Abstract
In this essay, we explore why there has traditionally been so little emphasis on teaching preparation in business doctoral programs. Program administrators and faculty typically espouse support for teaching development; yet the existing reward systems are powerfully aligned in favor of a focus on research competency. Indeed, through the lens of a performance diagnostic model, it is entirely predictable that doctoral programs have not offered more teaching development opportunities, as administrators often do not have the requisite motivation, ability, opportunity, or resources to develop comparable teaching competence. However, given that the average graduate will take a professorial position with greater than 50% of responsibilities devoted to teaching, most external observers would conclude that there is a curious dearth of teaching preparation in contemporary business doctoral programs. However understandable the dearth of teaching development, we argue that those reasons are no longer acceptable, and the present essay is predominately a call for change. Suggestions for enhancing the depth and nature of teaching development are offered, and we include some examples of progressive initiatives underway in the hopes of provoking a more intense conversation on the teaching preparation of the next generation of business professors.
Keywords
Like many jobs in the 21st century, the role of business professor has become increasingly complex and challenging. For example, recent research on journal submissions and acceptance rates has found that it is considerably harder to publish in the leading academic journals than it was a generation ago (Certo, Sirmon, & Brymer, 2010). In addition, economic pressures facing educational institutions have led to a reduction in resources traditionally supporting research (e.g., grant money, graduate assistants, teaching release time). Furthermore, tenure-track opportunities have declined at most institutions and thus competition for fewer spots is fierce and largely determined by publication success.
On the teaching front, the advent of highly publicized media rankings and tighter job markets for graduating students have created greater institutional emphasis on classroom performance. Moreover, modern technology has created pressure for faculty members to be adept in different modalities and to be able to serve different students in diverse contexts. Today’s constituents (e.g., current and potential students, parents, recruiters) put extraordinary demands on college instructors, and the saliency of individual teaching performance, as well as institutional assurance of learning, is higher than ever before. Some authors have specifically chronicled the impact of rankings on business schools and professors’ lives (Argenti, 2000; Corley & Gioia, 2000; Friga, Bettis, & Sullivan, 2003) and contend that such rankings are among the most significant forces shaping faculty selection and evaluation today. Others have outlined the immense challenge of becoming a business professor relative to comparable consulting or executive positions (Wisneski, 2013).
With those new realities in mind, our goal with the present essay is to provoke an engaged conversation on the appropriate preparation of business doctoral students for subsequent teaching responsibilities. While most management educators and constituents share an interest in preparing high-performing college professors, there has been too little engagement on the topic of classroom-teaching competencies. Toward that end, we report on a set of interviews with doctoral business program directors and overlay a classic performance diagnostic to better explicate how current reward systems, and perceptions of those rewards, have gotten us to the present state. While the dearth of teaching preparation is certainly explicable, we argue that the time has come to more seriously challenge and debate whether the historical imbalance should continue unabated.
The State of Business Doctoral Education
Relative to their undergraduate and MBA counterparts, business doctoral programs are something of an enigma. That is, there has been no accepted standard or protocol for curriculum or content, and accreditation standards are written in only the broadest of terms (see Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business [AACSB] International, 2013a). Anecdotal evidence suggests that programs differ widely on elements such as amount and nature of course work, faculty mentoring, ordering of requirements, dissertation expectations, and, most germane to the present essay, teaching preparation.
Although not empirical in nature, a number of exposés over the past decade have argued that business doctoral programs are not adequately preparing students for the realities of the careers they will face (cf. Lewicki & Bailey, 2009; Mitchell, 2007; Parsons, 2003). For example, Lewicki and Bailey (2009) assert that the dominant paradigm in faculty reward and recognition systems is rooted in three assumptions: (a) Institutional excellence is based on research productivity, (b) Encouraging and rewarding research faculty will yield excellent educators committed to the institution, and (c) All business schools must follow the same model if they wish to improve. The authors challenge each of those assumptions and argue for a broadening of how we think about school status, evaluate faculty performance, and customize appropriate strategies to schools with very different contexts and resources. Similarly, Mitchell (2007) argues that doctoral programs need to do a far better job of preparing their graduates for both career satisfaction and those professors’ student learning outcomes. And most recently, Porat (2014) has gone on record suggesting that business doctoral programs borrow from the sciences and use a postdoctoral model as a means of addressing this issue.
To systematically assess the current state of doctoral education in business, we personally interviewed representatives from 50 randomly selected doctoral programs from a population of 108 accredited schools in Canada and the United States. The first part of each interview gathered descriptive information about the focal program, how students are selected and funded, what, if any, teacher training is required during the program, where within the university the training is located, and whether teaching training and/or experience is required for graduation. The second phase of each interview examined institutional factors such as teaching awards for students and faculty, the level of support for teacher training from different segments of the business school, the placement goals of the program, and the importance of teaching in hiring and tenure processes.
