Teaching with emerging experience: to develop leadership and innovation skills

Abstract

This paper is based on a hands-on session proposed at ALE 2009 Conference (Active Learning for Engineering Education). It presents a teaching practice used at Ecole Centrale Paris (ECP) to foster engineering students’ leadership and innovation skills and to help them going through major paradigm shifts. Considering a class as a human complex system, teachers work in a posture of facilitators or coaches who orchestrate a learning process. Instead of transmitting knowledge as traditional professors, they focus on the relationships in the classroom and the experience emerging from them.