I owe most of my success as a teacher to a single factor: luck. I was lucky to find out early what I love to do for a living and who I want to be when I grow up: a wonderful teacher, hearing from my students, "Best professor I have ever had" (BUS 2000). One reason I love teaching is that I love unlearning; Alvin Toffler predicted that the illiterate of the twenty-first century would be those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn, and a classroom is the best place I know to practice unlearning together, to train ourselves to raise questions that have no answer yet and build the habit of questioning our way closer to the correct answer. In the age of generative AI, when answers are cheap and good questions are not, I find that habit more valuable than ever.

I was lucky to spend more than two decades as a student first, a dependent and, frankly, hypercritical one. Without knowing it, I was gathering data on teaching the whole time: what worked on me, what did not, and why. My own performance was tied to connection. In ninth grade I failed algebra because I could not stand the teacher; the next year, with a teacher I loved, I earned an A+ in the same subject. That pattern caused me plenty of trouble as a student. As a teacher, it became my compass: I know from the inside that for many students the relationship is the curriculum, so I set out to be the teacher who makes a genuine connection with every single one. "This is the best teacher. She is so kind and understands us and what we are going through inside and outside of school. She is not only the best; she is also the kindest and has treated me so well. Thank you for being the best teacher and a friend to me" (BUS 2000).

But none of it happened overnight. In the first class I taught at Baruch, in my first year of the Ph.D., I was hit over the head by a sweet 2.7 on one of the instructor items of my evaluations. I thought teaching was simply in my blood, as my mother is a distinguished retired schoolteacher; the 2.7 taught me otherwise. I was not born a good teacher; I would have to build one. That became my mission.

I was lucky to have the best training opportunity during my Ph.D. Baruch put me in front of one of the most diverse student bodies in the country: an 80-student classroom filled with sharp, hardworking students coming from different continents, religions, and cultural backgrounds, hustling their way in NYC. Over four years, it gave me 50 sections of two core undergraduate courses, Introduction to Information Systems (CIS 2200) and Business Fundamentals (BUS 2000), taught to roughly 1,400 students. That experience made diversity literally my comfort zone. I treated every section as an experiment to test and improve until I could get the highest-rated items to reach 4.9 out of 5 in the most recent evaluations, and received the 2026 Zicklin School of Business Dean's Teaching Award. That climb, more than any single score, is the achievement I am proudest of, because somewhere along it my way of teaching found me. My students noticed and named it before I did: "Hi Setareh, this was a fun course. Thanks for teaching it the way you did!" (BUS 2000); and another: "A great professor ... has a fun way of teaching. I hope to meet more professors like her" (BUS 2000). I like to call it the "Setareh way."

I was lucky to read philosophy as a hobby, as it shaped my worldview and affected my teaching, such as lessons from the Tao Te Ching: "If you want to govern the people, you must place yourself below them. If you want to lead the people, you must learn to follow them." I want to lead my students to their best versions, so I must follow them: meet them, know them, and build a real human connection with each one. The practice comes from Jiddu Krishnamurti's idea of the observer and the observee: as long as there is distance between two things, there is no true relationship. If my ego as a professor separates me from my students, I never actually meet them and I cannot teach them much of anything. So, I deliberately dismantle the usual power dynamics. Students call me by my first name, no titles; they are usually shocked at first, and then the whole room changes. I open every semester, whether the class has 20 or 80 students, by getting to know each other: our lives, hobbies, goals, and dreams. It sets the tone for this class to be different. My model is closer to a coach than a lecturer, in the spirit of Ted Lasso: I want every single student to leave my class a better version of themselves, and that only happens if I stay present, meet them where they are, and genuinely care. When students feel seen, heard, and worthy, and are having fun, the rest follows on its own. They show up, engage, learn more, and perform better. My students say it back in their own words: "I felt very seen by her warm words and demeanor," one wrote; another said the class "maintained high standards while also being approachable and empathetic, an ideal balance that made students feel both challenged and supported." But that's a part of the "Setareh way."