In most cases, the faculty director of the doctoral program was interviewed though, in some cases, it was a professional staff director—depending on the administrative structure of particular schools. In a few cases, due to the arrangement of administrative responsibilities and access to relevant information both persons were interviewed, either via conference call or follow-up call. In addition to the primary interview data, secondary data were gathered by examining the websites of all selected programs. Specifically, each program website was systematically reviewed to assess if preparing future teachers was mentioned in the mission of the program and/or if teacher training was included as a published part of the doctoral program description and curriculum. Information was also gathered on any separate units at each institution (e.g., a Center for Teaching & Learning) if the respondents indicated that the students might use those services as a resource during their doctoral program. Finally, respondents were given the opportunity to express their impressions about the role of teacher training in doctoral programs and offer their own perspectives of doctoral student and faculty perceptions. Indeed, the interviews were highly interactive and no two were identical. Table 1 summarizes characteristics of the schools in our sample.
Demographic Information on Participating Schools.
In conducting our investigation, we were aware of the limitations of interview methodology, and do not want to overstate the precision or depth of our results. However, we do believe that our findings paint an accurate portrait of business doctoral education today. What stood out most in the results, summarized in Table 2, was the lack of any consistent approach to the development of teaching competence and a relatively low amount of formal instructional training—at least compared with the amount of time ultimately devoted to it for the majority of new professors. More specifically, only 34% of business doctoral programs provide any formal (for credit) teaching courses, and 18% offer no type of teaching preparation at all. Furthermore, while some programs allow students to independently teach or serve as an assistant for one or more courses during their doctoral program (a form of on-the-job training), that experience is not necessarily coupled systematically with ongoing coursework, workshops, or deliberate feedback and coaching—well-known prerequisites for on-the-job training success.
Teacher Training Summary.
In order of structured formality. The more formal types of training sometimes included observations and mentoring.
Of the 46 universities that require or expect student teaching, 34 programs give the student full individual responsibility for a course. The others have students participate in course administration (N = 3), lead discussion sections (N = 4), or teach a course that is centrally managed by the department (N = 5). For those schools offering them, formal courses in teacher training are typically taken in the first 2 years either in the form of a semester course or in an intensive format in the summer. The schools which use workshops to train students often rely on a campus Center for Teaching or similar outlets. Within these results, we observed no patterns of difference between public and private schools, program size, prestige, and so on.
While the interviews generally indicated that doctoral program heads say they support teaching, the actual reported behavior suggests a relative devaluing of teacher training in comparison with training in research. The overall importance of students having their research peer-reviewed at a conference or for journal publication was very high (9.33/10) with 84% reporting they achieve this goal on average. Similar peer evaluation of teaching was not reported. On 5-point scales, teaching was more important to get hired (3.22/5.0) than to receive tenure (2.25/5.0); yet only one school reported requiring job candidates to teach a sample class during job visits. None of the responding schools indicated that outstanding teaching would result in a favorable tenure decision for a candidate with low research output.
When asked about placement goals for their doctoral programs, the vast majority of the participants wanted to place their graduates at peer or better research institutions. An analysis of the placement data they provided, however, indicates that over 60% of graduates do not ultimately obtain jobs at such institutions. Rather, a majority of graduates work at master’s-granting comprehensive universities or 4-year teaching-oriented schools. Interestingly, when discussing their placement results, respondents would often offer unsolicited explanations of placements at teaching schools such as, “Oh, that was a dual career couple and the graduate had to live in city X,” to justify placements deemed below the stated placement aspirations. Many schools have “illustrative” placement data on their websites, and some schools provided us with additional placement data, often with a condition that we not make it public.
We hasten to add that we do not believe that there should be any disappointment attached to placements at other than Research 1 universities. Indeed, the demographic reality is that the market simply cannot absorb more than a very small percentage of new graduates at leading research institutions. Compounding the challenge is that when such schools have openings today, many opt to only consider those with existing track records thereby eliminating recent graduates. Thus, our interviews reveal a perceptual reality that has great implications for the teaching preparation of our future professors.
The results of our analysis of program websites revealed mixed support for teaching. Of the 50 doctoral programs reviewed, 17 did not mention teaching at all in the program mission or overview. Of the 33 programs with teaching in their program overviews, only 20 actually detailed any teacher training in the required curriculum. While all 50 schools had a Center for Teaching of some sort on campus, only 22 of the interviewees indicated that their students used such services.
Finally, our interviews also surfaced some student and faculty perceptions that have important teaching-preparation implications. Despite idiosyncratic variations across the sample, our own experience and observations suggest that the quotes below are representative of a significant portion of doctoral granting institutions today: Many of our newly minted doctoral students are surprised by how consuming teaching can be and that surprise is accentuated if they are asked to teach MBA and Executive students and/or on-line courses. During their recruitment our new faculty candidates often actively negotiate to teach fewer and less important courses in our institution. Our students are trying to get jobs at schools that are increasingly populated with nontenure-track appointments. That is in part for cost reasons, of course, but it also reflects schools’ attempts to find instructors who have the motivation and ability to teach effectively to their various constituents. At our own school, department chairs often have to essentially “hide” a newly-minted doctoral graduate from all but the most introductory courses—so as not to generate stress in the new hire and/or revolt from attending students. There’s recent recognition that teaching has been neglected and affects graduating students on the job market, but faculty see it as a burden to provide additional mentorship. As Henry Kissinger said, “the great thing about having a Ph.D. is when people do not understand you they think it is them.” Teaching is taken seriously and we aim to create competent teachers though it is not central to the program or a requirement for graduation.
