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Research, Biz Ed | - "Thoughts on the Improvement of Teaching Quality in Research-Oriented Schools"

Paul Danos, Dean Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

There are two endpoints in our academic efforts— 1) student learning and 2) new knowledge creation. There are tremendous debates about the connections between these two in business schools and the results of those debates will determine how business schools evolve.

Do we do enough in our PhD programs or with our faculties to help our professors develop the skills they need to be outstanding teachers? We certainly help in the development of their expertise through research support and encouragement, and that is essential, but the teaching skills part in underdeveloped for many of the professors who need it the most.

The interesting thing is that some professors don’t need much support for teaching because they are "naturals," who from the start are stars in the classroom. But some professors are not as naturally gifted and they could get to be much better teachers with the right resources and support. A major point is that teaching skills development should not come at the cost of reduced research support, because in my opinion the highest standard of teaching is when the substantive expert melds with the teaching expert. One good thing is that because the base expenditure on improving teaching skills is usually so low, doubling it would not be a significant percentage of a school’s budget, and it could do a lot of good in terms of student learning.

Tags(clickable): Paul Danos,  Tuck, PhD, teaching

Research | - "How should we train our PhDs?"

Paul Danos, Dean Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

In response to Dean Ininguez's entry on PhD programs, I agree wholeheartedly that professors must be skilled and dedicated teachers in addition to striving to push back the frontiers of knowledge in their fields.  One very complicated factor I have seen at many schools is the question of whether each and every faculty should be committed to dual excellence or should some specialize in teaching and others specialize in research?

Because top researchers are so rare and expensive to support, I would say that some may not be particularly devoted to MBA teaching but the majority who do teach MBA or other professional courses should be both excellent researchers and excellent teachers.  Most  of the top PhD programs do a small amount in the way of training teachers, primarily by  giving opportunities to teach a course or two or by being a teaching assistant, but they spend the vast majority of the program doing a fabulous job of training researchers. 

We should probably have a post-doctoral period where young PhD graduates could both hone their research skills and also really dig into both the theory and practice of good teaching.  The current system, is primarily "on-the-job" training where the  pressures and the stakes are very high.  This is probably not best for student learning. 

We need to also look at the other side of the imbalance, which is perhaps even more important.  There are so many non-researchers who teach a high percentage of the courses in some business schools and ideally they should get more training in interpreting high-quality research.  As I have said in other entries in this blog, the best teaching in MBA programs is done by those who are both cutting edge thought leaders and dedicated teachers.  In a world where perhaps as many as 30-40% or more of some programs are being taught by non-PhD's who do do necessarily follow the latest research findings, perhaps a concerted effort is needed to make them conversant with leading edge thinking.  Of course, they along with their PhD colleagues are not necessarily trained in good pedagogy. 

Research| - "PhD Programmes: Need of Reforms"

Santiago Iñiguez, Dean of Instituto de Empresa Business School.

PhD programmes are essential to the whole education system. They are the pool of future university researchers and teachers. Last week, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, a US based non-profit organisation dedicated to promote excellence in education, released the report "The Responsive PhD: Innovations in US Doctoral Education", an extremely interesting document on doctoral education in the US that calls for important reforms: "there have been too many words and too little action", it states. The report also comprises a series of successful initiatives developed in PhD programmes at different US universities.

I want to focus on two recommendations of this report. First, that pedagogy should be an important part of doctoral preparation. For some time, PhD programmes have focused almost exclusively on training academic researchers. This has been essential, but not sufficient. In fact, the omission of some other important facets, such as preparing candidates to teach effectively and to link with the corporate world, has reduced the potential development and the opportunities of PhD graduates.

Another recommendation is the need of connecting doctoral programmes with other major social stakeholders outside universities, mainly the organisations that may recruit or work with PhD graduates: "the doctorate in totality and in every discipline will benefit enormously by a continuing interchange with the worlds beyond academia", says the report.

This report should be very welcome and it comes at a time when there is a growing market for DBA (Doctor in Business Administration) programmes in Europe. Significantly, the Association of MBAs (AMBA) recently launched a new accreditation scheme aimed at DBA programmes, to cope with the increasing demmand from the market. I do not dare to dissect here the differences between PhDs in Management and DBAs. Maybe in some future post. But it seems that the latter category of programmes is where the growth will take place in the future.

Research | - "Comments at Academy of Management Conference, Hawaii"

Paul Danos, Dean Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

I had the opportunity to be on a panel at the Academy of Management conference in Hawaii last August where much of the discussion revolved around the value of academic research in a management program. Here are some of the thoughts I tried to express in that session:

When I look at the central question of value of research in a business school setting, my belief is that the understanding of business processes, best practices, theories, and methods will all grow in importance. In general, business professors who are leading researchers know, as well as anyone, best practices, and the efficacy of those practices. They have the advantage of studying a cross-section of companies and therefore they can generalize their findings beyond the single company or industry; and their research success depends on rigorous review of their work.

