Teaching and Learning at Business Schools

Transforming Business Education

Pär Mårtensson, Magnus Bild

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780566088209
• eBook ISBN: 9781317046622
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Business schools are facing ever increasing internationalization: students are far less homogenous than before, faculty members come from different countries, and teaching is carried out in second (or even third) languages. As a result business schools and their teachers wrestle with new challenges as these changes accelerate. Teaching and Learning at Business Schools brings together contributions from business school managers and educators involved in the International Teachers Programme; a faculty development programme started by Harvard Business School more than 30 years ago and now run by a consortium of the London Business School, Manchester Business School, Kellogg, Stern School of Business, INSEAD, HEC Paris, IAE Aix-en-Provence, IMD, SDA Bocconi Milan and Stockholm School of Economics. The book tackles themes both within the classroom - teaching across different contexts and cultures - and outside the classroom - leading and developing business schools, designing and running programmes, developing faculty members. The authors provide direction, ideas and techniques for transforming business education that are accessible to everyone.

PART I
Inside the Classroom

Setting the Stage

CHAPTER 1
Teacher as Facilitator of Learning

Christine Kelly

In this chapter, we will examine the role of the facilitative teacher: how to get out of the way of learning while helping the learner get the most out of the classroom experience. Often, in academia when we talk about teaching, we focus almost exclusively on the professors, their expertise and their ability to convey their ideas. We can easily overlook what it means to be a learner. This chapter readdresses that balance by focusing on the simple practices, or craft, that all effective professors employ to get out of the way of learning–facilitation rather than pontification.

As we know, learning takes place when students create their own meanings. As John Dewey stated, ‘… no thought, no idea, can possibly be conveyed as an idea from one person to another. When it is told, it is, to the one to whom it is told, another given fact, not an idea.’ Students must wrestle with the facts and conditions to make them their own ideas. Therefore, the role of the teacher is to help students make content memorable and meaningful for themselves.

The intellectual origins of this approach are from such sources as John Dewey, Kurt Lewin, and David Kolb who were astoundingly prescient about the current research on learning and the brain. To fully disclose perspectives and practices, my years as a student of theatre and communication led to bringing theatre practices and experiential exercises to work with faculty and MBA students.

Finally, the foundation for facilitating learning is connection between student and professor. How else to make the classroom a ‘safe container’ for students to participate fully in their own learning except through connection?

Beginnings

Beginning at the beginning: the professor walks into the classroom, puts down her books, turns on the overhead projector and plugs in her computer. She pulls up the day’s agenda on the first page of her slides. At the top of the slide is a welcome to the class, instructions to sit with study teams, and a quote to alert them to today’s theme when they come in. She has answered their first question: ‘What are we doing today?’ They come from another class, or from their jobs. Sometime in the last 48 hours, 90 per cent of the students prepared for today’s class. They turned to the assignment—read the case; prepared the problem set, and so on—and then once completed, set it aside. It is then wiped out of conscious memory, replaced by more immediate and ‘real’ demands of other courses, of work, friends and family. Now as they enter the class, reminded of homework, they retrieve it and hand it in without any thought to today’s lecture. The professor, on the other hand, is full of her topic. She has probably spent the last 30 minutes reviewing what took three to six hours to prepare. She turns away from the side of the classroom where she was chatting about an article she saw today on an employer of interest to two students who came in early.

(A colleague notes that he finds a ‘gift’ for his class almost every day in the news.)

How does our professor begin? The beginning is the most critical moment in the classroom. The students’ minds are fresh, relatively open, and willing to tune in. And creating a strong and early emotional connection is crucial—you want to awaken the students and their brains! For example, one renowned professor at NYU Stern, Economist Robert Kavesh, uses a poem at the beginning of each class.

As she moves into the center, she senses that the class is relaxed and present. She waits in silence for five to seven seconds while making eye contact with someone in each section of the class. The class is in session. Without a word to the class, she has established control.

She opens with a provocative statement about her topic, and then she reviews today’s agenda and delivers the punchline: ‘By the end of class today, you will know ___; you will be able to do ___; you will feel ___ about this subject.’ The objectives have been established to anchor today’s work.

She began with the end in mind. By providing a proper frame for the course, the day, and the hour, she ensures that the students will be receptive to what she has to say.