At the risk of painting a one-sided picture, our interviews also uncovered multiple examples (a few briefly highlighted below) of people and programs with a passionate interest in teaching development. We further observed what could be fairly described as a “growing awareness” of a need for more training in teaching. Indeed, several schools were embarking on creating training programs at the time of our interviews, and some directors of schools providing no training offered their view that a lack of teaching preparation could be a liability for their students in a changing and competitive job market.
How We Got Here: Why Teaching Preparation Has Been Subordinated to Research
A useful conceptual frame for understanding (and ultimately addressing) the dearth of teaching preparation is a familiar diagnostic model proposed by Vroom (1964) and expanded by others (cf. Blumberg & Pringle, 1982; Campbell, McCloy, Oppler, & Sager, 1993), which formulates performance as a function of motivation, ability, and opportunity—graphically represented as P = f(M × A × O). Using this equation, any performance (or lack thereof) is a multiplicative function of motivation (“will do”), ability (“can do”), and opportunity (“has chance to do”). The multiplicative nature of the equation aptly represents that all three aspects are essential to performance and that one can only modestly compensate for the other. Overlaid on the existing state of doctoral education, it is readily apparent that there are perceptions, among administrators, faculty, and students, related to all three elements that constrain teaching development in our programs. We briefly expand on each of those below.
Insufficient Motivation
It is hardly controversial to suggest that the extrinsic rewards in academic life go disproportionately to those highest in research productivity (Fairweather, 2005; Tribunella, Neely, & Hull, 2007). Who would not agree that salaries, promotions, endowed chairs, and other perquisites of academic life demonstrate clearly the superordinate importance of research in our institutions today? So, it is not surprising that the motivation of doctoral administrators, faculty, and students alike is not to more proportionately emphasize teaching preparation.
Another more intrinsic factor that limits the motivation for teaching development is a perception that effective teaching is solely, or at least largely, an outgrowth of expert knowledge. That is, one operative theory is that the best potential teachers (defined as those who can inculcate the most current and useful information, rather than those who will simply be most liked) will be researchers who are actively contributing to that knowledge. So, an emphasis on pedagogical training, independent of knowledge development, would not necessarily be harmful—just misdirected—and hence, there is little motivation to do so. Under this mind-set, the key to having the best instruction is to put the most knowledgeable subject matter experts in front of students. As such, doctoral training should not stray from research and mastery of a common body of knowledge and existing evidence base.
Our performance diagnostic can also be overlaid on student perceptions and would similarly predict that students will also have attenuated motivation for teaching development. That is, very much aware of what is required to quickly acclimate and succeed in a research institution, many doctoral students will resist any dilution of their research preparation. So, even if programs did opt for more teaching development, students may resist—or perhaps favor—those programs that maintain an exclusively research focus.
But one key finding of our study was that, despite the stated aspirations of doctoral institutions, only a small percentage of their graduates gain employment at Tier 1 research universities—with such schools’ accordant publication demands. Rather, the vast majority of students find themselves hired by teaching or balanced schools where teaching loads are greater and institutional interest in good teaching is pronounced. As such, the devaluing of teacher preparation by both institutions and students is particularly problematic when juxtaposed against the reality of actual placement statistics. Even in highly sought-after research institutions with minimal teaching loads, it is a rarity that an academic professional is ever completely exempt from a significant instructional role (Serrow, 2000). As a result, pedagogical instruction may be more important to career success than doctoral students believe.
We should aim to inculcate a teaching excellence mind-set, whereby our novice professors recognize that they have a professional and ethical obligation to their school and students that is at least equivalent to their scholarly discipline. In the best case, they will believe that teaching excellence would improve—not dilute—their research productivity as efficacy in teaching can make it more enjoyable, less draining, and potentially free up more “mindshare” for research. This is not to suggest that students have any inherent dislike or aversion to teaching. Indeed, many students choose to enter a doctoral program primarily to become a teacher, although they may disguise that desire on their doctoral program application. Like all people, they are powerfully influenced by the saliency of the existing reward system.
Insufficient Ability
One of the catchy colloquial phrases we heard in the course of our interviews was that “teaching expertise is caught and not taught”—and this gets at the heart of the insufficient ability perception. Many of our interviewees were unconvinced that there is any compelling evidence about how teaching competence should be designed, nor that such emphasis would ultimately have any substantive impact on the teaching effectiveness of graduates. This view, in our opinion, ignores the fact that universities across the country have colleges of education that focus on preparing K-12 educators to teach. Indeed, some states require a master’s in teaching to have a job in public schools. Is this entire teaching specialty within academia a sham?
Perhaps more important, even those aware of the malleability of teaching competence generally feel they do not have the resources or faculty competence on hand to do it well. So, once again, the prudent strategy is for doctoral programs to do best what they can do (prepare researchers) and leave what they are not well-suited to do (prepare teachers) to on-the-job experience and others like instructional-design consultants. One possible compromise is to allow doctoral students to “practice” as teaching assistants with undergraduate courses while in school.
Insufficient Opportunity
In our interviews, it became clear that there is a strong feeling that the demands for junior faculty success in research are so great that thorough and intense doctoral preparation to publish is essential—and virtually every available educational opportunity needs to be devoted to that purpose. Professor careers are uniquely “front-loaded” (the lifetime tenure decision is typically made in just the sixth year of employment), so doctoral training time is zero sum. One cannot take time away from developing research competence, particularly sophisticated methodology and statistical analyses, and expect graduates to succeed in a fiercely competitive scholarly landscape. In short, if you want to succeed as a researcher, there simply is no time for anything else in a doctoral program. This is not so much a denigration of the importance of teaching, but rather what is seen to be a prudent choice to succeed as a researcher.
