On the HBS Classroom
How we might design even more powerful educational spaces and programs in the future, inspired by HBS
As a designer and engineer, I’ve built my career around developing new products, programs, and experiences in education. So while I came to Harvard Business School (HBS) this year to learn as a student, I also came to learn about teaching & learning.
I feel part-student, part-researcher, both experiencing and investigating the value of traditional MBA programs—still some of the most manual, exclusive, and expensive yet transformational learning experiences. My hope is to discover what uniquely works best at HBS that might be transferred and scaled to many more schools, programs, and spaces.
I’m incredibly thankful and fortunate to be here. The impact of this program stretches far beyond the classroom and already feels nearly impossible to articulate to friends and family, let alone summarize in a single article… but here’s my first pass. Upon finishing this past semester, here are a few reflections on the HBS classroom and provocations for designing effective learning environments in the future.
This piece is intended to reflect my personal perspective after only a few months on campus. I welcome your contradictions, additions, and questions!
Background
This semester, we took 5 classes with our Section of ~90 first-year students:
- Finance
- Technology and Operations Management (TOM)
- Financial Reporting and Control (FRC)
- Marketing
- Leadership
Academic learning at HBS revolves around the case method. Each case ranges from ~6–18 pages and requires a mix of qualitative reflection, quantitative analysis, and modeling in Excel.
Every day, the colorful flags adorning our classroom walls remind me that I’m sitting in the most diverse room I’ve ever been in. It’s a rare privilege to be immersed in such a unique blend of cultures, religions, industries, languages, and experiences. Whether we’re tackling a case on a South African mine or a D2C fashion brand, chances are, someone in the room has direct experience and a personal story to share.
Taking a People-first Approach
HBS starts by bringing the right people together—a wildly talented, diverse, and motivated cohort — to lay the foundation for learning. From there, HBS delivers specific programming, materials, and professors to provoke and unlock the group’s potential. No class, Section, or conversation could ever be the same, because it is uniquely defined by learners. When I walk into Aldrich 008 in the morning, I’m not always sure what I’m going to learn, but I do know that my eyes are going to open in some new way. This is the greatest power of HBS—its people.
In contrast, digital learning platforms like Coursera and MasterClass deliver a standardized, predetermined, and structured learning experience. Finish module 1, start module 2. Shonda Rhimes, unlike an HBS professor, doesn’t know who you are or that you’re taking her class on writing for television. Her capacity—and therefore, MasterClass’s capacity—to flip your perspective is static and one-dimensional.
A people-first approach to learning makes HBS intimate, authentic, spontaneous… and tricky to scale. A product-first approach makes MasterClass seamless, accessible, scalable… and sterile. Looking ahead, a key question that educators and designers alike are asking is,
How might we design flexible, adaptive, and personalized learning experiences that center around people and can scale?
6 Pillars
Gathering the right people at HBS, however, is only the first step towards enabling a transformational learning experience. I’ve mapped the HBS classroom experience across 6 pillars informed by my past work:
- 🙌 Engagement
- 📚 Content
- 💻 Tools & Tech
- 👨🏫 Instruction
- 🤝 Relevance
- ⚓ Leveling
🙌 Engagement
Coming from IDEO and Stanford’s d.school, I’ve typically felt most engaged in makerspaces and labs—learning fast by building, breaking things, and rolling up my sleeves. I was drawn to the HBS case method as a clear departure from my past experiences and a chance to learn in a completely new way. However, I was initially skeptical about how engaging this seemingly more “passive” learning approach might feel.
At HBS, it feels like students are sitting on the edge of their seats, leaning into a rich, dynamic discussion. There is a sense of spontaneity in the air—any comment might steer the conversation in an unexpected new direction. When a professor kicks off class with a cold call, the room holds its breath. Since students typically speak once per class (or every other class), comments carry weight and are crafted with care. When a student shares a controversial opinion, hands shoot in the air to counter. Professors embrace the banter, allowing the dialogue to bounce a few times between opposing sides before it opens back up again to the crowd. While I might not be physically building as many things with my hands, learning at HBS is clearly “hands-on.”
How might we cultivate dynamic and spontaneous banter around key concepts online? How might we create the conditions for more “hands-on” class discussions?
📚 Content
HBS cases allow students to step inside the shoes of managers in pressing positions—the company is crumbling; the sales team is committing fraud; competitors are rapidly stealing market share; the supply chain is breaking—and challenge the class to problem-solve together, “What would you do?”
Each case cleverly mixes quotations, images, graphs, and exhibits to tell a qualitative and quantitative story, sharing just enough detail to spark fruitful conversation but not enough to prescribe an obvious solution.
This past semester alone, we covered 100+ cases in healthcare, fashion, education, agriculture, and beyond. This breadth strategically allows first-year students to build fluency across sectors and learn how to speak a shared language within their Section before diving deeper into any one area. Personally, it’s been rewarding to feel so curious and expand my perspective while introducing others to the “design world,” such as through an HBS case on IDEO.
