teaching

Teaching Philosophy

The quote by Confucius contains the character 習 (xí) which can mean practice, review, repeated exercise, and gradually becoming familiar with something. Something is learned, revisited, tried again, and slowly becomes part of how a person sees and acts. Another character in the quote is 說 (yuè), used here in the sense of 悅 (yuè), meaning joy, delight, or inner satisfaction. It attests to the satisfaction that can arise when something has been practiced, understood more deeply, and slowly made one’s own.

Aristotle states something very similar from within another philosophical world. In the phrase ποιοῦντες μανθάνομεν (poioûntes manthánomen), “by doing, we learn,” learning is connected to action. Our capability grows when we try, repeat, correct ourselves, receive feedback, and slowly become more competent.

In the framework below, I take these two persepctives as the philosophical basis of my teaching philosophy. Kant adds another layer to it with “Sapere aude” (have the courage to use your own understanding). This, to me, speaks about intellectual maturity: the courage to think for oneself, to question what is handed down, to examine what others say, and to take responsibility for one’s own judgement. In a time of online sources, generative AI, expert opinions, social media, and ready-made explanations, this matters even more. Students should learn to use books, teachers, digital tools, and AI intelligently.

Finally Seneca’s phrase “Non scholae, sed vitae discimus” (we learn for life, not for school), points toward why we learn at all. Strictly speaking, of course, the phrase is a later reversal of Seneca’s own criticism that education can become too detached from life. This quote also makes me think back to the early days of universities: In the medieval university, the lecture had a very clear function. A learned person read, explained, interpreted, and transmitted texts that students could usually not access so easily by themselves. In that situation, the lecture was a gateway to knowledge.

Today, the situation is very different though: Knowledge as a scarce ressource is a thing of the past. Students can find explanations, tutorials, online courses, Wikipedia articles, MOOCs, YouTube lectures, and now also generative AI within seconds. If information is everywhere, then the value of a university can no longer lie solely in giving students more information.

But what happens after students have found information? Can they make sense of it? Can they question it? Can they compare it with other perspectives? Can they use it in a situation where the answer is not already clear? This is where I still see the university as a deeply meaningful place. At its best, it is a place where students train their minds, grow as persons, test ideas, receive feedback, and learn to work with problems that matter.

I want my teaching to prepare students for the realities they will face after graduation. Many of them will work in environments that are international, competitive, fast-moving, and often ambiguous. Mere knowledge of concepts or reproducing models is not enough. They need transferable skills, confidence in their own thinking, judgement under uncertainty, and the ability to communicate and act in situations where different people see the problem differently.

This is the point of departure for my teaching philosophy: I understand teaching as the design of learning spaces. Such spaces need structure, but they also need openness. In terms of strcuture, students need clear concepts, useful frameworks, good examples, and tasks that make sense. In terms of openness they need room to ask questions, try things out, make mistakes, compare perspectives, receive feedback, and think again about what they have learned. Good teaching, in this sense, is about creating situations in which knowledge can become something students can actually use.

My teaching philosophy in one view: learning spaces combine structure and openness so that knowledge can become judgement, capability, and responsible action.

The figure summarizes the way I currently think about teaching. Students first need concepts and frameworks. These give orientation and help them see a problem more clearly. But concepts should not remain abstract for too long. They become more meaningful when students have to use them in relation to real-world questions, first to questions that already have answers, and later to questions that are not fully solved or neatly prepared in advance.

From there, learning becomes more active. Students apply ideas, experiment with possible solutions, and often experience moments of productive struggle. I think these moments are important. Struggling is not a sign of failure. On the contrary, very often, they are exactly the moments in which students begin to understand what a concept really means. Feedback and reflection then help them take the next step: to see what worked, what did not work, and what they would do differently the next time.

