TEACHING

Teaching

Chris teaches a core Organizational Behavior course called Leading and Managing to undergraduate business majors, and he teaches Negotiation to undergraduate and full-time MBA, and Executive-MBA students. More recently, he developed a doctoral seminar at UNC called Diversity at Work, which reviews research on stereotyping and prejudice in organizational settings. Chris’s teaching leverages evidence-based techniques that are designed to make his instruction as effective as possible—to turn students into active learners, empathic peers, and problem-solvers with generalizable skill sets.

Pedagogical Techniques

Active learning

Flipped classrooms

Chris's teaching utilizes flipped classroom techniques. In flipped classrooms, students engage with course concepts before class rather than encountering them for the first time during class. According to meta-analyses, students in flipped classrooms outperform students in traditional classrooms on a variety of assessments of mastery, including final grades and standardized test scores.

Inclusive classrooms

Cooperative learning

Chris's teaching also relies on cooperative learning techniques. In cooperative learning classrooms, students have to work together in order to master course material. Educational research consistently documents that students in cooperative learning (vs. independent learning) classrooms tend to exhibit higher levels of achievement as well as more positive intergroup attitudes.

Generalizable skills

Instructional scaffolding

Finally, to equip students with generalizable skill sets, Chris uses instructional scaffolding. Instructional scaffolding is a technique in which instructors first teach the lower-order building blocks of course concepts before teaching the higher-order applications of course concepts. Meta-analyses document that instructional scaffolding is effective at deepening students’ understanding of complex topics.

Teaching Effectiveness

Across courses taught as instructor of record during the past five years, Chris’s teaching evaluations have been consistently strong.

UNC Kenan-Flagler

4.55–5.00 / 5.00

Undergraduate and MBA courses

Duke Fuqua

6.30–6.94 / 7.00

MBA and Executive MBA courses

Student Perspectives

“Professor Petsko does an excellent job of delivering the material in an exciting way and regularly has interactive activities and discussions to both keep the class engaged and help us understand the material. I also like how Professor Petsko uses real-world examples to show us how course content relates to our future careers and decision-making, like with the Mount Everest activity and story. Professor Petsko shows that he really understands college students and the class atmosphere, and he knows how to engage and work with us. It would be easy for this class to be dry and boring because a lot of the information seems straightforward and “common-sense,” but Professor Petsko always finds a way to make each day fun and easily throws humor into class. He is clearly passionate about the material and about his students. I’m grateful to have him as my professor this semester and I would highly recommend him to other students registering for classes.”

Student, Leading and Managing

“Professor Petsko was incredible at creating an inclusive environment. I know that several students in this class, myself included, were concerned that this would be an overly competitive class that would be nerve-racking to participate in, but it was actually very inclusive. Petsko reminded everyone that we are all here to learn and improve and we all stated why we were taking the course and it turns out most of us just wanted to gain confidence in our negotiating skills. It was a very respectful class in which we genuinely tried to negotiate a best-case for everyone as if it were a real world setting and not just a one-off competition. He did a great job of teaching us about how different people have differing perspectives and how that might impact their behavior. He made every student feel comfortable sharing with the class how their negotiations went, even if it did not go well. A 10/10 professor!”

Student, Negotiation

Full Teaching Statement →