June 2008 Archives

I've just received the (Student Evaluations of Teaching* or University Lecturing Questionnaire for INTBUS 202: Foundations of strategy.

Such evaluations have both supporters and detractors. Anyway, back to my results ...

The students seem to fall into three camps. First, there are those who liked what I did and marked me highly in all areas. This is typified by the student who said:

One of the best lecturers in my opinion. I came to university to learn and not to be taught or spoon-fed everything. His vast understanding across many areas prove useful and which I deem ought to be necessary for a paper of this calibre.

Secondly, there are those students who marked me down in all areas. The comments from those students are of the form:

Slides!!!

or

More structure

and

Did you talk about the course material? I might have missed it during your other insights

Finally, there are those students who had a more 'normal' distribution in their evaluation.

To some up; some students really liked what I did, some really disliked what I did, and a group were moderate in their opinions. The split is something like 10%, 30%, 60%.

So what do I take away from this, and what do I plan to change?

I think there was a gap between myself and many of the students. Despite both my comments and Dan's (the other person who taught this course), most of students didn't read the textbook ahead of the class. For Dan's sessions that didn't matter too much; but for my sessions, I relied on the fact that the student's had read the book--and I was unwilling to compromise on that. Without the background knowledge provided by the book, I can understand and believe that many of the students had a hard time following along with me. Thus, for many it would have felt unstructured. This would be especially so, given Dan's sessions that very heavily followed the book.

Was I unstructured? I don't think so. I had a very clear and detailed 'lesson plan' for each class. What I didn't provide is step-by-step slides. Could I do slides? Yes. Yet, as I pointed out to the students at the beginning of the course, the evidence is that providing slides detracts from students learning (even if they fell the opposite).

Having said all that, and re-read it, I sound defensive and perhaps I am.

The more I think about it, the more I regard the contrast between Dan's approach an my approach as being a challenge for the students. When I've co-taught with others (say Liliana Erakovic or Darl Kolb) my style has been close to the other teacher. Having said that, it doesn't mean my style is the same with both--Liliana's and my style is very different to that when I'm teaching with Darl. Dan and I are yet to find a common approach.

I think the new structure will help. Next semester, I imagine the general pattern will be:

• First class (Two hours)
  • Administriva
  • Review (and show) one good and one poor example of the case analyses handed-in the previous week
  • Provide some overarching comments on what was seen in the case analyses (30 minutes to here)
  • Answer questions about the readings and the questions (30 minutes)
  • Discuss a relevant news story/case/mini-case and the tools/theory that help to understand it (30 minutes)
  • Class exercise based on the "small group" exercises from the text (20 minutes)

• Second class (One hour)
  • Walk through and discuss the case of the week
  • Apply the Business, Customer, Industry framework (apply the new tools as they are acquired)
  • Talk about the possible strategies and the insights that students have developed

(I'm haven't talked this through with Dan yet, so it will be intresting to get his comments)

At the end of the day, we want the students to be adept at using the tools of strategy (and not just one or two of them). And I think this will do it better than before.

I had coffee with a good colleague today. Richard Brookes is one of the superb teachers around here.

We got on to the topic of what managers really need to know and the issue of the relevancy of much management research.

As a result of our discussion, I've become even more convinced of the need to teach "judgement" in our MBA programmes. The challenge is that it's hard to do that.

I think in my next undergraduate class, that I'll see how much buy-in I can get from the students to such an assertion (and consequently, how much effort they'll put into developing better judgement).

I've decided to step down from my role in the GSE. It's a shame, because I enjoy it so much. However, there are so many competing demands for my time, that I can't give the GSE the attention it deserves.

Que sera.

So, once I'm back from the conference in Europe I'll return to my home department.

I went along to one of the MBA classes tonight. They had some concerns about the marking of an assignment. One thing that struck me was how some people had exercised good judgement in deciding how to tackle the question.

And so, I began to wonder what I meant by good judgement. So, as I often do, I looked at the Oxford English Dictionary. Amongst the many meanings of the word, I found:

8. a. The faculty of judging; ability to form an opinion; that function of the mind whereby it arrives at a notion of anything; the critical faculty; discernment.

and of course (?), I had a look at Wikipedia, which I found less helpful, viz:

In non-legal contexts, a judgment (American English) or judgement (British English) is a balanced weighing up of evidence preparatory to making a decision. A formal process of evaluation applies. A judgment may be expressed as a statement, e.g. S1: 'A is B' and is usually the outcome of an evaluation of alternatives.

Whilst Wikipedia's definition does talk about weighing up evidence, it does seem a bit more formulaic in its approach.

Anyway, along time ago, or at least it feels that way, when I was doing my MBA I was taught finance by a Prof from America. During one of the early classes, he was asked what one needed to do to be successful in the course.

I remember his answer to this day. He said, "Use good judgement at all times."

This is probably good advice in many areas of our lives.

I firmly believe that one of the hallmarks of good managers, and leaders, is their ability to exercise good judgement. Consequently, in a MBA programme we should expect--and participants should require--opportunities to demonstrate (and be rewarded for) their skill in exercising good judgement.

So, I'm left with the thought "What can we do to help you develop better judgement?"

Judgement is an exercise in evaluation, one needs to practice it. So, I don't believe that there is any way in which good judgement can be taught without an experiential component (there must an experience of using judgement in order to better refine it).

I'm not sure that spelling things out in ever increasing detail contributes to developing judgement. Indeed, Hare in his commentary on the teaching of judgement argues for open-endedness and a degree of ambiguity (he says vagueness). Hare goes on to say that "the teacher is responsible for providing the minimum requirement ... and for bringing the person to a point where they can exercise judgement". Most importantly, and echoing my earlier point, Hare says "'Knowledge' does not require that we work things out for ourselves but judgement does."

At this point in time, as the bulk of their MBA programme lies ahead of them, again wonder what we can do differently to help each person develop better judgement.