Curiosity is one of the drivers of this process. Some of the best teaching moments start with very simple questions: What do we observe here? Why might this be the case? What changes if we look at the situation from another perspective? What would happen if we tried a different solution? I try to keep this kind of inquiry alive in my courses. Sometimes this also leads to questions that I cannot answer immediately. I have come to value these moments, because they make the classroom more honest. They show that thinking is still happening.

My role as a teacher is therefore not only to stand at the front of the room and transfer knowledge (which is also refered to in the literature as “sage on the stage”). A good lecture, a good framework, or a well-structured input can save students a lot of confusion. However the classroom shoul not just depend only on me. The value the idea of the teacher as a “guide on the side” (in the sense of a mentor). I try to give students enough orientation to start, but also enough autonomy to struggle productively, make choices, and develop their own judgement.

In practice, this is why my teaching style is strongly experiential, problem-oriented, and competence-oriented. I work with case studies, group puzzles, role plays, flipped classroom elements, hands-on workshops, business model tools, simulations, project-based tasks, and challenge-based formats. These methods are useful especially in entrepreneurship, management, organization, and sustainability, because students have to deal with ambiguity, incomplete information, different stakeholder perspectives, and practical consequences.

Students often understand a concept differently once they have had to use it in a case, defend a perspective in a role play, give feedback to another group, or work through the assumptions of a business model. Something changes when learning becomes visible and concrete: It is more than only a model on a slide. It becomes a tool for thinking, and this is an important outcome of teaching: to train the mind to think better.

Demanding learning only works well in an environment where students feel safe enough to participate. I want students to feel able to ask questions, offer ideas, disagree respectfully, and speak from their own perspective without being judged too quickly. I value it when they 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.

Another part of the environment that is important to me is feedback culture. I use lecturer feedback, peer feedback, presentation feedback, discussions, and structured assessment formats to help students see where they stand and what their next step could be. Good feedback should be encouraging, but it also needs to be specific. Otherwise, students may feel supported, but they do not necessarily know how to improve.

In the end, I want my courses to connect knowledge with action. I want students to leave university with clearer concepts, but also with sharper thinking and more confidence to engage with complex problems. In a time when information is abundant, teaching means designing learning spaces in which students can work with knowledge, develop judgement, and find the confidence to contribute responsibly to the world they will work and live in.

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 at a university in China, and eventually through teaching in environmental science, ecotoxicology, management, entrepreneurship, and sustainability.

Looking back, these experiences shaped my understanding of teaching in many ways. 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 to engage responsibly with the problems of their time.

My Role as a Teacher

A concept that has stayed with me since my time as a lecturer 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, more often than not, 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 that I consult regarding how I design teaching, learning activities, and assessment. Some of them overlap. I like to see them as “practical lenses” through which I create 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.

For chosing the depth of learning activities, Bloom’s Taxonomy has become helpful. For choosing the concrete learning and teaching activities I refer to “education for sustainable development” and “the five practices of entrepreneurship education”.

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 beyond the level of remembering and understanding, and move towards the higher levels of applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating.

Examples of how I have 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. And of course many illustrative open exam questions for the exam general management and organisation.

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. So far I have applied the following concepts from this framework: case studies, group puzzles and problem-based learning.

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 spaces that 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, ILV = integrated course, SE = seminar, PR/PRJ = project-based course, LAB = laboratory, WS = workshop, MOD = module, SUP = supervision, TUT = tutorial. WT = winter term, ST = summer term.

Selected Educational Videos

In addition to classroom-based teaching, I have developed educational videos that support asynchronous learning. These videos are documented as teaching-related outputs in the TU Graz research and knowledge documentation system and are available through TU Graz TUbe.

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 focuss 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. In addition to that, I show some funny pictures of very creative past guerrilla marketing activities by several well-known companies. This is a great way to end the input session of “the marketing plan”.

