A scholar-teacher's record of practice,
reflection, and renewal.

I consider myself fortunate to have one of the most rewarding jobs in the world: working with creative, curious university students every day. Years of reflective practice have taught me that effective teaching rests on research-based technique and genuine collegial relationships. My central commitment is to build a student-centred learning environment in every course — one structured around three pillars, Insight, Capacity, and Connection, resting on a foundation of Care. This philosophy is informed by three theories of learning — Cognitivism, Constructivism, and Connectivism — which together explain how knowledge is not simply transferred, but actively processed, socially constructed, and globally connected. As I have grown into an academic leadership role, these commitments increasingly shape not only my own classroom but the pedagogical direction I help set for my department.

Pillar 1 — Insight: From Foundational Knowledge to Cognitive Understanding

My approach is shaped by the simplest lessons I learned early. My father, an auditor for forty years, used to share stories of the fascinating work he did and the inconsistencies he uncovered. That I still remember those stories taught me how readily young minds grasp ideas explained through analogy and real-life example. This guides my first pillar: moving students from acquiring foundational facts to achieving genuine cognitive mastery.

In accounting there is an essential vocabulary of facts, formulas, and terminology to be learned, I often describe it as the fundamental ‘language’ of business. But my aim quickly shifts beyond transmission. Following the cognitivist view of the learner as an active agent, I help students process and categorise information, reconciling new data with what they already know.

I do this by minimising technicality and reaching for simple analogies. To teach profitability ratios in my financial-statement-analysis courses, for instance, I use a niece’s birthday party: the cake is operating profit, the guests are the providers of finance, taxes are the ‘big brother’ taking a slice, and so on; mapping each element of a return-on-capital calculation onto a familiar scene. The analogy turns an abstract formula into something concrete and shared. Real-world cases do similar work: the rise of Facebook and Netflix, or the collapses of Tyco and Wirecard, show students that these concepts carry high stakes beyond the classroom and sharpen the higher-order skills – analysis, evaluation, problem-solving – that cognitivism prizes. Students consistently note in evaluations that this makes their learning feel relevant to the world outside.

Pillar 2 — Capacity: Building Knowledge Through Social Constructivism

My methods rest on the constructivist conviction that knowledge is built, not received, assimilated, related to prior understanding, and tested socially. Learning, for me, is fundamentally a social process, which I cultivate by combining teaching, mentoring, and nurturing through interactive work.

I typically assign tasks to self-selected teams of three or four. Activities range from scenario-based problem-solving to analysing the financial statements of actual Omani listed companies, where students act as financial analysts and must defend a clear recommendation — buy, hold, or sell. Testing ideas against peers in open discussion is central to the constructivist ideal; that discussion then feeds a rigorously assessed final report. In elective courses I extend this through flipped learning: teams prepare a topic and become ‘instructors of the day’ for their peers, while I step back into the role of facilitator offering coaching feedback. The results are inventive, students have run interviews with practising accountants and designed their own quizzes.

My assessment philosophy follows from this: I want students to develop the capacity to use knowledge, not merely to hold it. Problem-based tasks rarely have a single correct answer; solutions are judged against agreed criteria. This can push students beyond their comfort zone, but the perseverance it demands builds resilience and confidence.

Pillar 3 — Connection: Learning in a Digital World

My commitment to current methods and the thoughtful use of technology leads naturally to connectivism, which reframes learning for the digital age. Knowledge now resides partly outside us, i.e. in organisations, databases, and tools, and shifts constantly, so the capacity to find and connect knowledge matters as much as what one already knows.

My own work models this. My ongoing research on AI-supported governance and board decision-making, and my professional engagement with the anti-fraud community through the ACFE, keep my teaching anchored to current practice and global standards. Most recently, the UNITAR Executive Programme for Senior Academic Leaders deepened my thinking on how AI is reshaping university teaching itself. For students, the essential skill of the future accountant is the ability to see connections across fields, ideas, and data. Through technology-enhanced activities and exposure to real information flows, I help them build the network-navigating ability that professional success increasingly demands.

