Beedie School of Business News

Our own Teaching and Learning Group launched Talking about Teaching Brown Bag Lunch Sessions on February 1. The purpose of Talking about Teaching is to create a learning community for our teachers. The initiative brings teachers together, in community, to share things they are doing to engage students, provide opportunities to discuss and model characteristics of quality teaching, to get support with teaching challenges, and to try out new ideas or concepts before introducing them to students. The intention behind Talking about Teaching is to engage participants in discussions about pedagogical goals and promote the practice of critical reflection, as well as increase the awareness of the scholarship of teaching and learning.

For a learning community, like Talking about Teaching, to be successful we need to create a space where participants are free to engage in open discussions about teaching (Knowles 1980). To ensure this, some guiding principles have been developed on the basic principles of adult education.

Sessions will be offered monthly (presently at Burnaby and Surrey, and hopefully soon at Segal) on different days to allow for people to have a chance to attend. They run over the lunch hour from noon to 1:30pm, so bring your lunch.

At each session, one person who volunteers prior to the event to present, will share a teaching activity or experience that worked well or a challenge s/he would like to receive input on from the group. Key concepts and resources will be shared with participants, as well as being posted on the Teaching and Learning website. The size of the group is limited to approximately 15 people to allow for engaged discussion.

Since this is a new initiative, it will likely shift, morph and evolve over time.

Our First Talking about Teaching Featured Kathleen Burke and Adam Mills and began with Kathleen Burke discussing how she uses poetry in her Ethics classes to take the ordinary and make it extraordinary. Burke, who comes from an Arts background and has been teaching since 1998, recited a poem from Sharon Olds entitled “The Summer Camp Bus Pulls Away from the Curb”. The intention of using poetry is to speak in a slant – to get the students to hear a message that comes at them from a different angle or, rather more implicitly than explicitly.

Adam Mills, one of our PhD students, considers himself lucky because he gets to do something he loves – teaching. He likes to create experiential opportunities for students. He described how, in his Entrepreneurship class, he has student teams create businesses. He likes to provide an opportunity for students to get first-hand experience, to integrate their learning more so than with a cognitive or case a case-based approach.

During the feedback process at the end of the session, participants liked the opportunity to hear about innovative things others are doing, having the focused discussion at the beginning, and hearing what others do. They also liked the size (13 people) of the group and found the discussion inspiring. It was suggested that we have only one speaker per session to allow more time for discussion. Also, it was suggested to hold monthly sessions, which already was the plan. Participants mentioned they would like more examples and, possibly, would like to play the role of student in order to fully experience the examples provided by the presenter.

All in all, people were happy with the opportunity to come together and share and learn with one another. Oh, and did I mention the chance to actually “eat” lunch?

Resources
Teaching with Fire: Poetry That Sustains the Courage to Teach by Sam M. Intrator and Megan Scriber
Leading from Within: Poetry That Sustains the Courage to Lead by Sam M. Intrator and Megan Scriber
Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses by L. Dee Fink
A Self-Directed Guide to Creating Significant Learning Experiences. Dee Fink’s online guide.
The Summer-Camp Bus Pulls Away from the Curb. A poem by Sharon Olds.
The Wanderer. A poem by Antonio Machado
The 5 Why’s for Problem Identification

Tags: Adam Mills, Beedie, Kathleen Burke, learning, shauna jones, Teaching, Teaching and Learning Group, teaching seminars

Anne Macdonald, a senior lecturer of accounting at the Beedie School of Business, has been named recipient of Simon Fraser University’s 2012 Excellence in Teaching Award, the highest honour of its kind awarded to faculty at the university. The Excellence in Teaching award is presented annually to three teachers from across the university who possess [...]

