Yes!

I am an enthusiastic YES to the question raised by Marx, Garcia, Butterfield, Kappen, and Baldwin (2015). It is time we did something about the lack of teaching preparation in business schools. And Marx and colleagues show that several exemplary Ph.D. programs already do so, from Boston College and the University of Michigan to the University of Massachusetts–Amherst and St. Louis University.

I offer some ideas in this commentary to contribute to the depth and nature of the developments needed, building on the important issues Marx and colleagues raise. As background, my university has a powerful resource in this effort, a world-class teaching center (the Eberly Center) that helps faculty learn evidence-based teaching principles and practices. Some of those are organized into a book, How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching (Ambrose, Bridges, DiPietro, Lovell, & Norman, 2010), which I have found very useful both in preparing my own classes and in understanding the challenges that managerial learners face in becoming more effective practitioners.

My first point is that our doctoral students need to acquire generalizable teaching principles and competencies. These principles include the following (Ambrose et al., 2010):

It is important to know such basic principles but applying them well requires more than just familiarity. It takes active learning via varied examples and practice in course development and execution, reflection, and feedback, to start our students on the path to developing effective teaching competencies. Our doctoral students will benefit from a structured and supportive environment in which to learn and practice effective approaches to teaching.

My second point is that our doctoral students need to develop insight and capabilities for dealing with subject-matter-specific teaching issues. Business school subjects may not seem like rocket science, but in many cases they may be more difficult to learn than the physical sciences. Physics teachers do not necessarily have to overcome false beliefs in their students regarding the way the physical world operates. But false beliefs and inaccurate knowledge must be overcome in the effective teaching of Organizational Behavior, Human Resource Management, and other behavioral areas.

False beliefs and inaccurate knowledge must be challenged, unlearned, and revised before more accurate evidence-informed knowledge can be acquired. It is not enough to merely expose students to accurate information, particularly when they hold long-standing beliefs and heart-felt assumptions. Whether it is the belief that money is the most important motivator or unshakeable faith in the validity of the unstructured selection interview, generations of graduates from business schools behave like “flat-earthers,” ignoring all evidence to the contrary in their day-to-day decisions. (And they probably had no trouble passing the course!) Importantly, research that addresses the accuracy of practitioner beliefs (see Rynes, Colbert, & Brown, 2002) can help make our teaching more effective by providing tools to identify the nature of the beliefs our students hold. Armed with that knowledge we are in a better position to begin creating learning experiences that help unfreeze unfounded beliefs, readying students to learn more effectively.

Another reason business school teaching requires well-prepared faculty has to do with the role that core concepts play in student learning. In recent years, learning scholars have identified the importance of threshold concepts. These are core understandings students must acquire before their learning of a given subject can progress. Threshold concepts identified in other fields include depreciation in accounting, opportunity costs in economics, and gravity in engineering. Our doctoral students need to know what these threshold concepts are and how to create effective learning experiences around them in order for graduate and undergraduates business students to learn successfully. Indeed, the Journal of Management Education recently published a special issue devoted to threshold concepts in business school teaching (Wright & Hibbert, 2015).

To teach management-related subjects, business students need to develop and have certain perceptions or experiences in order to grasp a subject’s fundamentals. How can young faculty know how to create such experiences if they do not know (a) what the threshold concepts might be and (b) how to teach them? Such concepts can include the importance of cognitive limits or bounded rationality, for example. The limits to rational action imposed by human cognition can be difficult for students to accept and act on appropriately. The notion of bounded rationality may come to mind when they see the term on a test, but that is no guarantee they will incorporate the concept appropriately into their own managerial reasoning and action. Too often the environments our business students encounter adopt the guise of rationality to legitimate organizational actions, with little attention to bias reduction or decision supports.

Research on learning and education makes it quite clear that opportunities to practice are critical to both learning and effective transfer beyond the classroom (Ambrose et al., 2010). Contemporary management textbooks are poor guides to effective practice, often reflecting what publishers believe faculty like to teach rather than evidence-based specifications of core subject-matter concepts that are organized in a fashion that promotes effective learning. Dear colleagues, we ourselves need to identify the core concepts and effective modes of teaching them. Nobody else is there to do it.

Recognition is growing that how best to effectively teach a subject is itself an important scholarly activity for a particular domain’s researchers and educators. Just as physicists do research on how to teach physics (Reif, 2008), business school educators need to systematically study and apply research on how to effectively teach management. We have exemplary colleagues who have done so in specific areas (in teaching negotiations, e.g., Loewenstein, Thompson, & Gentner, 2002).

One consequence of focusing on the development of teaching capabilities in our doctoral students may be to call attention to opportunities for more such systematic study of effective teaching strategies in the management domain. Research on how to effectively teach in the business school environment is a critical but often neglected activity among management scholars. Thanks to the ideas of Marx and colleagues and the important research published in the Journal Management Education we have a good start on how to go about developing critical teaching competencies in business school doctoral students.

A lot of important things can happen when we say YES.