Timing and Feedback

Transcript

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Feedback from students A Feedback from students B Applause Timing with examples from the Donnelley case Adjusting timing during the Andersen vs. Andersen case Teaching plan review The Dressen case teaching plan

Feedback from students A

PROFESSOR JIM HESKETT: It seems to me that perhaps halfway through the class or the course, it can be useful to ask people to suggest what you should stop doing, what you should start doing, what you should do more of, and what you should perhaps do less of, as just a way of helping you fine-tune what you’re doing.

Feedback from students B

PROFESSOR TOM DELONG: How do you get feedback from your students? I think it’s absolutely key to create the kind of relationship you want in your classrooms. That is, most of you ask for evaluations and feedback on your teaching at the end of the semester. What good does that do? It’s useful for the next person. What are you trying to teach in their time? Now I'm talking about MBAs, I'm talking about my audience. I'm trying to teach people to be future leaders and managers. I'm teaching them to try to be dynamic, to manage the dilemmas.

Remember the dilemma I said before? By the way, this is the feedback, and then I’ll talk about this dilemma of my humor. This is what I ask. Two weeks into class—and by the way, there isn't a student that you have that can’t mimic you after two weeks. They can mimic you after a week! They can mimic you after a day! So all I'm trying to do is I'm trying to normalize that.

So this is what I say. At the end of a class with two minutes left, maybe at the end of two weeks—everyone’s settled down and there’s not as much apprehension—I’ll say each person write down one thing you want me to quit doing as your teacher. Choose one. What’s one thing you want me to keep doing? What’s one thing you want me to start doing? Write it down; fold it; pass it in. That’s it.

Now, the key is what to do with the data. You know, if you are as gifted as I think you are in this room, even if 180 people say you're great, if two or three people say something hurtful, that’s what you remember. That’s what high achievers do: They only focus on those three things that hurt. They hurt your heart, then you get defensive—I've been trying so hard. And then you look at it and say, “That’s pretty good feedback. There’s something in there that I might be able to learn something from.”

So you take the feedback and you just look for themes. And you pick a couple of themes under each one. Then the next day, walk into class and say, “Listen, you gave me feedback, and this is about leadership and management, so here are a couple things. Things you’d like me to quit doing: Quit moving around so much, quit using your humor the way you do for the reasons I articulated. Keep moving around, keep using your humor; in fact, use more of it. Start giving us the answers to what’s going to be on the exam.”

So then, as soon as I share the data, you can see the light bulbs go on. They go, “Aha!” When in doubt, share the dilemma. And you don’t spend a lot of time on it. You don’t do therapy. You don’t get into it. You just say, “I want you to know this is a dilemma I have about humor. There are a few people in here whom I may have hurt, and I apologize if I've done that. The dilemma is that some people want me to use it more. So you're going to have to let me use some judgment calls.” Then they go, “Yeah, that’s fine. He’s with us.”

Applause

BENITO: If at the very end of the class you did not hear a big round of applause, do you feel frustrated? Or do you just think, “They are hungry and they're running to lunch”? Do you need to have a big round of applause? Do you think, “What did I do wrong?”

PROFESSOR DELONG: Down deep, if I really think about it, yeah, that’s important to me. And I do personalize it and I say, “Why didn’t that go well?” The other thing is I also compare applauses from the day before, which is really pathological. Talk about neurotic! I can remember the applauses from last year! You’ve got to be a little crazy to be in the business.

Timing with examples from the Donnelley case

PROFESSOR DAVID GARVIN: Timing is a tricky business, and it’s hard to remember all the times. You’ll notice there are two times underlined there. Those are really the only times I worry about. If I'm only at the beginning of the stages of new business creation and deliverables, and it’s 9:20, I know I'm behind.

Running a class in terms of time is like an accordion. You open and close. If you try to figure out each block—ten minutes, twelve minutes, eighteen minutes—you get overloaded. There are too many things to think about. But if you keep just two critical times in mind, you can tell whether you're on track, too slow, too quick. Then you can expand or shorten the other portions of class.

So for every class I walk into, I have a maximum of three, or typically only two, critical times where I have to get to in order to stay more or less on schedule. And you can violate those, by the way. If you do it, just do it consciously, knowing that you're going to run long. For instance, we violated the first of those big-time.

And I shortened the discussion of Schetter to compensate. But I knew we were about five, ten, after and I said, “I'm never going to get done with the stages by 9:20,” and I said that’s fine. We’re having a really good discussion, people are engaged, so let it run. I can pick it up on the back end.

