduced a rubric for student presentations, which makes it easier to assess presentations consistently and to provide structured feedback.

For me, rubrics are not only assessment tools, but also communication tools. They clarify what quality means in a course, help students understand what is expected, and support stronger alignment between learning activities, outputs, and evaluation.

My interest in transparent assessment already developed during my time at UAS Technikum Wien. In laboratory teaching, I introduced entrance checks to ensure that students engaged with the theoretical background before entering the laboratory. This improved preparation and made the laboratory sessions more productive and safer.

I also developed a rubric for laboratory reports based on the IMRAD structure. This helped students understand what a scientifically structured laboratory report should contain and allowed me to provide clearer and more consistent feedback. The rubric later also became useful for other lecturers.

[Add later: examples of assessment criteria, business plan rubric, presentation rubric, laboratory assessment rubrics, Antestate, LaTeX exams.]

Feedback and Evidence

This section is currently being expanded.

I use feedback as a central part of my teaching development. In the past, I have worked with oral feedback, institutional evaluation forms, written feedback, and informal student reflections. In the Entrepreneurship course, we actively ask students what their highlights were and what they would like to see more of.

I try to translate feedback into concrete improvements. When feedback points to possible changes, I document it directly in my teaching materials so that it can inform the next course iteration.

The Gründungsgarage / Startup Garage business model development workshop also includes feedback forms, which I plan to evaluate and incorporate into this teaching portfolio at a later point. This would allow me to document more systematically how students experience interactive formats such as the Leap Game.

An area I am currently developing is my own way of working with critical feedback. I want to become better at distinguishing between individual opinions and recurring patterns, and at translating useful criticism into concrete improvements without taking every critical comment personally. For me, this is part of developing a more professional feedback culture: feedback should not only confirm what works, but also help identify where learning activities, instructions, materials, or assessment criteria can become clearer.

[Add later: selected anonymized student feedback, peer feedback, teaching evaluation evidence, feedback from the Gründungsgarage / Startup Garage business model development workshop, and examples of changes made in response to feedback.]

Evidence of Teaching Development

A central part of my teaching development has been the gradual redesign of learning situations. Many of these changes started from concrete observations in class: moments where students seemed passive, where concepts remained too abstract, where feedback was too general, or where the connection between theory and application needed to become more visible.

For me, evidence of teaching development is therefore not only found in formal evaluations, but also in the visible changes I make to my teaching materials, classroom activities, assessment formats, and feedback practices over time. I try to observe what happens in a course, reflect on what supports or limits student learning, and then translate these observations into concrete design changes.

The following examples illustrate how my teaching has developed through this iterative process.

Across these examples, a common pattern is visible: I increasingly try to move students from listening to concepts toward working with them. This does not mean that structured input becomes unimportant. On the contrary, students still need conceptual orientation, explanations, examples, and frameworks. However, I try to combine these inputs with activities that require students to apply, compare, visualize, discuss, evaluate, or create something.

This development is closely connected to my understanding of teaching as the design of learning spaces. A learning space becomes stronger when students have something to do, something to discuss, something to produce, and something to reflect on. Over time, I have therefore become more attentive to the material and social design of teaching: worksheets, role cards, canvases, blackboard structures, rubrics, peer feedback formats, and visible group outputs are not merely supporting materials. They shape how students interact with the content and with each other.

The two rubrics I developed illustrate this development particularly clearly. In General Management and Organization, the presentation rubric supports a more transparent assessment of oral and visual communication, argumentation, structure, and professional presentation behavior. In Entrepreneurship, the business plan rubric supports a more coherent assessment of complex written venture-development work. In both cases, the rubrics help connect learning outcomes, student activities, and assessment criteria more explicitly.

In future iterations of this portfolio, I would like to document this development even more systematically by adding selected teaching materials, anonymized student feedback, examples of assessment rubrics, and short reflections on changes made between course iterations.

Developing My Teaching Competence: From Experience to Professional Practice

When I first started teaching, I did not yet think of teaching competence as a broad professional competence. In China, I mainly learned by trying things out. I was young, confident, and experimental. Looking back, one of the most important early lessons was that teaching becomes more meaningful when students are not only asked to present content, but to actively work with it.

One example from this period was a World Affairs discussion format. Instead of asking students to give traditional presentations on arbitrary topics, I asked them to prepare a short opening statement on a topic from world politics and then moderate a discussion with their classmates. Together with my mother, who was an English teacher, I developed a grading rubric for this format. The assessment criteria were made transparent to the students, and at the end they also submitted a short reflective statement summarizing the discussion. This was one of my first experiences of designing an assessment format around the actual communicative competence I wanted students to develop: not only speaking in a monologue, but leading, responding, asking, moderating, and reflecting.