In the debate about the value of academic business research, one central question must be considered: What process is best at developing and teaching knowledge of business to our students? I believe that the research process, as practiced in top business schools, offers the best approach to giving students a forward looking and relatively accurate picture of the world in which they will work.

Some people criticize professors for a lack of understanding of general management processes and here the appeal is usually to a lack of “real business” experience for faculty and for students. I agree that some of what is important to an MBA student can be best taught experientially. For instance, areas like teamwork, leadership, ethics, and negotiations require some hands-on work, but even in those cases, research can and should inform the coverage.

Most of the material in the elective courses taught at Tuck is based on our faculty's expertise derived from their research, and I know the same is true for many other schools. These electives are very highly rated by students for relevance and effectiveness.

On balance, I believe in rigorous research as a way of unfolding knowledge of important business processes. I understand that different fields have different challenges in making progress and therefore are at different points in their development. Top researchers in business schools know a great deal about what can and cannot be legitimately said about those processes, and for the most part they work on important topics and are quite honest about what they know.

In general, there is much to admire in the schools with good MBA programs-innovation and response to markets, coverage of leadership, ethics, teamwork, entrepreneurship, technology, community action, communications, teaching quality, career development, and alumni services. In addition, business schools have found ways to support good research and professors have found ways to have that research become part of the learning process. In general, I know of no professional programs that have done more.

Research | - "My presentation on research at AMBA in Chile"

Santiago Iñiguez, Dean of Instituto de Empresa Business School.

Readers may trace the discussion on management research generated in the past weeks in this blog. We debated the meaning of research for business schools, the necessary link between research and teaching and what defines cutting-edge research. The discussion probably resembles a recurrent debate present in Academia since the beginnings: the tension between theory and practice, between speculative work and its adaptation to real life. You may recall one of the famous quotes attributed to Immanuel Kant: “Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play”. The same author also explained that creating a separation between theory and practice is fallacious. Theories that are not applicable in practice are just bad theories.

In late August I was invited by the Association of MBAs (AMBA) to talk on the balance between teaching and research at business schools, on the occasion of their conference for Latin American deans in Chile. There, I had the opportunity to revive the same debate about the right balance between theory and practice in research activities. The main conclusions of my presentation were the following. First, since management education has become “glocal” and has varied sources and different distribution channels, business schools need to find their own sources of differentiation. Second, that there is a need to stipulate a wide and comprehensive conception of research. A plausible solution is to use the concept RDI (research, development and innovation. You will find the contents of my contribution ("Session 4"), along with others at the same conference, here at the AMBA website.

Research | - "Impact and Opportunities."

Santiago Iñiguez, Dean of Instituto de Empresa Business School.

Kai Peters raises the issue of research on education and how could we measure the impact of the learning process on students. Business schools are probably the segment of higher education where impact is more closely monitored. This is reflected, for example, in the sophisticated systems to evaluate teaching performance at our schools or the processes in place to implement feedback from recruiters that hire our graduates. As regards executive education, some schools, along with specialized consultants and human resource departments, have developed mechanisms to measure the impact of tailored programs in the actual performance of attendees and the company itself. There are systems, with some limitations however, that can evaluate the return on sales or the increase in productivity attributable to educational programs.

At the same time, some of the prevalent methodologies implemented at MBA programs have become paradigmatic. The case method, for example, has the virtue of linking theory and practice by the application of concepts and tools to particular business situations, while at the same time allowing for the development of valuable skills of participants. Teamwork has also been fostered at our schools, preparing students for the working environments they will encounter in real life.

Another example of the constant search for suitable learning methods at business schools is the ongoing debate about how to instill a social responsible attitude in our students. If you just search in Google the item “can ethics be taught” you will find over 3 million entries, many of them referring to management education. I hope that this particular debate is already producing fruitful results. We see, for instance, an increasing number of MBA graduates who engage in social entrepreneurship.

Talking about research on educational methodologies, a major challenge we now face is how to take advantage of the opportunities that technology is offering us to optimize the learning process. All ideas are welcome here.

Research | - "A research challenge"

Kai Peters, Ashridge Business School.

I've been thinking recently that there is a research angle that business schools rarely address and we are working to change that.

The debate around research tends to follow along old familiar ground. Is the research too esoteric to be useful? Does a teacher have to be a researcher? Is the research too focussed because of the requirements of functional silos and their equivalent journals?

The area that has increasingly interested me is slightly different. My question is as follows: if we want to create programmes (MBAs, open courses, customized courses etc) that have an impact, should we not research management learning more, and actually use it for course design?

We have been working at thinking through what kind of an intervention works when and where. A part of the project involves a review of philosophy of education literature and much of it involves applying various aspects of adult psychology to educational programmes.

We have found that there is indeed a significant body of literature in this area, but it is not really applied to programme design. As an example, there is considerable evidence that action learning, practical approaches, reflection and thematic rather than subject teaching is important for business students to be successful. While we know this, MBA programmes, since they are often conducted in groups of 75 students per section, do not do this, but fall back on a talk-and-chalk sheep dip approach to learning.

Imagine what business education would look like if schools were really interested in impact??