So, while the limited empirical evidence and our own experience confirm a historical imbalance in research versus teaching preparation, that imbalance has not emerged without reason. As has long been acknowledged, there are persistent tensions, and the outcome has been a pronounced subordination of teaching preparation (cf. Lewicki & Bailey, 2009). We contend the time is now to engage in a discussion of how to manage those tensions in a way that is more conducive to teaching development.
Challenging the Status Quo: The Way Forward
Overall the present data reveal that despite a clear recognition of the issue and recurring calls for change, relatively little has changed in doctoral teaching preparation and perceptions over the past 25 years. So, with an eye to the way forward, we address each of the three deficient elements (motivation, ability, and opportunity) in our performance diagnostic, which we find particularly practical here for two specific reasons. First, the notion that the three elements of performance combine multiplicatively is apt in this context; according to Vroom’s (1964) model, the absence of any of the three will still render low performance.
Second, we are mostly concerned about perceptions, not necessarily “objective” program realities. That is, in thinking about change, it will not be enough that new courses are offered or mentoring programs designed and mandated. Rather, our doctoral programs must believe that effort will lead to good performance, believe they have the ability, and believe they have sufficient opportunity for any significant change to occur. So, the tall order in this context is to change minds as well as program features and rewards.
Enhancing Motivation for Teaching Development: What Gets Rewarded Gets Done
Our faculty are incented for publishing by reducing their teaching load. Thus, it is not uncommon for faculty to view teaching as the cost, or even penalty, for being less productive in research. (Doctoral program director)
Imagine parents paying over $65,000 a year for their daughter’s education, hearing the quotation above from a new professor during a television interview. For those parents, learning that their daughter’s professor views teaching her as a penalty for not doing more research would likely, and rightly, spark outrage. But should the professor be held in contempt for merely responding to the existing reward system? Similarly, might doctoral graduates negotiate a lower teaching load and perceive higher teaching load as a penalty because their department chairs (and/or deans) actually use teaching for exactly these purposes to make an offer more attractive for high-potential candidates and for allocating more research (and less teaching) time to the most productive researchers?
Whatever one’s view, the reality is that changes in the reward systems, for both students and program faculty, will be requisite to any substantive changes in the status quo of teaching preparation in our doctoral programs. Universities have adapted in many other ways to new contextual realities (e.g., technology and online education); so, we are unwilling to accept that the situation is forever intractable (Loh, Friedman, & Burdick, 2013).
The seeds of change were planted some time ago, in calls for broader evaluations of scholarship (Boyer, 1990; Glassick, 2000). A bright spot in the development of doctoral teacher training has been the Preparing Future Faculty program, funded by the Carnegie Foundation from 1993 to 2001 and subsequently supported by the Council of Graduate Schools (DeNeef, 2002). This initiative aimed to create models that incorporated teacher preparation and academic citizenship into doctoral education across the arts and sciences. DeNeef’s (2002) survey of faculty who experienced the Preparing Future Faculty as students indicates that the impact of their exposure to the program successfully legitimized conversations about teaching. There is evidence that this realization is reaching schools of business given visible trends toward an increase in rigorous scholarship and publications on pedagogical topics (Aggarwal & Goodell, 2011; Fukami, 2004; Ireland, 2015).
The rationale for limiting teaching preparation in favor of research knowledge may also be partially explained by the hope that there is a positive, strong, and mutually reinforcing relationship between research and teaching effectiveness (Balkin & Mello, 2012; Lewicki & Bailey, 2009; Vroom, 2007). While we tend to agree that there is synergy, several authors observed that in practice, the existence of resource constraints and differing required skill sets generally do not support such synergy (Braxton, 1996). For example, Hattie and Marsh (1996) found that time spent on research and measures of research publication indices were unrelated to teaching quality and performance.
Enhancing the Ability (and Belief in That Ability) to Train Better Teachers: Teaching Competence Is Malleable
The perception that “teaching cannot really be taught” is persistent and can be compelling but, in our view, ultimately does not withstand scrutiny. There is considerable research supporting the value that pedagogical training could play in preparing doctoral candidates for the teaching responsibilities that they will assume on graduation. Research has generally shown that more effective teachers generate better student learning (e.g., Stronge, Ward, & Grant, 2011). Furthermore, teacher training can lead to increased self-efficacy, reduced anxiety, improved attitudes toward teaching, and increased use of effective teaching techniques (Boman, 2013). These improvements in both attitudes and skills may lead future professors to transition more quickly from concentrating primarily on their own performance to focusing on their students’ learning outcomes (Nyquist & Sprague, 1998). Similarly, graduate students at the University of Wisconsin’s Preparing Accomplished College Teachers summer program reported improved confidence and classroom performance after completing coursework on effective teaching (Bubenzer & Westphal-Johnson, 2003). Overall, the research literature supports the assumption that instruction in pedagogy has a positive impact on teacher performance (Gibbs & Coffey, 2004).
