When John Donaldson first joined the Columbia Business School faculty in 1977, efforts to cultivate the teaching skills of faculty members were wholly informal. “There was always a concern for teaching, but it was often reflected in the kindness of other faculty members, people who would sit in on less experienced faculty members’ classes and help out,” says Donaldson, the Mario J. Gabelli Professor of Finance and academic director of the Doctoral Program, and a 2001 recipient of a Columbia University Presidential Teaching Award.
Formal teaching initiatives have increasingly replaced the early voluntary gestures of colleagues, and today Columbia is one of only a handful of business schools that make extensive efforts to cultivate teaching in their ranks.
Some of these efforts underscore the School’s strength in combining theory and practice to ensure that the most relevant materials are used in the classroom. Master Classes, for example, frequently pair faculty members with industry experts to lead students as they take on consulting projects that address current business challenges, such as creating new financial products for an investment bank or helping entrepreneurs in Tanzania create a strategic plan for the expansion of a hotel.
Other efforts focus on further refining the existing curriculum or seeking new ways to promote teaching. Most recently, the Dean’s Office convened a two-day teaching retreat with members of the Executive Committee and the Teaching and Curriculum Committee, senior faculty members representing each division who are charged with strategizing and planning for additional initiatives to promote teaching quality, including increased integration of content in the recently revised core curriculum.
The Arthur J. Samberg Institute for Teaching Excellence is the centerpiece of the School’s commitment to teaching. Endowed in 2002 by Board of Overseers member Arthur J. Samberg ’67 and led by Professor Amir Ziv, vice dean and Samberg Faculty Director, the institute runs a daylong orientation for new faculty members and administers a series of annual prizes that recognize the very best of classroom teaching.
At the heart of the institute’s efforts is the faculty mentoring program. The mentoring program pairs new, less experienced faculty members with those who are more experienced for guidance both before and during their professorial teaching debut at the School.
Junior faculty members typically come without significant teaching experience directly from PhD programs. “All of our faculty members have enormous command of their subjects. It’s a question of how they get the ideas and information across,” says Harriett Wagman ’97, director of teaching quality at the Samberg Institute. “It appeared that if we could do something for the first-time teachers, then we could improve the quality of teaching. And most of teaching is teachable. You can develop everyone.” Wagman credits then senior vice dean Awi Federgruen, the Charles E. Exley Professor of Management and chair of the Decision, Risk and Operations Division, with the idea.
“It helps for a faculty member to be charismatic, but many of our most excellent teachers are not what you’d call charismatic, and they don’t necessarily tell jokes,” Wagman says. “They have good presence, they’re very clear in their presentation and they have good examples that pertain to business. That sounds obvious, but when you’re managing a graduate course and you have to do work to be timely, that’s not easy.”
The mentoring program eases new faculty members into teaching: rather than requiring them to teach in their first semester, the program allows them to spend their first term observing and interacting with their mentor. Junior faculty members observe all of their mentor’s courses and attend weekly meetings with their mentor to review how classes went, why certain questions or topics were handled as they were and plans for future sessions. In the second term, new faculty members teach a limited course load. As with other disciplines, teaching excellence is achieved through systematic practice and mastery of fundamental principles, all emphasized by the mentoring program.
“The first and most important thing for students,” says Bruce Greenwald, the Robert Heilbrunn Professor of Finance and Asset Management and the recipient of many teaching awards at the School, as well as a 2000 Columbia University Presidential Teaching Award, “is that they understand the material, that you can convey to them how it fits together, how it facilitates their learning, and that you do so in a way that they’ll remember it and be able to use it. For those purposes, the most important part happens before you step into the classroom.”
Donaldson agrees. “I always think, ’How can I do this in a way so that each idea follows naturally from the one that precedes it?’” he says. “I spend a lot of time on preparation, even though I teach mostly material I’ve taught before.”
In part, preparation involves taking stock of new research and recent market developments to incorporate relevant material into lectures and cases. Equally, it means being perpetually attuned to the audience. “For any teacher,” Donaldson says, “the most difficult thing to master—and this takes awhile—is to acquire some understanding of your audience and how they might think. Our students are very smart, but there is a huge range of experience in any given room. Some come from careers where their minds have to work in much more intuitive, less analytic ways. So you have to think carefully about how you prepare.”
But faculty members recognize that the teaching challenge represented by their students’ diverse range of experiences is also a teaching opportunity. “If I’m discussing, say, the chemical industry,” Donaldson says, “and I have a student in the classroom with experience in that field, I’ll ask that student to share some insights.”
For Laurie Hodrick, the A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Economics in the Faculty of Business, capitalizing on relevant connections extends to the city and world outside the classroom door. “I might teach a theory one day, a case illustrating that theory the next day and have the principal in that case come to the class on a third day to discuss the hows and whys of the case, how things really played out,” says Hodrick, who has won a number of teaching prizes at the School and, like Donaldson and Greenwald, is a recipient of a Columbia University Presidential Teaching Award, in 2006.
Above all, professors must be themselves. “I used to joke that my effective use of humor is to have none,” Hodrick says. “I’m not funny, so I don’t try to be an entertainer. People have to be true to themselves, to their own style. I always encourage new faculty members, ’The more you are true to whoever you are outside the classroom, the better teacher you’ll be in the classroom.’” Those styles, she says, can be shockingly different, “but we share certain values, putting the heart and the mind into it.”
A careful review of student evaluations can also help professors tweak their material and delivery. But evaluations have one significant limitation, Wagman notes: “Students sometimes have a very short-term perspective on the use of a course; a lot of students want things to be very applied and want to immediately see how they’re going to use a course in their first job, and that’s understandable. But our goal is to prepare them for a lifetime, a career.”
The best mentor-protégé pairs learn from each other, Wagman says. “Some experienced faculty members say they learned from the person they were mentoring. It’s as if a very accomplished student in your class were to give you high-level feedback,” she says. One senior faculty member decided to go to a teaching-skills coach despite his success and, Wagman reports, learned a lot and picked up some great pointers.
It is perhaps that singular openness to simultaneously acting as both student and teacher that is the mark of the best educators. “I work as hard now on class as I did when I was a new teacher,” Hodrick says. “It’s an ongoing effort to improve the learning opportunity, to reconsider what you’re doing, how you’re doing it and why you’re doing it. The art of teaching is never perfected.”