I was lucky to have an artistic soul that sees teaching a class as an art, a live performance, but an interactive one: students are not my audience; they are in the theater with me. Minimum lecture but hard practice, tough discussions, live problem-solving, and hands-on work and games. It's art, so it's fun. Still, it also needs great discipline and effort to be a great performance expected from all of us, me and my students: "Setareh is the best. She's tough and caring ... a perfect balance of strictness, sternness, and kindness. My favorite teacher in the CIS department" (CIS 2200). We are all owners of this performance, so we make many decisions together, such as choosing which dataset and company to work on among possible candidates for the Excel group project in CIS 2200. Once students feel the ownership, they care vastly more. And somewhere along the way it's recognizable by all: "She's amazing, she's truly one of the best at Baruch. I don't think anyone could've taught this class better" (CIS 2200). In peer observations of my CIS 2200 lectures (Spring and Fall 2025), faculty observers rated my teaching "Excellent," noting "excellent interaction with students" and a "supportive classroom atmosphere that promoted engagement and student understanding." Student reviews echo it: one describes a professor who "goes above and beyond to keep her students engaged." Engagement is not something I force on students; it is something we build together.

I was lucky to have prior industry consulting experience, which enabled me to bring hands-on practice to course design and to provide detailed feedback to students. Teaching CIS 2200 continuously since 2022 has also meant redesigning an introduction to information systems while generative AI rewrote the rules underneath it. I remember being a student who found lecture-only classes useless because better, faster explanations were already free on YouTube; today's students have AI, and a classroom now has to offer what a chatbot cannot. Traditional lecturing, however knowledgeable the professor, is no longer enough. So, I rebuilt the course around Harvard-style teaching cases, group projects on real business datasets, classroom games, and assignments that ask students to use AI openly but are designed so the thinking and the interpretation still have to be theirs. The centerpiece is an original AI module I designed and implemented in my classes: a team-based Excel audit of an AI hiring algorithm for bias and disparate impact, which teaches advanced Excel, AI literacy, and ethics in a single project (ISCAP teaching case accepted for presentation in November 2026). Students feel the difference: "90% of my BUS 2000 knowledge came from this class since the lecture feels like an outdated form of learning and this seems more adjusted to newer, more engaging learning styles," one wrote; another noted that I "incorporated current industry trends, case studies, and hands-on projects that mirrored real-world scenarios." My research reinforces this work from the other side. I study online education and its labor-market consequences, so questions about what makes education actually pay off for students are not abstract to me; they are my dissertation.

Assessment in my classes is designed for the same era, and it answers one question: how do I know they are really learning? Continuously, not at two high-stakes moments: active participation, frequent low-stakes quizzes, paper exams, and semester-long group projects. The projects move through staged milestones, including mock presentations before the final one, with detailed feedback at every step; students describe that feedback as telling them "what we missed, what we did well on, what can be fixed." And because AI can write answers but cannot sit in the room, the assessments that certify individual understanding take place in class, where I can watch the thinking unfold. I grade team deliverables strictly, so every member does their part, and I pair that strictness with generous feedback. My classes are also deliberately multidimensional. For every topic, I share related films, documentaries, TED talks, and HBR pieces, keep running lists, and invite students to add their own finds. One semester we opened with The Playlist, the miniseries about Spotify's founding, and spent the first session analyzing it as a business case; it was the best course opening I have tried, and students immediately started proposing what we should watch and discuss next. "She had an incredible way of making every class exciting and full of energy. Class was something to look forward to every day."

Another bittersweet piece of luck: as a woman from Iran, I know from the inside what it means to be accepted and included, or not. It's my way of turning every class into a small community where everyone feels like they belong: I survey students about the cultural and religious dates that matter to them and adjust the course schedule and deadlines around them, and I have worked with students with a range of disabilities and built individual accommodations so they could do their best work. One student described it as a class where "questions were welcomed, discussions were encouraged, and every student felt valued."

All in all, the main element of the Setareh way is a classroom where we are all curious and have no room for judgment. The most important habit research has given me is unlearning what I think I know; only then is there any hope of getting closer to the truth, or at least to the best answer yet. From Krishnamurti I keep the idea that the great questions are the ones with no answers, and I plant exactly those questions in my classes, because being brave and curious enough to sit with them is where real learning starts. My favorite evidence that all of this works arrives long after the semester ends. Students stay in touch for years; they come back for mentoring conversations about graduate school and careers, and they write to tell me about landing the internships they were aiming for. One wrote that my office hours "were more than just a formality, they were a space for meaningful dialogue, mentorship, and academic growth"; another simply said, "Setareh was my favorite professor I have had so far." I opened by crediting luck, and I meant it: the calling was luck. The teaching was not. My mother gave me the love of the classroom; everything else was built the way everything I trust is built: observed, tested, revised, one section at a time.