The Master Teacher Program

Teaching Notes

University Teaching in the 21st Century (From BizEd Magazine)

By Sharon Shinn [Author's Note: This article is the product of an interview conducted by the author using a set of questions related to teaching in today's business school. Yezdi K. Bhada is professor of accounting emeritus at the J. Mack Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University in Atlanta. He is co-director of the Master Teacher Program and a consultant to the Office of the Provost at GSU. He has conducted numerous programs on teaching improvement in the U.S. and around the world.]

Several years ago, I became fascinated by the question of what makes a good teacher. My curiosity was piqued when I was invited as a visiting professor to teach at a prestigious business school. It was a thrilling experience to be surrounded by faculty members from highly rated schools with impressive credentials and enviable publication records. However, it became apparent that while all of them were extremely knowledgeable people with remarkable research accomplishments, not all of them were recognized as top-notch instructors. The obvious question that came to mind was: what are the attributes that differentiate effective teachers from the not-so-effective teachers?

When I returned to Georgia State University, I started to put my energies into answering this question. My initial efforts focused on the faculty member as a 'teacher"; however, I experienced a change in focus that was sparked by a cartoon I saw in a newspaper. Here was one child telling an older child that he taught his dog to whistle. The bigger boy listens to the dog but says, "I don't hear him whistling." The smaller child replies, "I said I taught him. I didn't say he learned it." Surprising how a three-frame cartoon strip can impact your thinking. This led me to re-direct my investigation and learn more about how faculty behavior impacts student learning.

To answer the questions of how teachers teach and how students learn, I followed three different routes: faculty members (service providers), students (service receivers), and colleges of education (research conductors). In cooperation with my colleague Professor Harvey Brightman, we compiled enough data to identify what we now believe to be attributes of effective business school teachers.

Attributes of Effective Teachers

In terms of research related to faculty, perhaps the best information comes from a study conducted by Joseph Lowman, Professor of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Based on observation of faculty members who had been identified as successful, he came up with a two-dimensional model of the "master teacher" and published the work in Mastering the Techniques of Teaching. According to his model, the master teacher is successful both in the "intellectual dimension" and the "interpersonal dimension." In the intellectual dimension, teachers are well-organized, good at establishing relevance, dynamic in the classroom, and appear to love teaching their material. On the interpersonal side, they treat students as individuals, encourage questions and discussion, and behave in a positive manner toward students.

Lowman model was further validated through a later study that looked at how faculty and administrators articulate teaching effectiveness. For this, he content-analyzed the material submitted on UNC teachers nominated for teaching awards. Among the words that came up over and over again in the letters of nomination were enthusiastic, knowledgeable, clear, organized, concerned, caring, and helpful.

Turning our attention to the question of how students perceive teaching effectiveness, we found that literally thousands of studies had been done in this area. The most influential piece on students' perceptions was a meta-analytical study done by John Centra in Determining Faculty Effectiveness. His factor analysis provides clustering of attributes that influence overall teaching effectiveness as perceived by students. The primary factors identified by Centra were organization/clarity, student-teacher rapport, communication ability, workload challenge, grading, and motivation.

Eventually we narrowed our focus to consider teaching effectiveness from the perspective of business schools-more specifically, the business school at Georgia State University. Through research we conducted using a home-grown instrument in the business school, we were able to confirm Centra's top factors that influence student perception of teacher effectiveness. Listed in order of importance (with the first two factors representing significant influence), these factors are:

Ninety percent of the time, faculty members who don't fare well on student evaluations will give one of two explanations. They will either say, "I am not an extravert, and therefore students rate me poorly," or "I'm a tough grader, so they mark me down." What these studies show is that those aren't necessarily the only factors that students care about. What they're interested in is someone who is organized, clear, enthusiastic and attuned to their needs. The other elements do play a role, but not as strongly as some people want to believe.

Student Achievement

Turning our attention to the relationship between teaching attributes and student learning, we were heavily influenced by the work of Kenneth A. Feldman. He correlated faculty attributes with student accomplishment as measured by common examinations - for example, department developed exams or functionally based exams administered by outside institutions. Here again, the two most important criteria influencing student achievement came out to be: teacher preparation and organization and teacher clarity and understandability.

The third factor is usually a surprise to people: Instructor meets course objectives. This emphasizes the fact that student accomplishment is enhanced when they know what to expect. They want to do well, be prepared, and be ready for exams. Another highly rated item was: Teacher communicates relevance and impact of the instruction. The revelation that these two items are so important to learning should cause us to reflect. Consider the impact they can have on one's teaching. If I am teaching a course on accounting and I know that "relevance" and "meeting course objectives" are two of the primary concerns of students, I will spend more time on examples that show students the practical ramifications of accounting in the work situation-which (today, thanks to Enron and WorldCom), should not be too difficult to do. I can communicate learning objectives and allocate more classroom time to getting students to relate to the subject in place of insignificant technical details.

A Definitive List

After reviewing all these studies, we are confident that the following characteristics are needed for effective teaching.

We have to be knowledgeable and current in the field of study. All other attributes are merely window-dressing if the teacher does not have a synthetical/evaluative grasp of the subject matter. However, being a first-class scholar in the field does not assure effective teaching without the other listed attributes.

We must be organized and prepared. That doesn't mean we cannot be flexible; it means we know our course objectives and will get them accomplished.

