INTERVIEW WITH THE DEAN
“To give an analogy,” he continues, “I’m a tennis player and I have taken lessons from people who are incredibly good players but are simply unable to convey how another person can improve their game. They might just say, ‘Well, I hit my forehand at 100 miles an hour,’ and you say, ‘How do I do that? I would like to learn how to hit my forehand at 100 miles an hour,’ but they can’t express it to someone else.” Facets of faculty development Developing faculty members’ teaching abilities is therefore something in which Beardsley and Darden place the utmost importance: “We use the Socratic method of teaching, which provides a live learning environment akin to a real-life simulation of being a general manager. However, teaching in this way is a special skill and very few people know how to do it instinctively. So, we have a whole faculty onboarding and teaching and development programme to help new professors learn how to teach.” Putting professors through their teaching paces is designed to complement rather than detract from supporting their research output. “A lot of people say, ‘You can either be good at research or good at teaching, so which one do you choose?’ but we don’t find that it has to be a trade-off. We’re uncompromising on the quality of teaching and we’re uncompromising when it comes to the quality of your thought leadership,” the Darden dean declares, before detailing how the school sees these two facets of faculty life intertwine. “As a researcher, you sharpen your thinking by teaching. Plus, the students are intelligent; you might be standing in front of a class of 20 to 70 students who are leading-edge intellects and they will challenge your thinking. You don’t know what they’re going to say in class and you learn a lot about the topics by teaching them.” For Beardsley, this process is all the more effective when teaching topics based on emerging research. “If you can convey new ideas through quality teaching, that’s quite powerful. You can develop interesting cases, wrestle with the situation and bring in the latest research,” he reasons. “For example, we have found that there’s a synergy between having great ideas and the creation of electives.” There are also initiatives that support research more directly at Darden. “If you’re a faculty member, you want leverage for your ideas. For this, you’ll want
traditional higher education sector. However, Beardsley is not concerned about losing sway to the private sector and speaks from a wealth of experience in this regard, having also headed up learning and leadership development programmes worldwide during his time at McKinsey. “We need to remember that just because a corporation offers a leadership development or training programme, it doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily good at delivering it and there’s no guarantee that the instructor is an effective teacher,” he reasons, explaining that the programmes he helmed at McKinsey were overseen by a mix of internal experts and external faculty brought in from universities.
“We’re uncompromising on the quality of teaching and the quality of your thought leadership”
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Business Impact • ISSUE 2 • 2024
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