A development focusing on business doctoral students and recent graduates is the Doctoral Institute at the OBTS Teaching Society for Management Educators annual conference (http://www.obts.org/content/doctoral-institute). Additionally, the Academy of Management now offers a 1-day professional development teaching conference just before its annual conference (http://www.aom.pace.edu).
Development Means More Than Formal Classes: Finding Opportunities to Fit Teaching Development Into Doctoral Programs
Research productivity is extraordinarily difficult to achieve. But it is also true that today’s students pay huge sums for a business education. The reality that some doctoral graduates step into their first teaching classroom with zero hours of instructional preparation strikes us as bordering on malpractice. While problematic in any discipline, we believe it is especially acute in professional schools such as business, law, engineering, medicine, and so on, where students require more than a conceptual education. The teaching abilities of their professors are essential for students to practice a craft; we cannot in good conscience send new graduates into demanding teaching environments with so little preparation. We probably never should have—but in today’s new reality, it is clearly a disservice to future professors and their students.
It is also important not to limit the discussion of teaching preparation to just formal classes and seminars. Our data indicate that the majority of programs do afford doctoral students teaching assistantships and full course assignments that hold great potential for teaching development. However, if we are going to rely largely on on-the-job training, we contend that we have to be more thoughtful about how to do that in a way that such practice does lead to higher performance, and our responses reveal that current practice falls short of that ideal.
For example, our interviews indicate that even where independent teaching is the norm, there was generally little or no formalized program of evaluation, feedback, and coaching to learn from early teaching experiences. Anders Ericsson and colleagues (Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Römer, 1993; Ericsson & Lehmann, 1996) clearly explicate that deliberate practice is not just repeating a task but rather obtaining feedback from an expert source and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome. Put another way, the adage that “practice makes perfect” is only a half-truth. A more precise and accurate conception is that deliberate practice with informed feedback makes perfect. Perhaps business schools, as do some schools of education, could provide informed feedback by using retired teaching faculty to observe and mentor their doctoral students.
Four Different Approaches to Doctoral Teaching Training
As noted earlier, one of our goals of the present study was to identify a few programs which represent alternative models for teaching preparation within business doctoral programs. This goal was reinforced when a number of our participants said something to the effect of “ . . . We aren’t doing much at present, but we’d really like to see how other schools have developed their teacher preparation programs. . . . ” The four models described below were selected because they represent different approaches within our sample, at both public and private universities, which share an intensive commitment to teacher preparation along with developing research skills. Each has a required, formal, structured program (in our high-intensity group), but they each “do it their way.”
A Teaching Institute Within a School of Business
The Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan has one of the most comprehensive Teaching Development Programs (TDPs) observed in our study. Under the direction of Professor Anne White Harrington, the TDP is composed of 3 years of carefully monitored activities, including classroom observation, English language and local classroom culture seminars, two required second-year courses focusing on building teaching competencies and practice teaching, and a third-year, full-semester teaching requirement, with observations, feedback, and continued training, followed up by designing a teaching portfolio. The TDP is a prerequisite for completion of the doctorate for all Ross students since its inception in 1993.
A brief timeline of the TDP begins with a first-year orientation for incoming doctoral students where they are assigned classroom observation activities. The second year is composed of two courses, one requiring the development of effective classroom lessons and then actual presentation of a lesson to students who provide feedback, and then after a consultation with a teacher educator, a second practice teaching session with subsequent follow-up. The second required course is offered just before doctoral students begin their semester-teaching assignment at the beginning of the third year and includes traditional teaching competencies such as syllabus construction, leading discussions, and so on.
The third year begins with a graduate student instructor orientation, which includes an overview of instructional procedures and a preteaching conference with TDP staff, relevant department members, and peers who have already taught. Finally, students begin their teaching semester, observed at least twice by the director with feedback following and participate in weekly informal graduate student instructor meetings for the first half of the semester to discuss topics immediately relevant to their teaching activities. According to Dr. Harrington, contact hours with doctoral students can range from 20 to 60.
Of particular interest are the provisions included for incoming international doctoral students who are not easily understood when speaking English. They are assigned to a course in English language, which includes training in diction. A dozen other programs in our sample required additional coursework for such students including more time in a Center for Teaching, speech therapists, and communications classes. Additionally, the Ross School also includes specialized training for students not familiar with local (U.S.) classroom culture so they become comfortable with student questions during an instructor’s lecture or use experiential exercises and small group interactions.
The TDP at the Ross School has no separate budget and is maintained by the part-time appointment of the director and the full-time appointment of the associate director plus the offerings of the English language institute coordinator.
A Full-Semester Teaching Practicum Required for Organization Studies Doctoral Students
The Organizational Studies Department of the Carroll School of Management at Boston College offers an entirely different approach, delivering a one-semester (13-week) teaching practicum (TP) course required of organization studies PhD students only. Taught primarily by Professor Judith Gordon, the course meets weekly for 2½ hours every other spring semester, meaning first-year and second-year students take the course together. The TP has a formal syllabus with required reading and writing assignments, but the emphasis is on “doing” and feedback. Most of the formal teacher training takes place during the TP, where doctoral students are assigned to present 15-minute lectures, called “teach-outs” on topics such as motivation, teams, and so on. Videotapes of the classroom presentations are later reviewed and critiqued by the PhD students and the professor of the TP. The course concludes with the submission of a teaching portfolio and a journal of brief entries for each class. Having completed two semesters as a teaching assistant and full participation in the TP, Boston College Organization Studies students are given complete responsibility to teach an organizational behavior course or a related elective. The expense of the program is Professor Gordon’s teaching the class biannually as part of her regular teaching load.