Entrepreneurship: Design Thinking Session

In the Entrepreneurship course, I facilitate a Design Thinking session based on the Stanford d.school “Lunch Experience” materials. Here I want to make a disclaimer: I did not develop this format myself, and I also did not introduce it to the course. This was done by a former colleague and during my very first iteration of the course I participated in this activity together with the other students of the course. I remain committed to teaching it, because I myself experienced a lot of fun doing it and 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 with activating and reflective music playing in the background, a countdown timer running and me in my facilitator role giving instructions and encouraging students. It helps students experience how customer orientation, rapid prototyping, and feedback can support the development of entrepreneurial ideas. I think this activity is a big learning experience for how to approach product innovation that they will not forget so easily.

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 of this activity was to make the feedback that students give more structured and more diverse. Instead of the usual 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.

The figure below shows a clear support with 15 out of 17 students preferring the role-card format over the usual unstructured feedback format.

Show detailed analysis of the survey results

The following summary plot shows how strongly the different survey items point in a positive direction.

The diverging positive-negative plot makes the balance of responses visible. It shows where the evidence is particularly strong and where the activity still leaves room for improvement. It shows both the positive signal and the critical/ambivalent responses in a transparent way.

The stacked response distribution shows the full spread of answers for each item: it shows not just the positive tendency, but also how strongly or weakly students agreed across the different questions.

The boxplot with individual response points (shown as an overlayed scatterplot) gives a more exploratory view of the data. It shows the median response, the spread of answers, and individual variation across items.

Note: Q1–Q10 refer to the ten scaled survey items in the survey setup above. In brief: Q1 = task clarity, Q2 = livelier discussion, Q3 = more diverse feedback, Q4 = new perspectives, Q5 = role-specific questions, Q6 = constructive feedback, Q7 = later recall, Q8 = later influence, Q9 = perceived difference, Q10 = more specific/useful feedback.

The final plot summarizes recurring themes from the open responses. The thematic labels should be understood as interpretive codes rather than as separate survey answers. Several student comments touched on more than one theme, for example when a student described the role cards as giving more direction while also making it easier to start a discussion.

Interpretation of the thematic labels: “New perspectives” refers to comments that the role cards helped students look at pitches from another stakeholder or role perspective. “Structure / direction” refers to comments that the cards made it clearer what to focus on when asking questions or giving feedback. “Better questions / feedback” summarizes comments about more constructive, more creative, or more diverse questions and comments. “Later influence” refers to statements that the role perspectives stayed in students’ minds during later presentation sessions. "Improvement suggestions" refers to comments that the role-card method could be further improved by using a larger and more varied set of cards, introducing the cards with a clearer example, and giving students not just one but a few sample questions so that their feedback becomes more varied and less repetitive.

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. I intitally started with the existing material, but found it to be insufficient. There was only one leadership profile available, that was quite well rounded, so I added another one that shows that one can be succesfully leading a company with a different type of leadership as well. I also added a self-assessment questionnaire to make the material more relatable. In a further semester I refined the methodology to make it even more nuanced and show the students that someone that is classified as one type of leader might still behave differently in specific contexts.

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, the original material that was available when I started asked students to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of different forms of organizations. I carried this activity out, but on the written feedback I read that this was boring. In addition to that I thought it is not relevant to the task that they carry out for the case study where they need to classify the type of organization of the case (which means that there was a missalignement between learning outcome and teaching activities). Thus I set out and developed two case studies that allow students to practice drawing and interpreting organizational structures. It actually took two weeks time to research the respective companies and build the mini cases.

One of the cases 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 focuss 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 then 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.

Student teams 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. For some teams this is eye opening, because it is the first time they really think deeply about costs and profits. In any case the game makes business model development tangible, social, and iterative. The format has received positive feedback from students.

In addition to the business model development workshop, I also moderate the final pitch event of the Gründungsgarage / Startup Garage. The final pitches are the important culmination of the learning process: student teams translate what they worked on for a whole semester into an entrepreneurial narrative, present it to an external audience, respond to questions, and receive feedback from people connected to the startup ecosystem. Many successful startups have been founded through this program, which makes the final pitch event a meaningful moment where learning, entrepreneurial courage, and the wider startup community come together.