At the UAS Technikum Wien, my teaching became more systematic. I learned from colleagues, observed good practice, and gradually developed my own approaches to laboratory teaching, Moodle-based course organization, assessment, and teaching materials. One important development was the introduction of laboratory entrance tests. I had observed that some students came to the laboratory insufficiently prepared, which affected both safety and learning quality. I therefore introduced a preparatory assessment: students had to engage with the theoretical background before entering the laboratory, and if they did not pass the entrance check, they had to prepare again. In retrospect, this was close to a flipped-classroom logic, even though I did not yet use that terminology at the time. The effect was clear: students came better prepared, and the laboratory sessions became more productive.

Another important step at Technikum Wien was the development of a structured rubric for laboratory reports. Before that, the quality and structure of reports varied strongly. I introduced the IMRAD structure and developed assessment criteria that made expectations clearer and feedback more consistent. This rubric was later also useful for other lecturers. These experiences helped me understand assessment not only as grading, but as a way to clarify quality, guide student work, and support learning.

Since joining TU Graz, and especially through the Teaching Academy, I have become much more aware of the breadth of teaching competence. Good teaching requires disciplinary expertise, but it also requires didactic knowledge, social competence, communication skills, voice and speech technique, the ability to work with groups, the ability to design meaningful materials, assessment competence, and the capacity to reflect on and further develop one’s own teaching.

This broader understanding resonates with teaching competence models that describe professional teaching as a combination of values and attitudes, methodological-didactic abilities, contextual knowledge, and social and self-competence. The Teaching Competence Model for the Styrian Higher Education Area is helpful for me because it makes visible that professional teaching is not only a matter of methods, but also of appreciation, empathy, diversity awareness, planning, assessment, communication, and self-reflection.

I recognize myself especially in the areas of appreciation and empathy, student-centeredness, diversity awareness, and the willingness to reflect on my own teaching. At the same time, the model also helps me identify areas for further development. For example, I would like to become more systematic in planning learning sequences, defining learning outcomes for individual sessions, and preparing materials that allow students to work more independently and actively. I also want to become better at handling critical feedback: not taking every critical comment personally, but identifying patterns, distinguishing individual opinions from broader issues, and translating useful criticism into concrete improvements.

The pragmatic model of teaching competence by Fleischmann, Jäger, and Strasser is also useful for my own reflection because it distinguishes between developing teaching concepts, implementing them, organizing teaching, and reflecting on and further developing teaching. This fits my own development well. I increasingly understand teaching as a professional practice that includes the design of learning environments, the facilitation of classroom interaction, the organization of materials and learning processes, the transparent assessment of student outputs, and the continuous improvement of courses based on observation and feedback.

A central principle in my current teaching is that structure creates calm. For me, structure does not mean controlling every moment of a session. Rather, it creates orientation and security, both for students and for myself. A clear structure makes it easier to open spaces for discussion, experimentation, group work, and student contributions. I therefore try to combine clear conceptual orientation with active learning phases. Students need input, frameworks, and examples, but input alone is not enough. Learning becomes stronger when students actively process ideas, apply concepts, create visible outputs, discuss alternatives, take roles, challenge each other, or reflect on their own work.

This is also why I increasingly focus on creating learning experiences. A good learning experience is a situation in which students do something with the content: they moderate a discussion, classify leadership behavior, draw an organizational structure, develop a persona or organizata, estimate a market, prototype an idea, give feedback from a stakeholder perspective, or challenge a business model. These activities create moments that tend to stay longer than pure explanation, because students connect concepts with action, interaction, and their own thinking.

At the same time, I am still developing my teaching style. Slides remain an important support structure for me, especially for orientation, timing, and conceptual clarity. However, I would like to move further toward more free teaching sequences, more work with blackboards, whiteboards, flipcharts, and prepared visual structures, and more movement in the room. I want to become less dependent on the lectern and the screen, and more able to generate structures together with students in the moment. This includes asking more questions, collecting student ideas visually, building on their contributions, and using the board or flipchart as a shared thinking space.

This development also requires more deliberate preparation. If students are supposed to work actively with materials, cases, worksheets, visual organizers, or printed resources, these elements need to be planned in advance. I see this as one of my current development areas: preparing teaching sessions not only as sequences of slides, but as learning environments with clear tasks, usable materials, flexible visual structures, and opportunities for students to contribute. In this sense, better planning does not reduce spontaneity. It creates the conditions that allow spontaneity, dialogue, and student activity to emerge more naturally.

The Teaching Academy has strongly influenced this development. Group puzzles, role plays, interactive learning sequences, voice and speech training, constructive alignment, digital feedback tools, assessment workshops, and Education for Sustainable Development have all opened new possibilities for my teaching. Some of these elements were already present in my teaching in an intuitive form. Through the Teaching Academy, I have gained language, frameworks, and concrete methods to develop them more consciously.

