Robert McDonald

Teaching Philosophy

“The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.”  I have adopted this philosophy of Mark Van Doren, the Pulitzer Prize winning poet and Columbia University professor who nurtured several great minds of the twentieth century including Thomas Merton and Allen Ginsberg.  Too often, we try to push knowledge onto our students without regard to how well they absorb it.  Effective teaching requires the instructor to create conditions that enable students to learn as much as they can through active pursuit.  This means making the material accessible to students, encouraging high student involvement, and emphasizing learning rather than grades.  Most importantly, it means making the students an active part of the learning process, discovering knowledge rather than simply absorbing it.  Although active learning takes different forms in undergraduate and graduate classes, it is crucial in both cases for successful learning.

The atmosphere in my class is relaxed, but professional.  I want students to feel comfortable, rather than pressured.  If they enjoy the learning process, they should become more involved in the process and consequently learn better.  By maintaining professionalism in the classroom, the students also realize that they have responsibilities to themselves and their classmates.  They must come to class, complete assignments on time, study the material for exams, and treat each other with respect.  Sometimes this respect can be as simple as turning off a cell phone prior to class.  Every student is encouraged to ask questions, to challenge the instructor, and to actively participate in class discussions.

I treat students with the respect that every person deserves.  I am always shocked to hear of faculty who mistreat students, and wonder how they can possibly maintain an effective teaching relationship.  Every successful relationship begins with a basic level of mutual respect; otherwise it is doomed to failure.  Intimidating students in order to manage behavior is counter-productive to learning.  It may create more time for the faculty member to focus on research, but it fails to fulfill the obligation to educate our students.

In the Rawls College of Business, our classes are quite large.  I have taught several sections of a senior-level elective with more than 150 students.  In an attempt to foster a relationship with the students, I work hard to at least learn their names and something personal about each of them.  Every student submits an information sheet at the beginning of the semester.  The only required questions on the sheet are their name, their photograph, and contact information.  Most students answer the optional questions as well, which ask for important information like major, career ambition, and work experience.  However, there are a number of silly questions (favorite Brittany Spears song) to help break down the barriers between students and the professor.  In an effort to encourage participation, I share my own information sheet, complete with my college identification card.  Invariably, I find something on the information sheets that enables me to make a connection with each student, and even more importantly, to tailor my lectures to their experiences and interests.  It might be their hometown, their favorite book, or their favorite vacation spot.

It is important for a professor to take risks in the classroom, even if it puts her/him in a somewhat vulnerable position.  This creates a more comfortable atmosphere where the students can feel secure in participating, especially in large classes.  Sharing my own information sheet is one example of such a risk.  Trying something innovative is not always going to lead to success, but I have found that making the effort strengthens the ability to reach the students.  It has not harmed my ability to maintain a professional atmosphere in any way, but it has increased students’ interest and involvement in the course.  Students appreciate the effort made by faculty members in the classroom.

In one sense, the students are our customers, and we must strive to provide the highest level of customer service that we can.  This means working diligently to ensure that they learn, and that they develop academically and personally.  Students have a big responsibility in this process, and our job is to help them to achieve success.  That means fully preparing lectures, never “winging it,” teaching with enthusiasm, and being accessible outside of the classroom, in person, by telephone, and by email.

My style of teaching is purposefully unique.  I want the students to view their learning experience in my class as something different, something that holds their interest and helps them to learn.  I want them to look forward to the class, to come to class ready to learn.  I always arrive early, in part to demonstrate that teaching is important to me.  As students file into the class, I play music: rock, jazz, blues, rap, country, or classical.  This serves as a transition ritual, creating a setting that is different from other classes.  The students come to recognize it as a transition, and when the music stops, they turn their attention to the class.  Depending on the music selected, I have noticed different effects on the class mood.  I have experimented with different types of music, and have found that when I play upbeat music prior to examinations, students tend to earn slightly higher grades.  There also seems to be something humanizing about the music, helping to foster a relationship between the students and myself that is more amenable to learning.  Again, it helps to break down institutionalized barriers and open communication.

I try to be animated in my lectures, roving around the lecture hall, telling jokes or stories to keep the students alert, and involving them in examples, exercises, and discussions.  It is not unusual to feel like I have just come from the gym after a lecture.  I find that moving, lecturing from the back of the room, or even from a seat in the middle of the class will help keep students involved.  At the very least, it is unusual, and thus keeps their attention.  One of the nicest comments that I have received from a student on an evaluation form is that I am passionate about teaching.  It seems that a professor’s enthusiasm for education helps the students to develop their own passion for learning.  I believe that learning will occur best when the student is involved.  Developing that involvement is an important goal of my teaching methods.