Research | - "Need to find 'kangaroos' for our Faculties"

Santiago Iñiguez, Dean of Instituto de Empresa Business School.

Similarly to what happened in other sectors, management education has become global and this has affected the nature of management knowledge in terms of its content, origin, diffusion and relevance. An example is that the current sources of management research are multifarious, and authors in academic journals include not only business schools’ professors but also consultants, financial analysts and journalists, just to name a few. In this new global and brave world, some outsiders to education, such as consulting firms and investment banks, have sometimes more opportunities for originating new knowledge because of their larger resources and proximity to markets. In fact, the potential synergies between business schools and consultancies or other companies have prompted many joint alliances aimed at developing research.

Likewise, the channels of management knowledge diffusion, as Kai Peters points out, have become very varied and fuzzy. Here, Internet is making a big impact in the way business theories are currently being discussed and disseminated. Think, for example about collaborative online tools and Creative Commons. If we, as educators, aim at delivering the ultimate management inventions, we probably have to look also outside the canonical channels of diffusion.

These multifaceted origins and channels of management knowledge have driven some accreditation systems to amplify the meaning of research when it comes to assessing the quality of business schools. Some years ago, AACSB International opted to introduce a new concept, “intellectual contributions”, in order to cover a wide range of research outputs, from articles in refereed journals to teaching materials. On the other side of the Atlantic, EQUIS created a different category:  RDI (Research, Development & Innovation), which goes beyond a narrow conception of academic research and allows candidate schools to define the nature and forms of its knowledge processes and products according to their mission.

Globalisation is affecting decisively the meaning of management knowledge. Like Della Bradshaw and Dean Danos, I believe that cutting-edge research should be an essential activity at business schools and is the necessary basis for excellence in teaching. Some analysts characterise teaching as opposed to research when it comes to defining the ideal profile of a faculty member. But this opposition is fallacious. My experience, in line with what Dean Danos states, is that the most successful and sought-after professors, by corporate clients for example, are also those who excel both in research and performance in class. The challenge for business school deans is how to attract and retain the “kangaroos”, i.e., those professors that combine a remarkable research and teaching profile and have ample practical experience. This is becoming increasingly difficult in our global industry.

Research | - "Are the Perspectives of Academic Researchers too Narrow?"

Paul Danos, Dean Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

Both Della Bradshaw and Kai Peters are rightly concerned with the relevance to students of different kinds of research. Do faculty who publish at the refereed journal level have the perspectives on their topics that would lead to their teaching being special? Or more broadly, what process is best one to develop and teach the knowledge our students need? I believe that the research process as practiced in top business schools offers the best chance of giving students a forward looking and relatively accurate picture of the world in which they will work. Sometimes we assume that our academic researchers are narrowly focused and that non-researcher teachers give a broader perspective, but I believe that it can be just the opposite. The top researchers give generalizations based on sampling of populations and/or very general principles. So, for instance, when they generalize about the effects of promotions on subsequent sales, they are not talking about one company or one person's experiences but about the class of companies under study. In a sense, they can be broader in their perspective and they are not limited by their own personal experiences. Of course, the “scientific research” approach to management studies does not always work well, and there are many great teachers who do not actively engage in that process. However, I believe that the practice at most high-quality schools to reward great teaching done by great researchers is rational and justified. As business education expands to new populations, we must look at the costs associated with research and decide on adaptations needed to make solid and relevant research a part of the education of all business leaders.

Research | - "Research constraints"

Kai Peters, Chief Executive, Ashridge Business School

Research means different things to different people. In the most abstract sense, research must surely mean looking at the world, thinking about things, and adding some new insights. In that sense, research must clearly inform teaching and the better the insights are, the better the teaching will be.

It is at the more specific level, however, that the debates begin in the business education arena and it is in many ways a debate about channels of diffusion. At the top of the academically recognized hierarchy sit academically peer reviewed articles published in journals fundamentally aimed at an internal, university audience. And, as many have pointed out, these journals tend to have narrow subject-specific foci, tend to a quantitative perspective, and are oftentimes written in impenetrable prose.

Subsequent members of the queue include refereed conference presentations and focussed scholarly chapters. From an academic world view, popular books, broadly-based syntheses, cross-functional collaborations, cases, articles and the like, are simply not considered serious scholarship no matter how influential they may actually be.

One must also be aware that this situation is not institutionally specific, but systemic. The reward system for faculty is based on counting the output recognized by the academic community as valuable, funding is based on this, promotion is based on this, tenure is based on this.

The challenging question is how can one return to a more broadly defined view of what constitutes valuable research when the system is set up for the narrow view. While I'm sure that university-based business schools will exist long into the future and will research and publish significant amounts of valuable material, it will be critical for students who want to make sense of the world to cast their nets more widely, to think for themselves and to look beyond universities for interesting and insightful research wherever it may be published.

What if, for example, someone posts the best idea of all time, based on verified research and using proper scientific method, on this blog? Would that be research? Would it be considered valuable?

We'll have to wait and see!!