TEACHING
I teach organizational behavior and negotiation to undergraduate, MBA, and doctoral students. My goal is to create classrooms in which students actively engage with ideas, learn with and from one another, and develop frameworks they can use well beyond a single course.
Active learning
Flipped classrooms
I ask students to engage with important course concepts before class so that class time can be devoted to application, discussion, and problem solving. For example, students in my Leadership course complete a Big Five personality inventory before class; we then use class time to interpret their profiles and consider how personality shapes workplace behavior.
Inclusive classrooms
Cooperative learning
Mastering material in my courses often requires working with (rather than against) other people. Students in my Negotiation class, for example, complete simulations in which they each role-play a particular character. In simulations such as these, students who perform the best—and who in turn learn the most from the assignments—are those who share information each other.
Generalizable skills
Instructional scaffolding
To equip students with generalizable skill sets, I use instructional scaffolding. As an example, rather than teaching about statistical tests (t-tests, ANOVAs, correlations) as independent tools, I like to teach about these tests as variations on the same tool: the general linear model. Generally, scaffolding (vs. topic-by-topic teaching) has been shown to have large effects on student learning.
Leading and Managing
UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School
Undergraduate
Negotiation
UNC Kenan-Flagler: Undergraduate & Full-Time MBA
Duke Fuqua: Full-Time MBA & Executive MBA
Diversity at Work
UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School
Ph.D.
Across courses taught as instructor of record during the past five years, my teaching evaluations have been consistently strong.
UNC Kenan-Flagler
Undergraduate and MBA courses
Duke Fuqua
MBA and Executive MBA courses
“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