A Centralized Modular Series of Seminars Offered by the Center of Teaching Excellence
The John Cook School of Business at Saint Louis University requires all its doctoral students to complete a formal Certificate Program in University Teaching offered by the University’s Reinert Center for Teaching Excellence. At least 10, 2-hour effective teaching seminars are required, offered throughout the academic year on a wide range of topics common to most disciplines. Discipline-specific modules can also be created within the school. Additional certificate requirements include developing a teaching portfolio, videotaping class lectures, faculty mentoring, peer feedback, and so on. The certificate appears on each student’s transcript.
What makes this program unique is the opportunity for all schools and departments to partake in the numerous effective teaching seminars delivered by the Reinert Center, while at the same time, schools and departments can collaborate with the Center to create their own customized, discipline-specific seminar about how to teach, for example, their International Business course. Departments can develop up to 4 of the 10 seminars required for certification. Finally, PhD students can attend teaching-related conferences such as the OBTS Teaching Society for Management Educators. When preapproved by the Center and after handing in a deliverable (summary of learning points experienced at the meeting), this experience can count for one of the 10 required segments for certification.
The collaboration of the John Cook School of Business and the Reinert Center for Teaching Excellence may be a cost-effective and highly adaptive model for doctoral teacher training at other institutions.
An Intensive, Required, Schoolwide Course Taught Over 3 Years
The Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst requires all its PhD students to complete an intensive 6-day (42 contact hours) teaching seminar as a prerequisite to receiving their doctoral degree. What makes this program unique is that the doctoral teaching seminar is offered during a “window” between commencement and the start of summer school in May when other courses are not offered and full-day sessions can be scheduled. These include 1 full day after the first year of doctoral coursework, 4 full days at the end of the second year, just before doctoral students are assigned to teach two semesters of a course on their own, and 1 full day for the third-year students who reflect on their teaching experience and develop a teaching portfolio in preparation for upcoming job applications.
Day 1 introduces first-year students to basic pedagogical issues such as motivating students, learning styles, leading discussions, and Bloom’s (1956) taxonomy.
Days 2 to 5 are focused on skill building for second-year students who are only 2 months away from teaching their own courses. Instruction on how to lead a class discussion, followed by videotaped practice for each student and constructive feedback are featured. Similar modules on creating a syllabus, assessment (both objective and essay), and online teaching are among numerous other essential topics covered. The 4-day segment concludes with students grouped by subject area presenting a lesson to the rest of the class, which includes a lecture, an accompanying handout, a PowerPoint presentation, leading a class discussion of the topic, and then receiving feedback from the class and the faculty.
Day 6 is offered to third-year students who have just completed their first two semesters of teaching “on their own.” Center for Teaching experts help these advanced students prepare a teaching portfolio and develop a Philosophy of Teaching Statement. The seminar concludes with a discussion of teaching successes and difficulties with an emphasis on how the difficulties might be mastered. The cost of the seminar is only the modest honoraria for the two faculty members, one from the accounting department and the other from the department of management, each teaching a total of 42 contact hours over the 6 days.
The Dimensions of Choice in More Intentional Doctoral Teaching Preparation
Given the wide variability in current doctoral programs, it is certainly the case that no one-size-fits-all initiative would ever gain any traction. So, in contemplating how to spur more intense conversation, as well as pilot initiatives and experimentation, it seemed useful to first select a small number of programs already in place for developing Doctoral Teacher Training Programs. In the absence of clear empirical consensus on program development, we selected the four programs described above, all of which shared one fundamental component. They each were composed of more than 35 contact hours of teacher training over the 4- to 5-year period that most PhD students require to complete their degrees. What followed when we compared the four selected programs was the realization that there were several other dimensions, or what we have chosen to describe as “fundamental choices,” that the four programs had in common and also other choices in which they differed.
Fundamental Choices That Our Four Example Programs Had in Common
High intensity—35 or more contact hours
Required—as a prerequisite to receiving the doctoral degree
Content—program includes both pedagogy-based knowledge and content-based topics
Program leadership—based on a passionate belief that teaching effectiveness is an essential outcome of doctoral study
Formality—Doctoral Teacher Training Program delivered primarily through regularly scheduled, credit-bearing courses plus scheduled observation and constructive feedback sessions
Fundamental Choices That Differed Among Our Four Example Programs
Because of differences in institutional structure, priorities, and culture, the four selected programs differed on the following fundamental choices.
Administrative origin—administrative level most responsible for development and delivery of the program
Certification—completion of all requirements of the program results in announcement of certification on the recipient’s transcript
Timing—when during the doctoral program is the Doctoral Teacher Training Program delivered?
We hope that this initial rubric of some of the “fundamental choices” that Doctoral Teacher Training Programs might make will serve to energize the conversation about what such programs might look like and further legitimize their inclusion in quality doctoral programs in schools of business.
Table 3 presents our synthesis of those key dimensions including prominent choices that might be made in designing a doctoral teaching initiative.