Photo credit for the Gründungsgarage final pitch images: © Christof Hütter Fotografie.

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. Digital and Green Economy focuses on the digital and green transformation, data-driven value creation, servitization, platform dynamics. Digital Strategies and Business Modelling focuses on value proposition, filling out their first business model canvas and learning about the 45 patterns of sustainable business models. I ask them to go out and search their for their own examples of the patterns they were assigned and then present them in class. We then work on a design challenge in small groups and identidy relevant patterns and build a prototype.

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.

This informal feedback suggests that the workshop allowed participants to connect the content to their own professional contexts, entrepreneurial interests, and possible next steps.

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

Assessment is where I can see whether a learning activity has really worked. I prefer formats where students produce something concrete: an organizational chart, a poster, a business model canvas, a persona, a market-sizing calculation, a pitch, a business plan section, or a prototype.

These outputs are useful because we can actually look at them together. A group can explain why they chose a certain structure, why their market estimate makes sense, or why they framed a problem in a particular way. Another group may have solved the same task differently. This often leads to good discussions, because the differences become visible.

Rubrics are helpful here. I use them because students should know what I am looking at when I assess their work. In Entrepreneurship, the business plan rubric breaks the assessment down into parts such as the executive summary, product and USP, business model, market and competitor analysis, marketing plan, personnel plan, and financial plan. This gives student teams a clearer idea of what a convincing startup concept needs. It also helps when the teaching team or external startup guests discuss the quality of a business plan.

In General Management and Organization, I introduced a presentation rubric because I did not want presentations to be assessed only by general impression. The rubric makes it easier to talk about structure, clarity, argumentation, visual support, interaction with the audience, and professional delivery. Of course, judgement is still needed. But the criteria make it easier to explain why a presentation worked well or where it could become stronger.

My interest in transparent assessment goes back to my first teaching experience in China. As a final exam I set up role play scenarios. Students came in and could choose from different scenarios, then they had some minutes to prepare and would perform the play. I had set up an MS Excel file where I evaluated their fluency, the richnness of the vocabulary they used, and how well they responded on a score from 1-5. I put all of this into a formula to come up with a final grade. After these first exams I realized that I should restructure my whole teaching so that we work on exactly those learning outcomes, so that by the end of the semester they would do even better. Later during my time at UAS Technikum Wien in laboratory courses, I used entrance checks before students entered the laboratory. The idea was simple: students should come prepared, understand the theoretical background, and be ready to work safely and productively. I also developed an IMRAD-based rubric for laboratory reports. It gave students a clearer picture of what a scientific report should contain and gave me a better basis for feedback. Later, other lecturers also used this rubric.

Actually for me this approach came out of my own personal frustration. Nobody told me what exactly was expected, and then the only feedback I received was a grade and some red circles in my laboratory report, which left me guessing. To make this better I created these rubriques. My thought was: before a task, a rubrique tells students what matters. During the task, it helps them make decisions. After the task, it helps us talk about what already works and what still needs attention.

This is also how I understand learning outcomes. They should help me design tasks, choose assessment formats, and explain to students why we are doing a particular activity. When learning outcomes, classroom activities, and assessment fit together, students usually notice it. The course feels more coherent, and the work they produce becomes easier to discuss.

In the end, I want assessment to support the kind of learning I describe throughout this portfolio: structured enough to give orientation, open enough to allow different solutions, and concrete enough to connect theory with practice.

Feedback and Evidence

Feedback is a useful development tool. It allows me to capture the “intelligence” of all students (picking their braines) and their creative ideas and therefore has the potential to bring ideas I might have never had. 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. We do this orally, we ask questions to the group, and they respond, and we capture the feedback and ideas on paper and then see where we can make changes.