All this has been achieved through the use of space, timing, media (blackboard, PowerPoint slides, or an overhead) and the physical presence of the professor. We lead the class in response to our own and our students’ expectations about what should occur: the shape of the class, the structure of course material, and the timing of all elements within today’s context and the trajectory of the course. By remaining aware of these rhetorical elements to make conscious our choices and our students’ needs, we can do more to manage expectations. We are balancing the rhetorical decisions with the cognitive and physical needs of our audience.

To begin, the professor should answer the first five critical questions in the minds of every audience during the introduction:

1. What’s the topic?

2. What’s your position on it?

3. Why is it relevant to me?

4. Why is it urgent?

5. Who are you to tell me this?

The answers to these questions convey more than the topic, they inform the listener of your perspective and your claim to authority. This opening declares what is at stake for both the professor and the student by citing relevancy and urgency for the listener. Now the student can engage with the problem by making associations with what they already know or believe about the topic. Then they can settle down to listen—perhaps suspending skepticism—but, one hopes, remaining open-minded enough to listen.

Such an opening makes the most of the high levels of attention at the beginning of a session. Attention is at its highest level within the first three to five minutes of class. The audience ‘attention curve’ shows us that the highest levels of attention occur at the beginning and at the end of a lecture. Making the most of that few minutes of fullest attention will help the student to organize and retrieve material later, moving it from short-term to long-term memory. For this reason and some other important ones, an indirect structure should be used sparingly. The deductive structure can be very useful to approach parts of the topic, but for the class as a whole, deliver the punchline at the beginning. Stating the objective upfront will enhance the student’s ability to follow your logic and your thinking while making associations vital to their own.

Creating context

After this set-up will come the context—where today’s topic fits into the central thesis of the course, what happened in the preceding class, and how it fits within the scope of the course as a whole—including what was completed last class and where they are in this particular segment of the course. This serves as a review. Likewise, the professor will want to situate the students in the context of today’s material.

How they arrive

Most full-time business students’ schedules move them from class to class from early morning until late at night. In addition to going to class, our students run organizations, search for jobs, attend company presentations, create C functions (‘consumption’ functions sponsored by different cultural student groups), manage team projects, international trips, and new businesses, and take courses at two other universities, or across campus. It is an entrepreneurial culture, driving students to micro-manage to thrive in it. In such an environment, how can the professor compete for their attention in class—let alone help them learn? What can we do to bring students fully into the classroom prepared to work despite the demands on them?

Part-time students will run from their jobs where they have been sitting behind computers since early morning until they get up to take a subway to your classroom. I have had many students tell me that it is at this point in the day that their bosses suddenly realize that something vital must be completed. The student has only seconds to determine whether they can juggle the last minute assignment, negotiate a new time for it, or return after class. Even if the student makes it to class, and makes it on time, they are under physical and mental stress and the professor needs to be aware of it.

Capturing the mood of the student

Capturing the mood of the student is essential to capturing a mind. Sometimes, even before setting up the course objective, the professor must first respond to students’ moods. For example, one day you might notice that the students are unusually tense. You become aware of a change in rhythm, or the way they entered class. Perhaps it is body tension: sitting with heads down; talking abruptly, loudly; and ignoring your presence. Maybe you overhear the chatter when the students walk in to the classroom.

You ask a question and learn, perhaps, that they just came from an incident in the previous class: a difficult midterm, the announcement of the new business 100K winner (for a startup), once, a (seemingly) unfairly challenged student. Perhaps, with only 10 minutes between classes, they will not have had time to digest news, or commiserate about an especially difficult test. (In some institutions where departments plan with each other, the professor will have a calendar showing all scheduled exams and papers and can anticipate student stress points.)

Instead of commencing that day with your material, begin explicitly with the students and their mood. Invite them to discuss, briefly, their fears, or the facts, or their excitement. The professor simply acknowledges this mood, hears what is going on, and, perhaps, reflects on it. This moment, in effect, reverses the physiological changes that had occurred in the students’ nervous systems. Their reactions have been quieted by their own examination and evaluation. In a facilitator’s guide, it is a checking-in activity. By acknowledging the pressures they feel, or whatever they are feeling, and providing witness to their moods before putting them into the task at hand, the professor will help them put aside the previous incident. From brain research, we know, in effect, that hyperarousal takes over the bulk of a frontal cortex’s resources. Once freed up, the frontal cortex can focus on something else. And information obtained in the process of discovering your students’ moods will add to your understanding of their needs, your knowledge of who they are, as well as what else is occurring in your institution. It may even lead you to make new connections in your course to the students’ interests.