One challenge of this approach is keeping cases up-to-date, fairly representing not only how legacy companies have historically been built but also how modern tech startups are disrupting tomorrow’s world. When reading and discussing cases, it’s also easy for students to passively critique others’ decisions and say, “I would’ve done this differently.” How can we be sure?
How might we tell timeless, adaptable stories in education? How might we empower students to ‘walk the talk’ and ensure that learnings are sticky?
💻 Tools & Technologies
It’s striking how — as one of the top business schools in the world, dedicated to elevating the next generation of forward-thinking business leaders — HBS deliberately employs the simplest tools to fulfill this promise. When I first arrived in Boston, I remember carrying a heavy cardboard box with string-tied stacks of cases back to my apartment, wondering if HBS was behind the times or simply genius.
Here’s where I’ve landed: the HBS classroom is a rare, beautiful escape from our digital treadmill. There are no laptops to hide behind or screens to scroll — just real humans facing one another and some enormous chalkboards.
As a student, I feel so much more focused and present in the absence of technology. A true nerd, I revel in hand-writing notes in the case margins, physically raising my hand, and hearing the class flip through their printed packets when an exhibit is mentioned on page seven.
Our classroom also feels like an intimate, safe space. The design of the Section experience—hundreds of uninterrupted hours spent in one room with the same ~90 people—turns strangers into confidants and builds trust over time. Many students (myself included) have already openly cried in class, exchanging raw personal stories on the challenges of fighting discrimination in the workplace and achieving work-life balance. After only a few months, I am even lucky enough to call a few of my Sectionmates my closest friends.
How might we leverage tech-free moments and spaces to boost learners’ focus and engagement? How might we cultivate safe spaces online and help digital learning communities feel intimate?
👨🏫 Instruction
Historically, the role of the “teacher” has been a transactional arbiter of truth, trained and trusted to deliver high-quality information. The teacher speaks; the students listen.
Today, learning is fluid. We are constantly, inadvertently teaching and learning without calling ourselves “teachers” or “students,” such as through Twitter threads, Instagram stories, and TikTok videos. We aren’t sitting at a desk and recording what the teacher says; we are engaging in dynamic and authentic conversations, where everyone has a voice.
This flavor of instruction is what HBS does best. While all HBS professors are wildly accomplished and dedicated to their work, the best are charismatic, curious, passionate, and playful — pacing up and down the aisles, dutifully remembering students’ ideas, bravely pushing the discussion into new territory, and bringing humor into class. Spontaneous but in sync, our most powerful conversations move like a dance.
How might we train more instructors as facilitators, poised to enable dynamic classroom conversations?
🤝 Relevance
The case method teaches students how to be crisp and succinct, speak with conviction, and tell stories from the top down. Through my colleagues, I’m learning how to empathize with diverse perspectives and diagnose a problem from 90 different angles.
Things move fast, and every comment is meant to build directly upon the last, challenging students to think on their feet. At the same time, professors are carefully listening and will catch any irrelevant or redundant comments. One of my biggest learnings from this semester was to never just “talk to talk”—always meaningfully add to the conversation and make every word count. Every day in class, I know I’m stretching a critical muscle that will make me a stronger communicator in life, from making managerial decisions to resolving interpersonal conflicts.
The HBS curriculum resonates conceptually, too. The past few months have radically impacted my financial acumen; ability to evaluate the profitability of any company, product, or idea; and perspective on building a sustainable venture. Just a few weeks ago, I pulled a few supply chain frameworks from our TOM course into a job interview with a major tech company. Even waiting in line for coffee now elicits questions for me about the shop’s process flow. Looking back, I can’t believe how far we’ve come and how much I’ve learned in only a few months.
How might we leverage storytelling and problem-solving simulations to advance learners’ communications skills?
⚓ Leveling
Everyone brings a superpower to HBS—there are real estate moguls, rocketship engineers, venture capitalists, social entrepreneurs, you name it. I have so much to learn from everyone and can only hope to be teaching others as much as they’re teaching me. However, this diversity also poses important challenges in the classroom around leveling.
Take finance, for example. Despite completing pre-HBS supplementary materials, I still struggled a bit this past semester to keep up with my friends from investment banking and private equity.
Thankfully, HBS professors exercise masterful techniques in reconciling these knowledge gaps during class. They lower the barrier to entry for participation by mixing softer qualitative topics with more technical lines of questioning and playfully let students “phone a friend” if they get stuck. Professors also highlight how students’ industry expertise relates to the case—even if their discipline doesn’t—giving every learner a fair opportunity to shine in one class or another. Perhaps most importantly, HBS faculty are readily accessible and clearly, deeply care about students’ growth.
How might we equip every learner with the baseline knowledge, tools, and confidence they need before structured learning begins? How might we lean into every learner’s superpowers?
While no program is perfect, not a day goes by where I don’t feel grateful to be at HBS. Over the past semester, it’s been inspiring to explore the many tactics that HBS employs across these 6 pillars—Engagement, Content, Tools & Tech, Instruction, Relevance, and Leveling—to deliver a transformational academic experience. What’s more, the classroom is just one, tiny piece of what makes HBS so special.
If you have any comments or questions — or want to chat about your resume, career, or MBA application — my door is open. Thanks for reading!