Foundation — Care: The Ground of Lifelong Learning

Beneath these three pillars lies the principle I value most: care. Each student inhabits their own changing world of experience, and attending to that – learning names, checking in during difficult periods – strengthens both their commitment and the wider learning environment. This mattered most during the pandemic, when flexibility and availability beyond fixed office hours helped students cope with poor connectivity and difficult circumstances; their appreciation of that support stays with me.

Teaching is a reflective, evolving practice, and I revise this philosophy continually to match my students’ needs. By integrating the rigour of cognitive processing, the collaboration of social constructivism, and the openness of connectivism – all grounded in care – I aim to help students not only learn, but thrive as effective, globally minded professionals in an interconnected world. As I now help guide my department’s teaching direction, my goal is to see these same principles take root well beyond my own classroom.

When I began teaching, I taught the way I had been taught. I stood at the front, I covered the syllabus, and I mistook a quiet room for a learning one. The students were polite. The slides were thorough. And very little, I now suspect, was actually landing.

It took me some years, and a good deal of reflection, to understand that coverage is not the same as learning. The most useful question I can ask is not “what did I teach?” but “what did they learn, and how do I know?” Donald Schön calls this the work of the reflective practitioner: thinking not only after the lesson, but inside it, adjusting in the moment when a plan meets a real room. I have come to rely on Stephen Brookfield’s habit of looking at my teaching through several lenses at once – my own memory of it, my students’ eyes, my colleagues’ perspective, and what the scholarship actually says. The four rarely agree. That disagreement is where I learn.

My instinct for analogy came long before any theory. My father audited for forty years and came home with stories – of numbers that would not behave and people who hoped no one would notice. I remembered the stories long after I had forgotten the figures. That is the whole of my pedagogy in one sentence: people remember what they can picture. I have since explained return on capital using a birthday cake more times than is strictly dignified. My niece has grown up; the cake, mercifully, endures.

Trying new things has not always been graceful. The first time I ran a flipped classroom, I flipped it so completely that no one, myself included, was entirely sure who was teaching whom. Students arrived unprepared; I had under-explained the point. But I kept at it, because the principle was sound even when my execution was not. Now, when teams take a topic and teach it as “instructors of the day,” the room changes. They argue. They overprepare. They teach each other things I had not thought to mention. Constructivism stops being a word in my philosophy statement and becomes something I can watch happen.

The pandemic taught me something I had been slow to learn: that care is not the soft part of teaching, kept separate from the rigorous part. It is the foundation the rigour stands on. When students were sharing one laptop with three siblings, or studying through a weak connection in a crowded house, flexibility was not a kindness I offered. It was the only way learning could happen at all. I have kept that lesson. My office hours remain more porous than the timetable suggests.

More recently, my classroom has grown larger than a classroom. As Head of Department, I have learned that leadership is teaching by other means – that you cannot instruct colleagues to teach differently any more than you can instruct students to be curious. You have to make the better way visible, and make it safe to try. Securing full accreditation for our programme mattered to me less as a milestone than as a promise to students: that what they learn will travel, across borders and into the profession they are about to enter.

And then there is the question I cannot yet answer. Connectivism told me, years ago, that knowledge increasingly lives outside us, in networks, in tools, and now in machines that write a passable essay before breakfast. The UNITAR programme I joined put me in a room with academic leaders from around the world, all circling the same uncertainty: what is left for us to teach when the answers are a prompt away? I do not have a tidy resolution. My working belief is that our task shifts, from delivering knowledge towards teaching judgement, scepticism, and the ethics of using powerful tools well. For someone whose field is built on integrity, that feels like familiar ground. But I am still learning it, in public, alongside my students.

If there is a thread through all of this, it is that I have stopped seeing teaching as something I deliver, and started seeing it as something I do with my students, and, lately, with my colleagues. I am a more uncertain teacher than I was fifteen years ago, and a far better one. The certainty was never the point. The students were.