Dear friends:
“Tell us what kind of teaching innovations you have used in the classroom,” is a common question graduating PhD students face when interviewing for a university faculty position. As someone who has sat on the other side of that question on many occasions, I can attest that many candidates struggle to provide an answer that demonstrates a truly “innovative” approach to instruction.
Teaching a college class of 70 students for the first time can be daunting. The Carson College was one of the first universities in the country to offer business-specific courses on college teaching. We help new PhD teachers at Carson by providing teaching sessions during their first-year professional development course and through a required weekly teaching seminar focusing on a balance of teaching theory and tactics. Most students also receive individual mentoring from a faculty member, and faculty often share notes and other teaching materials with students.
We help new teachers in the Carson College by providing teaching sessions during our first-year professional development course and by requiring one of the few business-school-specific courses on college teaching offered in the country. Most students also receive individual mentoring from a faculty member, and faculty often share notes and other teaching materials with students.
But what does “classroom innovation” mean?
Classroom innovation can take several forms. Examples include creating an interactive game, incorporating AI into a previous assignment, developing a fun assignment related to students’ experiences, developing new industry projects, or finding other unique ways to encourage class participation. Developing such innovations can be challenging and risky, which is why so few graduate students around the country try it.
My former PhD student, Gihan Edirisinghe, showed tremendous initiative in this respect one summer. Seeing an opportunity to bring in voices from outside the Pullman area, he developed a remote guest speaker series engaging Cougar alumni. Gihan secured a teaching room capable of two-way video calls. He used LinkedIn to identify and recruit successful Cougs working in areas relevant to the course. Students researched the speakers and prepared questions, which were reviewed by the instructor prior to the speakers selecting which questions to address in their presentation. The students loved the series. Recently, Gihan and I published a paper describing this approach in INFORMS Transactions on Education, a peer-reviewed journal focused on teaching and learning in operations research, analytics, and management science.
As you might guess, this effort allowed Gihan to separate himself from most other candidates interviewing for faculty positions when he finished his PhD at Carson. He followed by creating his own interactive class demonstrations about the “newsvendor problem”—an operations management tool for choosing optimal inventory levels when demand for a perishable or single‑season product is uncertain. Gihan included fun prizes from the local campus bookstore when he interviewed at other campuses. I’m not surprised he has since won a Provost’s teaching award at Western Kentucky University.
Innovation certainly involves risk, but our PhD students need to show initiative to generate classroom innovations. New classroom approaches that resonate with students not only improve student experiences and raise student evaluation scores, they also help generate job offers in the ultra-competitive job market for new faculty—as our PhD graduates have demonstrated on numerous occasions.
Chuck Munson,
PhD Program Director