Teaching
High Challenge, High Support
My teaching approach draws on more than a decade of experience, from leading tutor trainings at Princeton's McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning and designing curricula in Chiang Mai to teaching executives at Harvard. Through these diverse contexts, I have learned that breakthrough learning happens when we surface and test students' assumptions while preserving psychological safety.
We work with messy, real-world dilemmas, discussing cases without clean answers where choices must account for time pressures, various stakeholders, and firm values. Through case discussions, role-play activities, and structured debates, I help leaders think in frameworks rather than formulas, to empower them to lead when there is no playbook.
Whether teaching undergraduates, MBAs, or senior executives, my goal is the same: equip students to make thoughtful, evidence-based, context-aware decisions with both rigor and empathy.
"Professor Smith was great. She was able to provide a space that allowed for a lot of learning and dialogue to occur. Her thoughtful responses to questions and ability to hear tangential thoughts from students and roll with it was very well done. I thought her culmination of course readings were excellent. I will definitely recommend peers to take this course with her in the future."
"Professor Smith is an engaging lecturer. She created a safe space for open dialogue—even around difficult topics."
"So knowledgeable and welcoming of all viewpoints. Willing to follow the conversation wherever it went but managed to bring us back on topic. I appreciated that she was choosing readings as we went along to respond to current events and students' suggestions."
"Samantha was always very thorough in her explanations and took the time to answer every question asked, providing insightful answers that benefited the class. She also preaches what she teaches and truly believes in the content and principles she teaches in her class."
"She was so warm and receptive and encouraged you to support your ideas. She was never dismissive and clearly has a love of learning and data."
"These discussions helped me be more at ease with all the chaos in my life as a federal consultant, and helped me stay optimistic at times that I maybe wouldn't always be."
Designed for Impact
Harnessing Employee Talent: The Diversity Advantage (HET)
Most organizations talk about diversity. Few make it work. I designed HET to reveal why smart people make biased decisions and why well-intentioned diversity initiatives fail. This course teaches students to build systems where inclusive behavior becomes a default choice, not an act of individual goodwill.
HET progresses through three modules: Hiring Diverse Talent, Retaining Diverse Talent, and Harnessing Diverse Talent. Drawing on behavioral economics, psychology, and organizational theory, HR professionals learn to redesign the infrastructure that shapes talent decisions, from the language in job postings to the criteria in promotion reviews.
For the final paper, students identify where inclusion breaks down in their organizations, design evidence-backed solutions, and create a plan to measure impact, connecting diversity directly back to business outcomes.
15-week curriculum · Asynchronous and online · 73% evaluation response rate
Building Trusted Organizations (BTO)
As Teaching Fellow for Professor Sucher's MBA elective on trust and organizational resilience, I gained training in the case method through weekly lecture preparation and teaching debriefs. Beyond supporting students with individualized feedback on trust frameworks, Professor Sucher and I co-authored an HBS case examining Boeing's organizational failures through the lens of trust erosion.
View HBS caseThe case method immerses students in real organizational dilemmas where there are no clean answers. My role involved helping students connect theoretical frameworks to their own professional experiences with trust and accountability.
The course covered a diverse array of cases—from Boeing's safety failures to Bud Light's brand crisis to D&D's community trust—using role-playing exercises, structured debates, and guest speakers to bring frameworks to life.
Half-semester MBA elective · 16 students · 44% cross-registered from other Harvard schools · 80% evaluation response rate
Course quality: 6.6/7 · Subject importance: 6.6/7 · 94% rated "Excellent"
"I received more than I wanted as I now feel well equipped to implement some changes in our organization, which not many classes leave you with this feeling."
"All of the supplemental readings have been fascinating to me and applicable to my current job."
"This is a fantastic class—engaging, timely, comprehensive, thought-provoking. Prof Smith is smart, well-researched, very engaged in her subject matter, and great at welcoming open debate. This is one of the true highlights of my HES coursework."
"This course has been so enlightening and a beacon of sorts for how to continue forward, driving these changes regardless of the environment that surrounds them."
"This course provides a deep dive into the history and current state of how organizations harness employee talents, providing frameworks and research validated examples to create greater engagement and productivity. What you'll learn in this course is not taught elsewhere. It's a unique and powerful deep dive into a very important topic."
"Week after week I find myself thinking back on the lecture and finding real time examples of what has been discussed in my work life. Of all the classes I've taken in my HES journey to date, this one has been the most timely and most related to current topics in the cultural zeitgeist."
"This class has inspired me to proactively integrate inclusive practices into our firm's strategies. For example, I plan to restructure interviews to reduce bias in hiring and actively seek input from diverse groups within decision-making processes."
"I loved learning about choice architecture... Everyone on my team now knows about choice architecture and ways that they can implement it into consulting conversations because I have told them about it approximately 500 times!!!"
"I find myself thinking back to this class daily, relating the discussions and readings directly to my day-to-day. I have been joking that my team members are basically taking this class with me because I seem to speak about it at many of my team meetings."
"Measurements and data provide objective truth when we're surrounded by subjectivity, including our own. There is a sense of safety by including objectivity into business practices, reinforcing what can be celebrated and what needs addressing."
You Can't Manage What You Don't Measure
A key takeaway from students