Haas School of Business faculty members Sara Beckman and Dave Rochlin have been selected as UC Berkeley Lecturer Teaching Fellows for the 2014–2015 academic year.
The Lecturer Teaching Fellows Program supports participants in generating dynamic tools and resources for enriching and/or innovating teaching practices on campus. Ten to 12 Fellows are selected each year to participate in workshops and work in teams on areas of interest to the university.
Beckman is a pioneer in design thinking and created the Haas School’s Problem Finding, Problem Solving (PFPS) course, a core course in the Berkeley MBA innovative leader development curriculum that gives students a deeper understanding of how to frame and solve problems by leveraging tools and methods from critical, design, and systems thinking.
Rochlin has served as both a lecturer and the executive director of the business school’s Haas@Work applied innovation program since 2010. The program develops and delivers project-based courses through partnerships that allow prominent international corporations to work with the school’s students and faculty to identify and drive new innovation initiatives. Recent partners in these efforts include SAP, PayPal, Citi, HP, Nike, Nissan, and Verizon.
Beckman and Rochlin have been using student self-reflection as a key learning and evaluation tool in their NPD, PFPS, and Haas@Work courses. In addition to asking students to thoughtfully evaluate their learning during the semester, at the end of the semester they use self-reflection papers to encourage students to synthesize course goals and learning and to think more deeply about how the materials and frameworks they have been working with can be applied in their lives and future work.