Week 6 – What makes a good teacher?

(S – Students  P – Professor)

S: I do not have one favorite teacher inspiring me, but I like some aspects of different teachers. For example, they care about the students, not just the number of scores. In my class, I try to remember students’ names. It’s hard, but it is something good to try. It shows that you care about them.

S: My favorite teacher is my advisor when I was a master student. When I started research, I knew little about it. My advisor gave me a lot of hands-on advices such as how to collect data, how to write a paper. She was busy, but she still spent a lot of time on student. Besides, she is very passionate about her research. She is a role model for me.

S: I want to talk about my Chinese verbal teacher in my 7^th grade. At that time, I was very shy and not good at speak in front of people. The teacher made a lot of try to encourage me. For example, he asked us to describe a latest news in front of class every week. He tried to open my mind and speak in public. He changed my life.

P: A good teacher is someone inspired you. He or she cares about students, gives an opportunity to change the student’s life. It is hard to say which aspect is the most important, there are different aspects matter for students in different stages.

S: My favorite teacher is a mathematics teacher who helped me in the college entrance exam. With his help, I became strong in Calculus at that time.

S: I think for a teacher, it is hard to inspire every student. But there are a lot of little things you could do. You need to be organized, preparing for the class, doing a good time management, sending students emails to remind them of homework.

P: I know there are professors who have a class at 9:00. They will arrive at 9 and start to prepare for the slides, then the exact time when the class begins will be 9:05. Do not do that. You should arrive earlier for preparation work. This is a small thing, but it’s important. You need to show that you are ready, well prepared and professional.

S: I like the teachers who do not just teach based on the lecture notes or textbooks. They will extend from the text book and teach something else within the current topic. And a good teacher should be encouraging, always inspire students. They should be approachable, not only in class, but also by email, office hours though they might be busy.

P: The teacher need to be a good guy. You could not be a different person in class through the whole semester. If a teacher is not a good person, he or she doesn’t care about students. Students will know that.

S: And a teacher should think the course is important and put effort in it. If the teacher doesn’t think the course is important for them, the students would not think it’s important.

P: This is what I am doing for this class. Teaching a doctoral seminar means I need to spend one day to reading all the papers which we will discuss each week. Compared to teaching undergraduate or MBA courses, teaching doctoral seminar means more effort.

S: One teacher I like often thought of some games or tools to help us understand the difficult concepts. He was well prepared, and students will know that he put many efforts in it.

P: You mean that the class is not just about lectures, right? Here is something very important. The more you talk, the lower your teaching evaluation would be. A good teacher should interact with students, provide many different ways for students to understand. There is a study about different ways for learning: Reading textbook, listening to teachers, talking as a group, watching videos, practicing and teaching others. Reading and listening are not the most effective ways because they are passive learning methods. Teaching is a very good way. I am practicing this method right now. Each week I asked you to summarize the paper and explain it to others, it is a good way to understand the paper.  Something fuzzy might become clear when you explain to others. And I always asked you to tell us what you think in your mind. Something will become concrete when you organize it in your mind.

S: Sometimes a big name in academia will inspire students.

P: I think it is very important to inspire students, but it is difficult.

S: Doctoral students are motivated, but for undergraduate students, some of them do not care about the classes. They even do not want to make a cheat sheet for exams, it seems that they do not care about this degree.

P: This is the 2^nd point I want to emphasize. It is very important to convince your students why this course is very important. Especially for MIS field, although students are forced to take core IS course, they do not think it is necessary for business students. I spent a lot of time to explain why we need to care about technology and this IS course. For those which are not core course, students choose them because they have enough motivation. But for core course, the teacher should try to convince them.

Another key ability a good teacher should have is to think from the student’s perspective. When you are designing slides and homework, think about effectiveness from a student’s perspective. Are they going to enjoy this? It is not saying that just to make students happy. But we need to make the course durable, enjoyable and student could learn something from it. One example is about deadline. If you set the homework deadline to Friday, there is always students asking whether they could have an extension.  So you could specify the penalty, for example 10% deduction after Friday submission. Things could happen to students so there should be some flexibilities.

Here is something I found useful when I am teaching. I will give unofficial grades in the middle of the semester. Because students are anxious when they are waiting for the final grading. If I tell them the unofficial grades of B- in the middle of the semester, they would be not that surprise when they find their final grading is B because they already know their performance.

S: I think it is good if you give students feedbacks. I will tell students their performance in the previous sections. If they don’t do well, they still have a chance to fix it. In addition, I will design the course to make sure it includes different ways for grading, test, group study, project, etc.

P: Business school usually emphasize active learning. They care about students’ participation, but sometimes they just kill introverts. There is an article online “When Schools Overlook Introverts”. When I was in University of Michigan, I was required to take MBA courses in Marketing and Finance. It was a nightmare. Look back the experience, I knew that someone just hate participation in class. So, I use in-class participation and online participation when I am teaching. Students love that. The principle behind this is, understand what the students think.

S: That’s what I did in class. If someone likes answering questions, let them do. If someone don’t like it, don’t force them.

P: It is true that some students will dominate the class. Sometimes I will wait and ask whether someone else would like to answer the questions. Teaching is important, you have to put effort, try to get high teaching evaluations, and develop your own best practice. When you just at the beginning, you need to take a lot of effort, but it will get easier after you figure out all of these. There is a resource which would be helpful –  Temple University Center for the Advancement of Teaching. There are several programs and events you could take. When you are doing a TA, you could learn a lot by actively involved in the class. There are two senior students sitting in my class, we will review the class together after each class. What went well, what went wrong. They could learn a lot from it.

S: I have a question about how to arrange the time for your teaching work. I think most of the research universities require teachers to teach three each year.

P: Yes. There is a tip when you are choosing the university if you have options. Life in a university with big undergraduate program will be easier. Because the same course will be opened multiple times, then you just need to prepare for one course material but teach them several times. It is good for both teaching and research.