Memoir Retirement

Preparing to Teach

Preparing to Teach

I taught at the graduate level at Cornell’s business school for ten years. I performed well enough to get myself promoted from Executive-in-Residence to full Clinical Professor of Finance. That felt like an accomplishment to me since I would never consider myself as academically oriented. The academy requires a degree of rigor that doesn’t suit me. I respect such rigor, but I know my general level of impatience and know that I am unlikely to be driven to apply that degree of diligence to what is essentially a theoretical task. That all said, I do take my storytelling very seriously and put lots of time into weaving my stories together in such a way as to insure the right narrative arc to make the story both engaging and fulfilling to the reader. I have become a bit of a student of storytelling in an informal way because I use it so much in all the things I do. I use storytelling in my business role to create and sell a vision (both internally and externally). Leading a start-up venture requires good storytelling since the financial tale is generally unfulfilling in that there are few, if any, revenues to speak for the business. I use storytelling in my expert witness work. I study a case, analyze the data and then craft a narrative of what the import issues are that make or defend the position I represent. Both of those roles are about advocacy and both require a great deal of information synthesis and weaving. Making the arguments compelling is often the difference between success and failure. Teaching is not so different.

When I was at Cornell I was always surprised that the administration and senior faculty did not spend much (actually, any) time in my classroom listening to me lecture. They had heard me talk in gatherings that were of a more exposition or presentation, but not so much of my teaching per se. They let the evaluations flow and inform them as well as the trends on enrollment, since the student grapevine drove course selection among electives. Their assumption was that their students were the ultimate in educated consumers and they understood better than anyone what was helpful to them and what was not. In many ways that was a very intelligent way to go about the process since most of the senior faculty and administration were far more of the academy than of the practicum. They probably felt they knew less how to evaluate practical lessons and data, much less how best to teach it to students that wanted to learn applied skills.

My evaluations, both for my course subjects and materials and for my personal teaching methods were always strong. I taught enough students that I was ranked alongside the top 150 teachers in the school and was ranked 11th overall. That top decile performance made me feel good because I was only ever doing this part time and as more of an avocation than a primary activity. I also had a great deal of respect for the ten professors who were better ranked than me and I knew them well enough to know that they were delivering an engaging product to the students for reasons I could understand. It all made sense to me.

My storytelling was such a big part of my teaching style that my classes took on the informal title of “Story Time with Rich”. I liked that because it said that they appreciated the familiarity with which I engaged with them, treating them more like young associates than as students and I was more of a coach than a pedagogue. As a storyteller, I also fervently believed that teaching through storytelling was the best way to lock in lessons. So, as I reengage with teaching next month, I am less focused on the teaching material (I have all my old lectures on the topic of Project Financing) than I am on the stories I will tell. To begin with, I, like every other teacher on the planet, have to figure out how to adjust my style for optimal impact through the Zoom format. I view that as both a technical issue (which I will practice and hone ahead of time) and a style issue, which I will think through and prearrange the flow and process as best I can. I am in luck in that as of now I only have ten in my class, which is small and easily managed. That will allow me more room for personal interaction, which takes part of the showmanship[ burden off of me. But the stories are still important to properly prepare and delineate for the lessons they are meant to convey. There are certain theme I want to emphasize and that means there are certain stories more worthwhile than others. The best impact will come from a montage or natural flow of stories that help me take the students through the concepts I find most useful. Clearly, the most effective stories are the ones that cause the students to think and come to their own conclusions about the central themes. This is the process we all call internalization, and it is the best way to have things stick.

Today I went through a first technical session with an administrative person at University of San Diego. SHe walked me through their version of Blackboard, that ubiquitous class management program that almost all Universities seem to use (or at least both Cornell and USD use). I started using Blackboard in 2007, so it is a relatively old and stable platform that allows the teacher to make announcements, post assignments and readings, check their roster and allow students the ability to easily access the course materials, including video copies of the lectures, to allow them to optimize their educational experience. I speak about students as educated consumers because most of them in these graduate programs are both older and quite a bit wiser about what they want to get out of their high-priced, time-consuming education. Some may still be shopping for the degrees, but most are seeking knowledge, which is pretty heartwarming to most teachers. And the knowledge they all want more than anything else is how to get ahead in business and be successful. There are very few reasons to take these courses other than that. They know that and we know that.

So, I now have the necessary tools for setting up Blackboard for my course. The next task is to set up my Zoom account and protocol. Both tools need to be considered carefully in the context of this COVID educational environment. I used to use Blackboard as a pure backstop in my prior courses, but I suspect it will be more central in this setting. As for Zoom, I have to review that functionality and probably use this as the opportunity to sharpen my Zoom skills. I need to be sure to find the optimal format for displaying Powerpoints and Videos, something you take for granted when you walk into a classroom with a thumb drive, which is what I used to do.

I am taking teaching seriously as I always have. Some of that is because it is a “sacred oath”, but mostly its about believing in the value of what I have learned and what I think students can get out of it. So, I am preparing to teach and I just hope all ten are prepared to learn.

2 thoughts on “Preparing to Teach”

  1. A masterful essay On teaching anything. As I remember, Harvard business school based its curriculum in case studies, ie. stories.

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