Motivation

Having attended to the mood, the professor will want to explore student motivation. It is not enough to tell students they need to know your subject matter, or that you have some unique slant on what they already know. Telling them the subject is useful is not even enough motivation for the student who already realizes its relevance. The student will need to understand two things: why the material is relevant and what knowledge they are missing. When dealing with adult students who are professionals, this is especially important.

Some courses may lend themselves more towards motivating learning than others. For example, a student’s interest in Futures and Options may be obvious. The student may know very little about the subject, and may be totally unfamiliar with the language. This makes it easier to get them to acknowledge that they are missing information. However, they can guess scope and context in order to relate the subject matter to what they intuit or have experienced in their jobs as relevant. In some courses, Human and Organizational Behavior, for example, students tend to take their knowledge for granted. The language is familiar; the solutions posed may sound like common sense—all adding to their sense of competence. Still other courses may seem unique but not fulfilling of a pressing need. One MBA required course, Conceptual Foundations of Business, essentially a course in business ethics, consistently received low course/faculty evaluations. But when alums were asked, three years out, which core course was of most value to them, this one received the highest ratings. The students had by that time experienced the ‘startle factor’—its relevance to their security and success. Still, involving the student during the semester proved difficult.

Motivating students to learn

To create an urgent need to learn is a little like trying to arouse someone from sleep. You want to increase alertness. Our brains attend to multiple stimuli, from within and without. ‘Novelty and reward are the two primary forces that direct the selection of where to focus our attention. The novelty system takes note of new stimuli. The reward system produces sensations of pleasure, assigning an emotional value to a stimulus, which also marks it for memory’ (A User’s Guide to the Brain, John J. Ratey). An ‘emotional’ value—key to long-term memory as well as motivating attention—means actively involving the students. The professor will help students ‘experience’ their needs, or help pinpoint more precisely where they are ignorant: through a case, a discussion, a problem set, an example, or a role play. Recognizing in a graduate level course that some in the class are novices and others are experienced, the professor will acknowledge this difference implicitly or explicitly. The professor’s meta-communication, communication about the communication, to the knowledgeable will make clear the relevance of this material to them. Or, she will explain that for them this review and their involvement can be useful to those who are inexperienced. If possible, she will show how their knowledge might need refreshing or updating, or at least, invite them to bring their related practical experiences into discussion.

Motivating students can be simple and practical. One professor I know always brings extra copies of the assignment given out, and when asked about it by someone who missed the previous class, states, ‘Would I forget about you?’ In other words, her administration and housekeeping role is personal with her students. It is simple awareness, for example, that after 50 minutes of class, students need a stretch break. We can do many things that make it easier to help them manage the learning process.

The locus of learning

Learning is physical and mental. The student needs to be active. Learning is connected to motion. The parts of the brain that coordinate physical movement also coordinate the movement of thought. When I first read this, I thought about where action occurs in a classroom. Often, the action occurs on the dais, or that two foot ‘stage’ in front of the blackboard. The professor and the professor’s media are the center of attention, shaping the flow and delivering the talk. One consultant calls this the ‘me and my flip-chart syndrome’. Some people refer to the teacher as actor. In fact, in traditional theatre, action occurs on stage within and behind the proscenium arch. The actors may look out beyond the ‘fourth wall’ into the audience, but the ‘action’ takes place on stage. The audience observing the scene may imaginatively project themselves into the scene and identify with the characters, but the ‘locus’ of the action is on stage. The playwright, the director and the actors control the scene.

If a lecture is about you and your PowerPoint slides, you control the scene. We are often tempted to treat the structure of the class as a drama: we lead the student audience along with us in a kind of treasure hunt, keeping the prize to ourselves until the end. It lends suspense and builds up tension, involving the students in a guessing game, playing them along. My sense is that often this style is unconscious rather than on purpose. For example, I have observed case classes where the professors’ questions lead through their logic. The questions are designed to elicit certain answers to lead toward the professor’s big surprise at the end, often a kind of ‘gotcha’, designed to show the professor’s superior knowledge. The students are at best involved in a question and answer format and, at worst, involved in guessing what is in the professor’s mind. The result of that experience is that the students are getting a fill-in-the-blanks lecture. It tests their preparation and offers a type of modeling of thinking and a rehea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Preface Pär Mårtensson, Magnus Bild and Kristina Nilsson
• PART I INSIDE THE CLASSROOM
• PART II OUTSIDE THE CLASSROOM
• About the Contributors
• Index