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Tags: accounting, Andrew Gemino, Anne MacDonald, auditing, Beedie School of Business, engagement, Excellence in Teaching Award, Rick Iverson, Simon Fraser University, student engagement, student experience, TD Canada Trust Distinguished Teaching Award, Teaching, Teaching Honor Roll

Opinion: As host to top-ranked research universities, British Columbia stands much to gain from fostering talented young people

By Ian McCarthy, Vancouver Sun

Tags: Aalborg University, Andre Wirthmann, Beedie School of Business, Brian Gordon, British Columbia, business ventures, Canada Research Chair, economic growth, Education + Training, Elicia Maine, entrepreneurship, Ian McCarthy, innovation, iowa Writers' Workshop, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Leeds Business School, Management of Technology MBA, Management Science, MOT MBA, nature vs nurture, sfu, Startup Canada, Teaching, University of Hamburg, Yale School of Management

2012 TD Canada Trust Distinguished Teaching Award winner, Todd Green

Professor Sudheer Gupta and recent PhD recipient Todd Green have been announced as the winners of this year’s TD Canada Trust Distinguished Teaching Award. The prestigious award is the highest teaching honour of its kind in SFU’s Beedie School of Business.

Since 1990, Beedie School of Business students, faculty and alumni have nominated teachers from both undergraduate and postgraduate programs for the award. The nominations are then scrutinized by the Teaching Effectiveness Committee, who select the award recipients based on the nominations and testimonials from a sample of the nominee’s former students.

Up to two awards are presented each year to the teachers who exemplify qualities such as engagement, enthusiasm and support in their teaching. Since its creation, 37 different teachers have won the award, and winners are asked to assist the Teaching Effectiveness Committee in choosing the next year’s award winners.

2012 TD Canada Trust Distinguished Teaching Award winner, Sudheer Gupta

Gupta is an Associate Professor who joined the Beedie School of Business in 2005 and has taught classes in Supply Chain Management, Operations Management and in the Management of Technology MBA program. Gupta was also nominated for the TD Canada Trust Distinguished Teaching Award in 2009 and 2010.

Todd Green joined the Beedie School of Business in 2008 as a PhD candidate and lecturer and has taught a number of classes in marketing at undergraduate level, including ethical issues in marketing and advertising and sales promotions. This year marks the first time Green has ever been nominated for the award, which arrives shortly after completing his PhD on corporate social responsibility. Keep reading…

Tags: 2012 TD Canada Trust Distinguished Teaching Award, Beedie School of Business, Management of Technology MBA, student experience, Sudheer Gupta, Teaching, Teaching Effectiveness Committee, Todd green

by Shauna Jones

A strategic focus for the Beedie School of Business is to educate, engage and inspire the responsible leaders of tomorrow. To do this we design and deliver distinctive, relevant, and responsive programs. As a teacher, I want to create significant learning experiences for my students so that they can apply their learning in the workplace in a way that has meaning for them. Yet, for many teachers, it is often difficult to have concentrated ‘time away’ from teaching and research responsibilities to improve the art and science of our teaching.

At the end of April I was fortunate to have ‘time away’ to participate in the four-day Rethinking Teaching: A Course Design Workshop offered by the Teaching and Learning Centre (TLC). I took the workshop because I wanted to improve students’ perception of BUS360W: Business Communications. Having worked as a career counsellor for a number of years, I saw the impact of communication skills on one’s employability. Although many students tell me a semester or more after they have completed the course how it helped improve their communication, they did not enjoy the course at the time of taking it. By participating in the Rethinking Teaching workshop I was hoping to change this. I want my students to understand the significance of the BUS360W while taking it – not just after. The workshop helped me do that.

My colleague, Christian Venhuizen, who also attended the workshop, summed up the Rethinking Teaching workshop by saying, “it provided me with a chance to step back from teaching BUS360W to try and view it more objectively, to learn how to incorporate more chances for weekly peer instruction and discussion, and to make better connections between the course learning goals and the formal assignments and informal exercises.

Lead by Cheryl Amundsen, Associate Professor with the Faculty of Education, the design of the workshop modeled excellent pedagogical practice. We learned the principles for designing good courses in plenary and then applied the learning to our own course design or redesign.