Fundamental Choices for Considering How to Create Doctoral Teacher Training Programs.
Table 4 indicates how the choices vary across the four universities selected as examples of Doctoral Teacher Training Programs.
Fundamental Choices From the Four Example Programs.
Transforming Doctoral Programs Toward Greater Teaching Emphasis: A Call to Action
In an effort to synthesize our interview findings and draw lessons from the examples highlighted above, we conclude with a call to action for the transformation of doctoral programs toward a greater emphasis on teaching. In doing so, we fully recognize that we are challenging conventional cultures that reward research far more than other performance dimensions. Nonetheless, the scant investment and attention devoted to teaching preparation has become a “dirty little secret” of our profession and the need is great to come clean.
Of course, advancing the cause here will take more than just imploring programs to “teach the future teachers.” Rather, it will require multiple parties to play a role in specifying more clearly what teaching instruction should entail and initiating standards and provisions for accountability. We therefore target our call not just to doctoral programs but to the multiple constituencies (AACSB; hiring schools; teaching class designers) in this domain. We have no delusions that substantive change will happen quickly or easily—and some of our charge will no doubt seem bold and provocative—but that is intentional and an attempt to spark action. Social psychologists (cf. Festinger, 1957) long ago documented that attitudes often follow (rather than precede) behaviors and the most fundamental thing for change to take place here is for a growing group of believers to act. We need brave souls to first act and then build momentum from the reactions/outcomes that emerge from that action.
Continuing acceptance of the status quo invites our “dirty little secret” to be publically exposed by beleaguered parents (or cynical popular press journalists) lamenting that their daughter’s $65,000 annual college expense put her in front of new graduates who had little or no classroom training whatsoever. Worse, those ill-prepared instructors may share a belief that their teaching assignments actually detract from their primary research mission. Our author team is passionate in our belief that we cannot allow that scenario to continue unchallenged.
Seek New AACSB Standards for Teaching Preparation
One of the most salient reasons for the haphazard, idiosyncratic development of teaching preparation for doctoral students in business has been the scant attention given to this competency by the AACSB. In a major review of business doctoral education released after our interviews were completed, the AACSB acknowledges: The emphasis on developing research capabilities among doctoral students often, it seems, far outweighs attention to developing effective teaching skill . . . that doctoral programs, particularly those oriented toward individuals pursuing academic careers, do not place more emphasis on teacher training is a disservice not only to their graduates, but also to the graduates’ future employers and future students. The timing is right for greater attention to laying the foundations for effective teaching within doctoral programs. (AACSB International, 2013b, p. 22)
We believe this represents an opportunity for the AACSB and its counterparts to establish a core set of expected teaching competencies to guide schools in their curricula development and refinement. But it will only happen if the key constituencies bring their influence to bear—and that influence cannot emerge solely from doctoral program directors. Indeed, we challenge deans and funding sources to join in a chorus of calls for more “top-driven” directives from AACSB that give leverage to those advocating an increased emphasis on teaching in doctoral student preparation. AACSB has been stressing student learning outcomes; it is time to stress teaching input. For real change to occur, we need school accreditation contingent on some teaching education initiatives.
In this same vein, our foray into the doctoral domain suggests to us that centralized standards and programs (AACSB mandates; university teaching centers) are likely the quickest path to get some traction. Local program advocates and initiatives are important and encouraged but, largely due to the availability of funding and broader expertise, our sense is that change will come quicker and more systemically via more “federal” initiatives.
Expand Hiring Schools’ Role
The responsibility for teaching development has traditionally rested solely on the seller (i.e., doctoral programs) rather than the buyer (i.e., the hiring schools). We believe that it would be productive to shift at least some of the responsibility to the hiring schools by creating more intentional and systemic onboarding and TDPs at hiring schools. Most important, however, we think it is time that hiring schools heighten their demands on faculty candidates to produce some evidence, and even behavioral demonstration, of teaching interest and competence. Only when students realize that their market attractiveness is at least partly contingent on their teaching profile will they demand, and take seriously, teaching preparation.
Champion New Doctoral Program Initiatives
Assess recent graduates and program outcomes
Our findings indicate that many doctoral program directors are reluctant to acknowledge the proportion of their graduates who will ultimately be employed at universities with substantial teaching loads and/or have high teaching-related expectations for tenure and promotion. So, we believe doctoral program leaders need data, at a minimum, on at least two questions: (a) Where are our graduates of the past decade currently employed—and what are the expectations for teaching required for them to excel at those institutions? and (b) What are the perceptions of our graduates regarding the elements of their doctoral training that have most helped them thrive in their career and where do they perceive deficiencies and/or opportunities to provide better preparation?
We recommend that independent researchers collect these data to assess teacher training and subsequent experience across university settings. We suspect that, with valid and unfiltered assessment data in hand, most programs will conclude that their doctoral training would be well served with more attention/resources devoted to teaching preparation. In fact, given the proportion of doctoral graduates who end up in primarily teaching roles, and the acute need for master teachers in our business schools today, we think the time has come for doctoral programs to thoughtfully revisit their mission. An honest review will lead at least some schools to conclude that an overt switch to becoming a teaching academy would be warranted. This is provocative for sure, but an institution that built a reputation for training master teachers in strategy or product management or big data or entrepreneurship would generate immense interest from schools with demanding MBA students and a shortage of qualified faculty to teach them.
