Some Thoughts about Teaching

By

Stuart Bretschneider

As one of my colleagues has warned me, it may be great to win an award but usually they will want something in return. Consequently, as this year’s recipient of the Leslie Whittington Excellence in Teaching Award, presented by NASPAA, I was asked to write a down something about how I approach teaching. Before I start I must make it clear that these assumption, ideas and activities have worked well for me but I make no claim as to their external validity or applicability to anyone else. I strongly suspect that individual characteristics and traits have a lot to do with success at teaching and interact with one’s personal philosophy and strategies to effect educational outcomes.

I begin from two key assumptions about the educational process. The first is that education is a co-produced good. Essentially this concept from economics suggests that the final outcome requires the active participation of the student in the process. Unlike a typical good where one person (or organization) produces it and another consumes it, co-production requires the consumer to be a part of the production process. This assumption is very important since it implies that education cannot be viewed as a typical consumption product and that we cannot think about students as consumers since they are also producers. This perspective also argues against developing higher education policy around the notion that customer satisfaction should be the basis for evaluation of educational processes. In fact it is important that we recognize that from a logical perspective, the activities of any teacher are neither necessary nor sufficient for the student to learn!

The second assumption that I make is that each student is unique and has their own personal learning style. We can identify some broad classes of learning styles related to how humans process information cognitively and make use of different senses in that process. For example some student are more visually oriented and others are more auditory. An associated point is that along with unique learning styles, students will exhibit unique learning rates that are partly related to their learning styles but also related to their past experiences with the subject matter being studied. Another but associated assumption is that individuals interact with peers and that the learning rate for a class is not the simple average of the individuals in the class. This is often called a cohort effect. Anyone who has taught for even a short time understands that a cohort effect can have either very positive of very negative effects on individuals.

These assumptions suggest the following implications. The teacher is neither necessary nor sufficient but student activity is necessary though not sufficient for education to occur! Second since there are numerous learning styles and rates in any given class setting the teacher must be prepared to present the same material using multiple approaches in order to effectively reach all students. Finally the existence of cohort effects in all classes requires that a teacher acknowledge them and attempt to utilize them to effect student learning.

These assumptions help to frame the role for a teacher. I see two overarching roles one that most teachers engage in and one that tends to be given less emphasis. First, a teach assembles material and presents it using multiple approaches to students. This should at a minimum include both multiple teacher-centered activities and student-centered activities. Second, a teacher must motivate students to take the necessary action to promote student centered self-learning. While many teachers consider a form of motivation it typically tends to focus on "motivating the material" more than motivating the student. That is to say teacher try to think about how to effect or control their presentation of material being taught not the students themselves. When they do focus on the student side it is typically in the form of grading policies, which, while often effective are typically negative incentives.

As noted above I there are two foci that I am concerned with when presenting material, the stuff I do and the stuff student’s do. Both of these foci can be seen in any course syllabi. The choice of textbook or text material typically represents one form of presenting course material. It is interesting to note how modern textbooks have tried to incorporate the idea of multiple learning styles. They typically include graphs, pictures and diagrams to appeal to visual learners and standard written text for those more oriented to symbolic and auditory presentations. For MPA level course the reliance on articles can be problematic if no other approach to presentation for the same material is provided. The assumption that everyone will get it if they just read the article is more than likely incorrect. Use of class and small group discussions can help here when the only source material is in one form.

The growing prominence of visual and graphical presentation tools like Mircosoft’s Powerpoint allow the teacher to similarly include multiple approaches through lecturing. I have Powerpoint lectures for all my MPA classes and make them available to students before class so that they don’t have to spend class time trying to write down everything I say. It should (but does not always) allow students to focus on what is being said in class and allow them to respond to ideas and concepts critically instead of trying to "record" everything being said. Powerpoint also allows the lecture pages to be printed out with space for notes on each slide if students want to add additional material. When I was a student I used to re-write all class notes into a final copy notebook because the act of writing the material allowed me to reconstruct and reorganize it in ways that made sense to me. That process while laborious was how I learned material. Some student’s today might find this useful but it requires a high level of self-awareness and motivation, but it illustrates on a personally level my point about multiple learning styles.