Looking ahead, I want to focus on three areas of development. First, I want to design more structured but flexible learning sequences that combine short input, student activation, visible outputs, and reflection. Second, I want to collect and use student feedback more systematically, for example through short activity-specific feedback surveys and the official evaluation system. Third, I want to deepen my engagement with Education for Sustainable Development and explore how sustainability-related competences can be integrated even more strongly into entrepreneurship, management, and business model education.

I also want to strengthen the connection between research and teaching where this is possible. For me, teaching becomes particularly alive when I can bring in questions, cases, uncertainties, or insights from my own research and professional work. In the future, I would like to develop more teaching moments in which students do not only learn about existing concepts, but work with research-informed questions and open problems themselves.

For me, developing teaching competence therefore means moving from experience and intuition toward a more deliberate, evidence-informed, and professionally grounded teaching practice, without losing the openness, presence, and responsiveness that make teaching alive.

Professional Development in Teaching

My teaching has developed in very different contexts: first through language teaching and intercultural classroom experiences, later through laboratory teaching, research seminars, problem-based learning, and today through entrepreneurship and management education.

Since joining TU Graz, I have taken a more systematic approach to developing my teaching. The TU Graz Teaching Academy and related higher education didactic training opportunities have helped me refine my teaching practice, become more attentive to classroom presence and interaction, make better use of digital tools, and think more carefully about how students learn.

Many of the changes I introduced in Entrepreneurship and General Management and Organization were influenced by my work in the TU Graz Teaching Academy. The programme has given me a structured space to think about teaching together with colleagues, try out new ideas, and reflect on my own classroom practice.

For myself, I have made it a principle to take at least one concrete idea from each didactic course I attend and implement it in one of my own courses. This has worked very well so far. Some ideas have influenced the structure of my sessions, others have changed how I use worksheets, role plays, blackboard work, peer feedback, assessment rubrics, digital tools, or active learning phases.

I especially value the courses on voice and speech training, interactive rhetoric, assessment, digital teaching, generative AI, and education for sustainable development. Some of these workshops helped me become more aware of classroom presence and communication. Others created space for critical reflection with colleagues, for example on the use of AI in teaching, course design, video-based teaching, or the question of how students can work more actively with complex problems.

I am currently completing the Expert Module of the TU Graz Teaching Academy. This module focuses on the documentation, further development, and visibility of professional teaching competence. As part of this process, I am developing this teaching portfolio as a reflective documentation of my teaching philosophy, teaching practice, assessment approaches, feedback culture, and future development goals. For me, the portfolio is not only a certification requirement, but also a way to make my teaching development more visible, coherent, and evidence-based.

In addition, I am preparing a contribution to the Teaching Community@TU Graz. I understand this as an opportunity to make selected teaching approaches, materials, or reflections useful beyond my own courses and to contribute to collegial exchange on teaching practice at TU Graz.

Ongoing and planned entries refer to activities currently being completed as part of the TU Graz Teaching Academy Expert Module. The Expert Module comprises 76 work units in total: 16 units for the Teaching Expert Workshop, 30 units for the teaching portfolio and/or teaching project, and 30 units for a contribution to Teaching Community@TU Graz.

Future Development

In the next phase of my teaching development, I want to further strengthen experimentation, reflection, and active student engagement in my courses. In entrepreneurship education especially, I see potential to create more structured opportunities for students to test assumptions, reflect on their learning process, and connect theoretical concepts with entrepreneurial action.

First, I want to strengthen free teaching sequences and reduce my dependence on slides and the lectern. Slides will remain useful for orientation, structure, and conceptual clarity, but I would like to work more with blackboards, whiteboards, flipcharts, prepared visual structures, and movement in the room. My aim is to create more moments in which ideas are developed visibly together with students.

Second, I want to prepare active learning phases more systematically. This includes clearer learning outcomes for individual sessions, more structured worksheets and materials, and better-planned transitions between short input, student work, discussion, and reflection. I want students to engage more often with concepts through visible outputs such as sketches, matrices, personas, organizatas, canvases, posters, role cards, and structured peer feedback.

Third, I want to deepen the connection between research, sustainability, and teaching. I am especially interested in Education for Sustainable Development and in creating more learning situations in which students work with open, research-informed questions around entrepreneurship, management, sustainability, and business model innovation. In upcoming workshops, I want to bring in sustainable business model thinking more strongly and help participants move from broad sustainability challenges toward concrete business model ideas.

Finally, I want to use feedback more systematically as a basis for future development. In addition to official course evaluations, I plan to collect short activity-specific feedback on selected learning formats such as worksheets, design thinking sessions, role plays, persona and organizata maps, pitch feedback role cards, and business model development workshops. This should help me better understand which activities support student learning and where my course design can become clearer, more coherent, and more effective.