One resource I found extremely helpful was Fink’s taxonomy of significant learning. Fink places emphasis on creating significant learning experiences that learners find meaningful rather than on how much is learned. His model for designing a course provides you with a step by step approach to design your own course. Fink’s book, Creating Significant Learning Experience: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses is an expanded version of the above link and is good reading for those interested in engaging their students more.

Both Christian and I found the Rethinking Teaching workshop both refreshing and well worth our time. Contact the TLC for information on the workshop and their next offering.

BSB Teaching and Learning Group’s Fall Offerings

We are still formulating the offerings for the fall. So far we are looking at:
• An update on the Assurance of Learning
• Teachers Share – a session where those who recently attended conferences share significant learning

Tags: Beedie Teaching and Learning Group, Course Design, Teaching, TLC

On February 6, a wine and cheese gathering was held to get our teachers involved in creating a vision for the Beedie School’s new Teaching and Learning Group. There was a great turnout, with 22 people in attendance. Shauna Jones, Coordinator of the Teaching and Learning Group, gathered input on the following questions:

1. What would you envision for the Beedie School’s Teaching Group for the next three years?
2. What do you want from the teaching group?
3. What initiatives would best support your needs?

From the input gathered at the initial kickoff, a draft of the Teaching Groups Vision and Mission statement was formed:

Vision
The international business education community will recognize the Beedie School of Business Teaching and Learning Group as a leader in engaged and experiential learning.

Mission
We are committed to the collective and individual development of scholarly teaching within the BSB. We engage faculty and students to foster effective outcome-oriented learning environments. We model and share successful scholarly best practices that encourage great students.

For now, these are considered “draft” statements. Try them on and see how they fit. If you have comments or suggestions, please submit them to shaunaj@sfu.ca. Representatives from the Teaching and Learning Group will also be soliciting feedback from students before the statements are finalized.

The input from the kickoff also demonstrated several key themes about what teachers want: opportunities to learn with and from others, opportunities for teaching development, and opportunities to share with others. There were some great ideas about how this might be accomplished. It was decided to start this year with interactive sessions and expand the offerings next year. Mark your calendars for the upcoming sessions in 2012:

Interactive Polling – May 24 from 2:30-4:30pm
Language and Writing – October 2 from 10am-12pm

If you are interested in the full results from the kickoff session, they can be found here.

To ensure our 2013 offerings are pertinent to our teachers, your input is needed. Please take five minutes to complete the following survey. Teaching Survey. Please use your regular SFU login ID and password to access the survey. It will remain open until May 31.

The Teaching and Learning Group is open to all Faculty members, Sessionals and others who are teaching. Your participation is a valuable asset in bringing to life the vision for the Beedie School’s Teaching and Learning Group.

Tags: Teaching, Teaching and Learning Group, Teaching News

by David Rubeli, Educational Consultant

SFU Symposium on Teaching and Learning
Beedie will be well-represented at this year’s Symposium on Teaching and Learning, which takes place at SFU Burnaby on May 16-17. The theme of this year’s conference is Leading Change @ SFU, and sessions will explore ways to improve student learning experiences in courses and programs. Several sessions will cover topics of interest to Beedie faculty members and staff, including addressing student work experience, health promoting classrooms, leadership identity development, and empowering Generation 1.5 and EAL students.

Consider supporting our Beedie colleagues who will be presenting:
• Andrew Gemino will facilitate an interdisciplinary plenary discussion on “Practicing Engagement”.
• Jan Kietzmann, who will participate in a panel discussion about upper-division cohort programs, along with SFU Surrey faculty leaders of the innaugeral Semester in Innovation cohort program.
• Stephanie Bertels and colleagues from Geography and Chemistry, will engage in a dialogue about the idea of engaged scholarship and how they use this pedagogy to achieve education for sustainable development.

In addition, Julia Christensen Hughes, Dean of the College of Management and Economics at the University of Guelph, will deliver the opening keynote address. Dr. Christensen Hughes’s talk will draw on research and insights from higher education reform initiatives in Ontario to discuss external influences and economic pressures facing universities in Canada and systemic barriers to change that SFU and other institutions must confront.