Finally the use of assignments is probably the single most important aspect of the teacher as presenter, because it is how I can influence the activity of the student most directly. My assignments, while related to substance, are also related to my second issue, the teacher as motivator. Three things come together in student assignments; the courses subject mater, an opportunity to motivate students, and awareness of multiple learning styles. In general at both the MPA and Ph.D. level I try to develop assignments and student centered activities that cover the material appropriately, motivate students, and account for multiple learning styles and when possible develop positive cohort effects. At the MPA level I heavily rely on group projects that are done for real world sponsors and at the Ph.D. level I rely exclusively on professional activities while completely excluding traditional student like activities such as tests (when was the last time a Ph.D. professional had to take a test!).

Clearly it is impossible to separate teacher as presenter from teacher as motivator but for purposes of this paper I will try. The single most important motivation strategy I have found that works for me is a high level of personal enthusiasm every time I walk into the classroom! I try to go into each class "psyched!" At the MPA level, for example, I try to demonstrate that statistics is not only important but that it is fun, exciting and provides many opportunities for creativity. For example most teachers try to make statistics seem more scientific than it is, in fact I would argue that statistics isn’t even a science! For example most of the core processes we teach are all heuristics! We all have to take a "leap of faith" every time we reject (or accept) a hypothesis. Construction of a good hypothesis is more art than science, and it requires a great deal of creativity. I also emphasize the process of discovery and how exciting that can be as one does simple but powerful things like graphing data to explore relationships.

Another motivational tactic I use is to provide students with both relevant and hands-on activities. In various MPA analysis courses students must (with some help from me) find their own data about some policy or management issue they are interested in and then analyze it using various tools we have studied in class. I have had great success with this and over the years only had about 10% of the students have to rely on data I provided. For example an individual who was a business manager for a local school board analyzed the effects of moving 5^th graders our of an elementary school environment into a middle school setting on standardized test scores. This study was based on a policy change implemented in their school district three years earlier. Another student developed a forecasting model for university enrollments. At the Ph.D. level I have student do article reviews, but use manuscripts submitted to journals and provide students with copies of actual peer reviews as part of the evaluation. This is a relevant professional activity where students are often surprised to find they were able to identify problems in the submission and could make valuable suggestions for improvement sometimes missed by the actual reviewer. I have, in some cases, used these student reviews as part of an active article review and sent them along to editors with my review as an added bonus.

Along with individual work I also rely heavily on groups and team projects. While it is well known that group activities can have a huge educational effect based on peer learning I have found that there need to be several important precursor conditions. As already noted, the students need to be motivated. For MPA students, when a project has a real world basis and sponsor, levels of motivation soar. The project should be a real project in the sense that it is too large and complex for any one member to successfully complete or any small subgroup. This creates a high level of interdependence in the group and promotes the development of many important skills like negotiation, bargaining, consensus building, etc. These projects also allow a course that appears to be on a technical topic (e.g. statistics or computer applications) to integrate management education. This is important for motivation because some student struggling with the technical material can still have a major project effect through contributions in management related activities (which is in itself an import finding for students). A final requirement that I see as important in constructing group exercises is that each student must rate and evaluate every group member including themselves and they must know that going into the project. This helps build some additional incentives for cooperation.

Finally, I strongly believe in positive incentives as a motivational device. For my MPA students I often reward strong individual and group performance with a "free lunch." For example, student in a statistics course had to write a critical review of three research articles on a common theme and then do a short minute oral presentation of the review to the class. Each student rated the presenters on both style and substance. I then identified the top 5 students based on these peer reviews and took them out to lunch. In another instance, I assigned students to teams and each team was given the same set of 5 variables to forecast beyond the end of the data. Termed a forecast tournament, the team that generated the best forecasts in terms of accuracy was also taken out to lunch. In the context of Ph.D. students the best positive reinforcement I have been able to provide is to work closely with students at producing a research outcome, such as a refereed journal paper or conference presented paper, where they can take most of the credit for the work.

In this paper I have made a few suggestions to people but I believe that each of us must figure out how a classroom tactic or strategy will work for them individually. There are too many variables to boil it all down into a few do’s and don’ts. What I have laid out here works for me. Hopefully some of you reading this will find parts of it that resonate with your personality, teach context and experience.