To that end, I use humor extensively in my class.  I tell corny jokes and entertaining stories.  Usually, they tie into the material, but the primary purpose is to keep students alert and involved.  I try to make the learning process fun.  As a change of pace, the review for the second exam each semester in the undergraduate class is a quiz show.  I award silly, inexpensive (<$1) prizes for correct answers.  Prizes have included: a jar of bubbles, a protractor, a package of coat hangers, and a package of pudding.  Students are very competitive as they try to win these silly prizes, and they become quite involved in the review process.  Although having fun is an important element of my teaching style, I am always vigilant about the content of the humor, and avoid anything inappropriate.  I always maintain respect for my students and my classroom.

Prior to entering a doctoral program, I spent twenty years working in industry.  The experience gained through my career has proven to be a valuable asset in teaching business classes.  With limited, and often no business experience, most students lack the proper framework within which to learn about marketing.  I use my experience to help create that framework, to emphasize and clarify certain points, to make the material accessible to the students.  That does not mean wasting time telling war stories, but rather bringing the dry, academic presentations of many of the textbooks to life, making them vivid through real examples.  After graduation, many students write to me to tell me how much they learned in my class and now that they are in a business setting they can see that.  It is not unusual for me to continue teaching these alumni.  Last year for example, a former student wrote that she had just started a new job selling copier services for a small company in the Pacific Northwest, and needed help trying to find customers.  Over a period of several weeks, and a dozen emails, the former student started experiencing success, finding new clients, including a fellow Red Raider.

Too often, students are overly concerned with grades rather than learning.  I structure my classes so that students have ample opportunity to earn reasonably good grades through a variety of tasks including exams, cases, papers, quizzes, exercises, and class participation.  I believe that I have been successful in shifting the emphasis to learning.  To this end, all lecture slides are posted on my web page so that they can be downloaded prior to class for note taking.  I review before each exam, so students can better organize the material for study.  Although I am forced to use multiple-choice exams in the undergraduate course because of the size of the classes, I work hard to develop questions that require thought and analysis, not rote memorization.  I often spend a full day creating an exam that tests the students’ grasp of the material, not their memories.  One student, who earned the lowest passing grade in my class, wrote to me several months after graduation.  She was successfully applying the principles of the class in a sales position for a local distributor.  Although she did not earn a good grade, she learned and consequently was successful in her first job.

In addition to teaching the academic material, I believe that I have a responsibility to teach the student how to practice business in an ethical manner.  I emphasize personal and business integrity, and the importance of treating everyone you encounter in a respectful way.  This includes coworkers, customers, and employees.  Furthermore, I emphasize the responsibility of a manager to protect employees from unethical behavior, including sexual harassment and other forms of discrimination.  I encourage them to develop a personal philosophy of ethical business behavior.  This may include leaving unethical employers, or not doing business with unethical customers.

I encourage my students to develop their careers so that they are personally rewarding.  I emphasize that you should enjoy your job, so that you can have a satisfying life.  I counsel them to forgo higher salaries in the short term, if necessary to develop their career successfully.  Every semester, at least one of my students changes career paths upon graduation, often to pursue graduate studies in education.  One former student left a promising career in sales, and now works for a non-profit organization that supports homeless people.

I use myself as an example of someone who chose pursuit of a satisfying and rewarding career over salary; that I am able to pursue this career with enthusiasm.  Teaching is my passion, and I pursue it with a great deal of energy.  I work hard to keep my lectures fresh.  I continuously look for ways to improve my teaching, through innovative materials and processes.  I learn from other successful teachers, like Debbie Laverie, who has mentored me in teaching since I arrived at Texas Tech University, and who has taught me the importance of active learning.  I always ask my students for suggestions on how to improve the class, and every semester, I incorporate some of their suggestions.  I have attended teaching seminars through the Teaching Learning and Technology Center, and was a fellow at Wakonse South in 2002 and at the American Association for Higher Education annual conference in 2003.  This past semester, I incorporated a service-learning component into my undergraduate class.

When I began teaching as a doctoral student, I asked my younger brother for advice.  At the time, he taught special education in an inner-city high school in New York City.  He told me that students wanted their teachers to work hard, to be fair, and most importantly, to care.  I have tried to practice these standards in my career.