For more information about the Symposium or to register, visit the TLC website. The keynotes addresses and plenary sessions will be recorded and resources will be archived for those unable to attend.

Consultation Services
David Rubeli is the Beedie School of Business Educational Consultant. If you are working on an aspect of your teaching, revising a course or program, or pondering a big question or issue related to business education, David would be pleased to hear from you and happy to consult. You can reach him at 778-782-2278, drubeli@sfu.ca or @drubeli on Twitter.

Tags: SFU Sumposium on Teaching and Learning, Teaching, Teaching News

Jan Kietzmann in the Beedie School of Business, was a co-applicant with Ted Kirkpatrick (Applied Science), John Bowes (FCAT) and Rob Cameron (Applied Science) for one of SFU’s newest teaching grants. They have been awarded the $10,000 large teaching grant, which will be used to support and develop a project titled “Designing SFU Mobile”. SFU Mobile will be a 15-credit, cohort based, multidisciplinary course to be offered at the Surrey campus in Summer 2012. It will be co-taught by Faculty from Business, Computing Science and Interactive Arts and Technology and will draw students from those majors.

The course design draws from the successful model of SFU’s Semester in Dialogue program but adds new elements. Where the Dialogue program emphasizes dialogue as a field of study and practice in its own right (students enrol in DIAL courses), SFU Mobile will emphasize the skills students have learned in their respective disciplines, demanding that they coordinate their talents with other specialists in service of a larger goal, receiving 400-level credit in their own department. SFU Mobile will also emphasize product development, delivering road maps, concept demonstrations, and business plans.

The distinctly different intent of SFU Mobile, its heterogenous participants, its aim of building on and polishing the disparate disciplinary skills of the participating students, will require developing a distinctly different structure and outcomes than have been used for the Semester in Dialogue. The Teaching and Learning Development Grant is crucial for this process. Critical is the hiring of an inquiry team (different from the teaching team) to help facilitate development of the original learning outcomes, and independently evaluate the success of both the course activities and the stated learning outcomes. During the actual course, the inquiry team will maintain some distance from the instructors. This will allow the inquiry team to maintain a disinterested perspective on the decisions of the instructional team. It will also be important in sustaining the students’ confidence that they can express concerns to the inquiry team without any affect on their relationship to the instructional team and their ultimate grades. After the course is concluded, the instructional and inquiry teams will collaborate to evaluate the course.

About Teaching & Learning Grants
These grants were created to recognize teaching development as scholarly activity and to stimulate the development, implementation, and investigation of innovative teaching and learning at SFU. Learn more about these grants and how you can apply at: http://www.sfu.ca/teachlearn/tlgrants.html

Tags: Jan Kietzmann, SFU Mobile, SFU Semester in Dialogue, Teaching, Teaching and Learning Grant, Teaching Development, Teaching News

The Beedie School of Business at Simon Fraser University is pleased to announce that it has maintained its accreditation from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) for a period of five years.

The business school, with campuses in Burnaby, Surrey and downtown Vancouver, is home to Canada’s first Executive MBA program and one of Canada’s largest undergraduate programs. It was first accredited by AACSB in 2006. Since that time, it has continued to grow its reputation as one of the country’s leading teaching and learning settings, and for producing global-class research for the knowledge economy.

The renewed distinction puts Beedie in an elite class of business and management schools globally. AACSB accreditation is considered a hallmark of excellence in business education and has been earned by less than five percent of the world’s business schools.

Founded in 1916, AACSB International is the longest serving global accrediting body for business schools that offer undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral degrees in business and accounting. Meeting the AACSB accreditation standards requires a high-quality teaching environment, a commitment to continuous improvement, and curricula responsive to the needs of businesses. In addition, as required by the AACSB standards, all accredited schools must go through a peer review process every five years in order to maintain their accreditation.

View announcement from AACSB International.

Tags: AACSB, AACSB International, accreditation, Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, curricula, EMBA, MBA, Research, Teaching