Adjusting timing during the Andersen vs. Andersen case

PROFESSOR ASHISH NANDA: I have a teaching plan that I have put in front of you. This is a one-page summary, and you have to make adjustments. So what things went wrong? I had thought the introduction section was five minutes. I was amazed by your questions. We went fifteen minutes there. Then arbitration, I kept twenty minutes. Arbitration—fantastic arguments, lots of energy, great debate. I had to cut it short. It went for thirty-five to forty minutes. Then I said, "Class discussion, vote on award, valuation, and update"—total of fifteen minutes there. We took about fifteen. Reflections, number one. Human versus physical capital, alienability, stewardship. Those points took us about twenty, twenty-five minutes. Very good, very deep questions on, what does stewardship mean? How does it apply to us? So we kept going beyond what I had expected, and in a good way, because the discussion was coming up with new ideas. But what did it lead to? I had a video I couldn't show. Then there were reflections on negotiation lessons, which I basically just went through quickly. Preparation and execution took about five minutes. So the timing went sort of crazy because the front end went longer.

Now, David is fantastic, David Garvin. He has written the book on how to teach. He has his thinking on how to time his classes. But I use a looser way of thinking about time, which is, roughly this to this time, with a sense of where the class wants to spend its energy. So if it wants to spend more time on something, I'll adjust somewhere else, so long as the main one or two ideas are going through.

Teaching plan review

PROFESSOR DELONG: I put my teaching plan up on the board, on both sides, and what I simply tried to do is an introduction. I wanted to spend ten to twelve minutes building the rationale why, and then, “How do you prepare for it?”

And, notice, Jorge was pushing me to get to the role-play, remember? He started early on, and I got a little nervous inside, saying, “Well, he’s messing up my curriculum!” I said, “I don’t want to get there quite yet, because some students will get to the 'Well, I would do this and this and this,' rather than understanding the theory behind it.”

So that’s why I wanted to build a rationale. I wanted to spend more time on a role-play—what I would have normally done in class—so that they can all have a visceral experience. And the reason I didn’t do it is I made a decision that we were going to run out of time. But, normally, I would say get into triads, into threes. One person would be Tom Tierney, you be Granville Harris, and Arvinder, be the observer, and role-play it. Then they can actually feel what it’s like.

I particularly do this with students, because in my course on managing human capital, students are quite cavalier about things like firing people. They're quite confident at age twenty-seven about how you lay off forty people. Well, you just lay them off. You send an e-mail. So, OK!

So what I try to do is have the students have a visceral experience. The words don’t come. They find themselves saying things that they're embarrassed saying.

So we didn’t have enough time, but I was originally going to do a role-play; have each one of you get into a role-play. And then talk with the observers in the triads, because the observers haven't been talking, and they now are process consultants. They’ve been observing. So they get pulled into the pedagogical experience.

The B case is telling him what he did when he said, “Let’s go talk to your wife,” and then this is the, “Now what?” I wish we could have spent more time on “What do you do now?” and ”What’s the advice that you would give him?”

So I found myself a little nervous inside that we were slowing down at the beginning, and there was rich dialogue, and I was trying to monitor whether we were talking too much about that.

The other thing that I don’t like about what I did is I felt like I talked too much.

The Dressen case teaching plan

PROFESSOR TOM PIPER: I think this is a bad one-day case. There's too much in it. It’s a bad case to teach in eighty minutes because you just can’t work through it. And most times when we have teaching plans that are too full, we grab the students by the neck and we pull them right through it. And about the third time you take it away from them and their discovery, they say, “Fine, you know what content you want. Don’t make me play the game of figuring out which hoop you want me to jump through now. It’s over.” Except for the ones who are trying to get honors and they still hang in there. So it’s a bad case because it’s too much. And it’s a bad case because if you can’t do all that, you're confusing students, I think, the night before.

So I never use it as a one-day case. I use it as a two-day case, and I'll have very different assignments. First day is around valuation: Do you believe the forecast? I’ll hold information back. I won't tell them about the competing bidders. And then on the second day, I'll give them that little video where John’s talking about the competing bidders, some information on HON and the financing information. I probably ought to write an A and a B case, and break them apart. But at least break it into two parts and then you have a chance of letting the students run with it and of developing something other than just the technique.

We also have used it as a project, for a term project. For eight weeks, they have deliverables, well-defined assignments for each, deliverables one, two, three, four. Four deliverables every two weeks. Teams linked together by the technology. And we supplement it with, “All right, if you want to do some review, here are the right chapters in Higgins,” or whichever book we’re using. I think that's been extremely powerful.