For myself, I try to translate feedback into concrete improvements. When feedback points to possible changes, I document it directly in my teaching materials (by adding a post-it note on the respective print-out) so that I have it ready when preparing the next course iteration.

Critical feedback is not always easy to handle for me, especially when I put a lot of effort into a course. This is an area that I am currently developing. 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.

Evidence of Teaching Development

The most important and influential task in 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.

Evidence of teaching development is found in the visible changes that 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.

The common pattern that is visible across the above-mentioned examples: I try to move students from listening to concepts towards working with them. Of course students still need an introduction first so that they grasp methods and frameworks through examples. But I try to combine these inputs with activities that require students to apply, compare, visualize, discuss, evaluate, or create something new.

This 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.

Developing My Teaching Competence: From Experience to Professional Practice

When I first started teaching, I could not fully grasp teaching competence as a broad professional competence yet. In China, much of my teaching developed through experimentation. I had limited resources available, but I was young, confident, and willing to try things out. One of my first insights was that teaching becomes more meaningful when students are asked to actively work with knowledge.

An early example that resulted from this period was the discussion format on world affairs. Instead of asking students to give traditional presentations on freely chosen topics, as other lecturers had done in the past, I asked them to prepare a short opening statement on a current topic in world politics or current news and then moderate a discussion with their classmates. Together with my mother, who was an English teacher, I also developed my very first grading rubric for this format. Looking back, this was one of my first experiences of designing an assessment format around the actual communicative competence I wanted students to develop: leading a discussion, responding to others, moderating interaction, and reflecting afterwards.

At UAS Technikum Wien, I learned from colleagues, observed what I identified as good practice, and gradually developed my own approaches to laboratory teaching. I also made my first experiences with Moodle-based course organization, exam assessment, and developing teaching materials. Laboratory entrance tests and a structured rubric for laboratory reports helped me understand assessment not only as grading, but also as a way to clarify expectations, guide preparation, 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 understanding resonates with teaching competence models that describe professional teaching as a combination of values and attitudes, methodological and didactic abilities, contextual knowledge, and social and self-competence. The Teaching Competence Model for the Styrian Higher Education Area is helpful for me in this regard because it makes visible that professional teaching is not just a matter of methods. It also includes 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 continue developing a more professional feedback culture by identifying patterns, distinguishing individual opinions from broader issues, and translating useful criticism into concrete improvements.

I also find the pragmatic model of teaching competence by Fleischmann, Jäger, and Strasser useful for my own reflection. It distinguishes between developing teaching concepts, implementing them, organizing teaching, and reflecting on and further developing teaching. This fits with my own development well. I 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.

An important realization that I had in my current teaching is that structure creates a calm atmosphere. Structure does not mean controlling every moment of a session. 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.

This is why my focus has shifted more towards creating learning experiences. A good learning experience for me is a situation in which students do something with content. This could be moderating a discussion, classifying leadership behavior, drawing an organizational structure, developing a persona or organizata, estimating a market, prototyping an idea, giving feedback from a stakeholder perspective, or challenging a business model. These activities create moments that remain more memorable than pure explanation, because students connect concepts with action, interaction, and their own thinking.

Concerning my teaching style, I can say that it is an ongoing process. Slides still remain an important support structure for me, especially for orientation and timing. I also find that they give the class structure. However, I would like to move further toward more “open” teaching sequences, more work with blackboards, whiteboards, flipcharts 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.

The Teaching Academy has strongly influenced this development. Some 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 continue developing my teaching in three interconnected directions: more structured but flexible learning sequences, more systematic use of student feedback, and a stronger integration of Education for Sustainable Development into entrepreneurship, management, and sustainability education.

I also want to strengthen the connection between research and teaching wherever 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.

For me, developing teaching competence means moving from experience and intuition toward an evidence-informed and professionally grounded teaching practice, without losing the openness, presence, curiosity 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 focuss 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.

In addition, I am preparing a contribution to the Teaching Community@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.