We must be clear and understandable. We must take the time to develop key concepts, know what is difficult and requires more time, and know when to let students work by themselves.

We must be enthusiastic. I heard Lowman once acknowledge that it is controversial to say that all good teachers are good performers -but they all are! This, however, does not mean that all good performers are good teachers.

We must be able to establish relevance and connections. As business teachers, we often fail to make those connections. If I teach accounting, I must help students see how it interacts with finance, marketing, and all our other disciplines.

We must be respectful and fair. Fairness is a perception issue, but successful teachers are perceived to be consistent in how they treat students.

We should have high standards that motivate student accomplishment. The really good teachers I know are high-expectation teachers. They do not sacrifice their standards, but they also give of themselves, and the students recognize that.

Self-Improvement and Evaluation

Once teachers understand the attributes that are viewed as important, and once they understand where their weaknesses lie, I believe they can improve. But they've got to have the heart for it. At Georgia State-and many other universities-teachers can attend workshops and faculty development seminars that will help them become better teachers.

Teachers also can improve their techniques by videotaping themselves, and watching that tape with a mentor. Most people can pick up on their own idiosyncrasies as they watch themselves on video. However, some traits are so ingrained that they feel normal and natural and it takes an outsider to point out where the individual has gone wrong. For instance, most people don't realize if they talk too fast, even if they hear themselves on tape. But teachers who talk too fast can lose their students, particularly those whose mother-tongue is not English.

Another tool teachers can use to help them improve their performance is the teaching portfolio. Peter Seldin has compiled a list of items that can provide inputs for a comprehensive teaching portfolio. One important element is the teacher's philosophy. This reveals if a certain professor is content-oriented or process-oriented, generates critical thinking or relies on rote memorization, hands out knowledge on a silver platter or encourages discovery learning, incorporates innovations or relies on yellowed notes? Evidence of the professor's teaching style can be found in syllabi, course examinations, peer evaluations, and classroom videotapes. While I believe teachers should develop their portfolios primarily to help them improve their own performance, I do think the information gathered in the portfolios can help administrators evaluate a teacher's success in the classroom. In fact, I am confident that good teaching portfolios eventually will become one of the key tools to use for evaluating teaching effectiveness.

Paradigm Shifts

As with most philosophies, the idea of what constitutes effective teaching has undergone some changes in recent years. These shifts have occurred over five stages: from tradition-dictated, to teacher-centered, to student-focused, to improvement-oriented, to the current stage where the scholarship of teaching is encouraged.

When I first started teaching, the implicit criterion was "survival of the fittest." A good teacher was tough. Whoever had the highest attrition rates was the best teacher. At that time, if you had a Ph.D., you were still breathing, and you could solve Problem #17-9 on the board, you were a teacher. This tradition-dictated stage of teaching gradually gave way to an era where administrators focused more on student and teacher satisfaction. Success was measured by student evaluations, faculty self-assessment, and judgments made by the department chair. This era slowly shifted to the student-focused stage, when schools began to engage in active learning and incorporate certain accreditation standards for student learning. Society at large was beginning to look at education in general, and the universities were part of this focus.
Schools began to work on process improvement in the '90s with the introduction of teaching portfolios and awards for teaching innovations. Organizations like the American Association of Higher Education (AAHE) and the Carnegie Foundation began to have a stronger influence on the practice of teaching. Today, the focus is clearly on student learning outcomes and the scholarship of teaching. We hear more talk about learning assurance, outcome-based assessments and active learning techniques. The paradigm shift has been from teaching to learning. This will be the predominant model in the early part of the 21st century. We are changing from an emphasis on lecturing in the classroom to designing learning methods that rely on discussion, teamwork, and off-site communications. The learning environment is far more cooperative and collaborative than it used to be.

One of the most powerful resources for learning is one that has been sorely underutilized: student-with-student learning. This is a key component of executive education and EMBA classes, but it is also important for undergraduate students. Involving students in the teaching process is a real plus. Let's face it, I cannot get myself to think like a sophomore. Even though I may want to, I cannot always come up with terminology that young students can relate to. But if one student in class understands what I am attempting to convey and comes up with an alternative way of phrasing it, she can explain it to others in the class in language they can understand. And, once students see that their peers can do something, they are more motivated to try to do it themselves.

Inevitably, there will be some resistance to interactive teaching-from both students and teachers. It's easier for a professor to prepare a lecture, go into the class, and pour the knowledge into the students' brains. Also, it's easier for the student to copy it down and regurgitate it back on a test. But what we want is not necessarily what we need.

Changes Ahead

Business schools may be behind the curve in implementing new theories of teaching and learning. But we're at a point in time where a lot of people are questioning the value of a business degree. We must keep up with effective teaching practices to maintain relevant and regenerative student learning.

Business schools will inevitably undergo some changes because university provosts often come from backgrounds other than business. These provosts are more in tune with the educational philosophies gaining popularity around the nation.

In fact, I believe the movements that will have the most profound impact on business schools will originate in associations such as AAHE, the Carnegie Foundation, other education-oriented organizations, and accrediting bodies. All of these have strong followings by senior administrators, and they have tremendous potential for influencing education trends. I do believe business schools are beginning to value teaching as a skill-but we have a long way to go before we can ensure that every teacher is an effective teacher.

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