Reconsider doctoral student admission criteria
Traditional methods of assessing candidates for a doctorate in business have been focused largely on predicting academic and research success (e.g., GMAT, GPA, research background). However, those traditional criteria may not be highly predictive of teaching performance (assuming they do predict research performance). Acknowledging this very phenomenon in their own disciplines, the legal and medical communities are increasingly overt in their distinctions between success in academic programs and in their respective fields (Lievens, Ones, & Dilchert, 2009; McGaghie, 1990; Schultz & Zedeck, 2008). We contend that, like our law and medical educator counterparts, it is time that we explicitly acknowledge that our existing entrance criteria are not strongly related to teaching excellence criteria. Admission criteria will only change if business schools, and the constituents they serve, are clear on the importance of teaching excellence for the next generation of professors. Enough of taking an applicant’s interest in teaching as a cause for concern! It is time that such interest and potential is treated as a key antecedent of success in the profession.
Identify one or more visible teaching champions
Better aligned incentives and targeted programs are critical, for sure, but a movement toward better teaching preparation will ultimately require people champions and maybe even something akin to “radicals” (e.g., Rosa Parks) to metaphorically refuse to get off the bus until action is taken. Indeed, while a single champion would be useful in an institution, two or more are even better particularly if they represent different doctoral specialties, for example, management and accounting. Otherwise, teaching may be seen as something “only people in management care about.” All the programs we highlight above had product champions. They need to be identified, held accountable, and rewarded. If there is no obvious teaching champion among the faculty, the default option is the doctoral program director. It should be part of that person’s job to make sure that the doctoral students are as prepared to be excellent teachers as they are to be excellent researchers.
Expand comprehensive exams to evaluate teaching as well as research
The timeless adage, “what gets measured gets done,” is certainly apt in doctoral education. So, we also recommend that doctoral programs begin to institute teaching evaluation as part of student development. That is, just as there is an oral defense of the dissertation in virtually every doctoral program, why should there not be a comparable oral defense of teaching? Here again, doctoral students are rational actors and will alter their behavior to fit the evaluation and reward system. Only when their programs include a demanding test of teaching competence will they truly take the preparation to teach seriously.
Clarify What Not to Do
Part of basic training in most disciplines also includes an emphasis on what not to do—or common mistakes that trained professionals always avoid. In medical training, this involves things like, “first do no harm.” To the extent that we can isolate effective teaching analogues (e.g., do not lecture for an entire class; give student feedback promptly), we could seek to create antibodies against those behaviors in novice teachers. Our observation of novice professor behaviors over the past 25 years suggests to us that we might have a positive effect on teaching performance if we could simply inoculate our novice instructors to avoid the most common and insidious mistakes.
One way to do this is to build a library of teaching cases and illustrations where things went awry—not hard to do among a group of experienced professors. One of our reviewers revealed a familiar story about a new instructor thrust into a new class during her first semester. The time investment was huge, the students rebelled, the teaching experience was a disaster, and it took the instructor a considerable amount of time to get over the “hangover.” Reverse engineering of failed teaching experiences often reveals many of the same failings—insufficient expectation setting at the outset; poor targeting to the audience level; too little variety in teaching mode; issues with evaluation and feedback; insufficient student engagement, and so on. Developing a lexicon of such predictable problems, and specific examples where they have occurred, is one vehicle for creating antibodies that help prevent such mistakes in new instructors.
Conclusion
In this essay, we have argued that there are no widely accepted standards among business doctoral programs for preparing candidates to teach and, while program directors espouse the value of teaching, the actual investment in formal teaching preparation is generally small and varies greatly. We have also tried to make explicit how the tensions between teaching program demands, legacy incentive systems, and structural determinants have led to the reality that preparation of doctoral candidates for teaching often falls to the lower rungs of the priority list.
A relatively recent advance in contemporary educational research is value-added analysis. It uses standardized test scores to look at how much the academic performance of students in a given teacher’s classroom changes between the beginning and the end of the year. Accumulating evidence suggests that students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in 1 school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material, and the cost to the school district of those two teachers is (usually) roughly the same (Rivkin, Hanushek, & Kain, 2005). Moreover, researchers have estimated that the gap between the test performance of U.S. students and those in other developed nations could be closed simply by replacing the bottom 6% to 10% of teachers with others of just average quality (Rivkin et al., 2005).
While the Rivkin et al. (2005) study comes from secondary education, we believe that this same type of value-added approach and mind-set is long overdue in doctoral teaching education discussions, and the urgency is great. What truly is the cost of a bad college teacher? More important, what is the value of competent ones and how much could we improve student achievement and healthy classrooms if we just modestly increased their stock? We clearly recognize that there are those who will take exception to our belief that more teaching preparation is warranted. We further suspect that they would say we have done an inadequate job of fully presenting the opposing arguments, which is no doubt true. So let us start that conversation, and let us do it before external groups, which do not share our values, history, or investment in our programs and students, start it for us.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We express our grateful appreciation to Rachel Edgington of the Graduate Management Admission Council’s Management Education and Research Institute for her assistance. We also thank the Journal of Management Education’s action editor and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This essay evolved from research supported by a grant from the Graduate Management Admission Council.