Talk About Teaching ------------------- How the Undergraduate Core _Could_ Be Run at Wharton ==================================================== by W. Bruce Allen Many changes have occurred in the 26 years I've been at Penn. When I was hired, my teaching load was discussed-my teaching ability/desire was not. My understanding, and certainly the culture at the time, dictated that I produce "quality research." If it turned out that I could teach a class well, that would be a bonus-but certainly not the reason that I was hired. Today, much more consideration is given in the hiring process to teaching aptitude. We look for "triple threats" in new faculty: an excellent research potential, collegiality, and teaching ability. Can this person teach? Will they fit into the teaching mode required for a top business school? These are questions now asked when a department contemplates extending a job offer. The consideration of all three continues through the yearly salary review process, and most importantly through the tenure process at Wharton. Teaching became a serious issue at Wharton about eight years ago when the first Business Week MBA ranking gave Wharton a "D" in teaching. (Actually, students were never asked to give A to F ratings; they were sur-veyed on a semantic scale from 1 to 10, where we came out "good to very good." Business Week's translation to a D was analogous to giving a student who received an 80 in your class a D because others had received 85s and 90s). We also knew that the Business Week D was not a true rating because we had our own internal, end-of-semester ratings. However, we had a potential public relations disaster on our hands, and it forced us to evaluate the quality of our teaching. On the MBA level, we had a set of core courses. They received lower teaching quality ratings than elective courses. On reflection, this is not surprising-students predisposed to a course are likely to be happy, especially if they can drop the course when they do not find the instructor/course to their liking. No such option exists for an MBA core course. Taking Ownership The first major area to be addressed then, was the core. Faculty convened to discuss how they felt the quality of the core courses could be improved. As a result, while core courses still maintained departmental designations and instructors, the school/faculty took a more active ownership role in these courses. In two cases (Managerial Economics on the MBA level and Wharton 101-Leadership Skills-on the undergraduate level), the School took ownership of the course. The Vice Dean now has an active planning role in the core, and staffing has become a consultation between the Department Chairs and the Vice Dean. Course offering times (down to the day and hour) were decided by the Vice Dean's office. As part of this overall process, faculty compensation became tied to teaching. In addition, teaching became more important in the hiring, renewal, and tenure process. It is not just the individual courses that are now managed more directly. The entire core curriculum is also under tighter guidelines. With the old model, departments allocated faculty to courses, and the faculty member decided what to teach in the course; and when he/she wished to teach it, scheduling time and day. They planned their course and course assignments without regard to whether the material was sequenced so as to be useful to other courses, and whether total workload (spread over five courses) was humanly (or humanely) possible. To handle this organized core curriculum, two types of teaching teams have been developed. One team is horizontal, generally made up of four faculty, each of whom teaches three sections (cohorts) of the course. One of the four faculty is the course head. This faculty "team" meets before the course is offered to plan and organize the course material (given knowledge of past integrative needs of the other core courses and, as experts in the field, on the base materials in the field to be covered). They continue to meet during the teaching semester to manage the daily issues of the class. Some teams meet weekly via telephone or e-mail, while others meet physically. Some hold focus groups/quality circles with students. The second teaching team is vertical. Cohorts are aggregated into clusters (three cohorts equal one cluster, 12 cohorts thus form four clusters). The vertical teaching team exists to facilitate a given set of instructors teaching a given set of students. The vertical teaching team will teach the cluster its five courses during a teaching/learning period. While each instructor teaches in his/her discipline, some cross- disciplinary events are developing that include cases common to different courses (but seen from a different perspective) and instances of Professor A from discipline X showing up in Professor B's (of discipline Y) class have been reported! The vertical teaching teams meet a minimum of four times per year. Three of those meetings are within a relatively short period of time, just before a six-week teaching period begins, halfway through a teaching period, and just after the teaching period ends. The additional meeting is a general planning session held about three months prior to the teaching period. A cluster head manages each cluster and performs that role over all teaching periods. All cluster heads teach at least one core course within the cluster. A lunch with the Vice Dean, the cluster faculty, and the students is held on a cohort basis each semester. Last is a monthly meeting of a core implementation committee. This committee oversees the general curriculum over the whole year, now effectively five teaching times, (August pre-term, Fall I, Fall II, Spring I, and Spring II). One role of the core implementation committee is to bring the course heads together before their teaching time and begin an iterative process of load planning to make student assignments and examinations more manageable and less peaked. Within this vein, negotiation on feedership and integration of common materials and time sequencing is also undertaken. The result of this oversight is a group of concurrent courses integrated in terms of content and student workload. The committee then works to implement course head discussions across teaching periods so that nonconcurrent courses are integrated and intellectual feedership is facilitated. Meetings with the student representatives of the cohorts are held every semester. While we are not there yet, the result is a core curriculum that is becoming an integrated, cross-disciplinary educational experience with a much more collective faculty ownership experience than previously existed. The Vice Dean's office took responsibility for the overall provision of teaching in the core, with the resultant extension of responsibility to the faculty. While the Vice Dean's office was the catalyst, the faculty are the implementers and the overseers. The outcome: The new curriculum is one of the reasons for the Business Week number one rating for the Wharton School in the fall of 1994. Beginnings So, why has the Undergraduate Vice Dean spent so much time talking about the MBA core teaching experience? The answer is simple: it's the model for how the undergraduate Wharton core could be run. Students would be taught their Wharton core courses primarily in their sophomore year. They would be in cohorts. Cohorts, in turn, would be aggregations of student learning teams (groups of students who perform some-but not all-of their assignments as part of a team, contributing to peer learning). Cohorts would be grouped into clusters and taught by teaching teams who have both the vertical and horizontal forms. Already, focus groups of undergraduates have told us that they would like to see cohorts and an increased use of learning teams. Organizing the undergraduate core along the model of the graduate will allow for the integration of course material across disciplines and better planning of work loads. My experience as both a course head and a cluster head in the MBA program has convinced me that this is a workable model for the delivery of high quality teaching/education on the undergraduate level as well. We will engage our stakeholders- faculty, students, alumni, employment recruiters, Wharton Undergraduate Board-in a dialogue to determine how we will proceed with undergraduate Wharton education. This article is the seventh in a series developed by the Lindback Society and the College of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Allen is Vice Dean and Director of the Wharton Undergraduate Division as well as Professor of Public Policy and Management, and of Transportation, at the Wharton School.
Almanac
Volume 41, Number 28
April 11, 1995
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