"College teaching may be the only skilled profession for which no preparation or training is provided or required. You get a Ph.D., join a faculty, they show you your office, and then tell you 'By the way, you're teaching 205 next semester. See you later.' The result is the consistent use of teaching techniques that have repeatedly been shown to be ineffective at promoting learning."

— Richard Felder
• plenary speaker, 2005 INFORMS Teaching Management Science Workshop
• professor emeritus of chemical engineering, North Carolina State University
• co-director, National Effective Teaching Institute (NETI)

Guilty, guilty, guilty as charged, Dr. Felder. In graduate school, I learned a little bit about how to prove theorems; in the real world, I learned a little bit about finding clients and keeping them happy.

And now I'm a college teacher. During my first two years on the job, I perused syllabi from here and there, muddled through various (often ill-chosen by me) textbooks, gathered a little random advice about what to expect and what to watch out for, and otherwise sat in the vacuum of my office and thought about how to fill each class session. The results were decidedly mixed.

And so, at the end of July, I ventured out to the second annual INFORMS Teaching Management Science Workshop in Lake Bluff, Ill. My mission was to hear experienced, confident teachers tell me how, with perseverance and patience, I might become one of them.

The workshop's schedule was action packed. On Thursday afternoon, an opening cocktail hour and dinner quickly gave way to the first plenary lecture, entitled "Perspectives on Learning, Teaching and the Brain," presented by Chris Jernstedt from Dartmouth College (www.dartmouth.edu/~psych/people/faculty/jernstedt.html).

My first surprise came right there. Looking around, I noticed that I was seated with 40 or so of my peers in a lecture hall listening to an esteemed professor present unfamiliar topics. In that instant, I suddenly had a sense of how my students feel, nervously trying to keep up and anxiously wondering whether they are "getting it."

Indeed, the core of Professor Jernstedt's presentation was that our capacity to learn was not only a function of our cognitive abilities, but also of the social and emotional context in which we found ourselves — something that I could definitely relate to in that moment! Taking us on a fascinating tour of research work in the brain science, learning theory and education literatures, Professor Jernstedt proposed that, given the way that human beings have been shown to learn, we would do well as teachers to let go of our traditional "Sage on the Stage" paradigm of the classroom experience.

Instead, he suggested an alternative model in which teachers play three central roles: designer, demonstrator and diagnostician. Moreover, given that 95 percent of human learning is preconscious or unconscious, the social and emotional context that we create in our classrooms is a critical educational component. His follow-up presentations the next day — entitled "Cognition" and "Assessment" respectively — continued on these themes while introducing new ones. In particular, my notes from the "Cognition" presentation includes quotes like "Memory is constructed," "Learning is doing," "Storage is not the challenge — retrieval is the challenge," and "Reduce the amount of material ? decrease interference ? increase the amount that gets mastered and can be recalled."

"Learning through doing" was also a strong theme in Richard Felder's plenary presentations as well. Making the case for active and cooperative learning by showing powerful research results (see www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/RMF.html for more), Professor Felder then introduced a number of different techniques for getting students engaged with one another to enhance the amount that is learned and retained. And watching classroom videos demonstrating these techniques in action, I was amazed at the amount of energy that that his chemical engineering (!) students showed.

In addition to these plenary sessions, there were many workshops on specific topics of relevance to O.R. professors, with topics ranging from case studies to simulation to teaching evaluations. A great deal of wisdom was dispensed by Professors Bell and Anderson (Case Studies), Powell (Spreadsheet Engineering), Baker (Optimization), Birge (Finance), Erkut (Teaching EvaluationsL Facts, Tips and Uses), Ragsdale (VBA) and Grinde (Simulation). These guys are giants, with much wisdom to share.

Lest you think, incorrectly, that this agenda was three days of all work and no play, note too that there were many different types of games played. Afternoon sports period including rousing if rudimentary volleyball and basketball games. Sam Wood from Response Learning Technologies demonstrated his company's classroom game for teaching operations management. Late Saturday night, several of us used a game to explore fluid flow models and liquidity preference functions.

On Sunday morning, Peter Bell's plenary presentation served as a great capstone to the conference. Entitled "Teaching Strategic OR," the talk included notes on how O.R. can have strategic value to our students and to companies. In addition, the talk included an outstanding catalog [1] of specific strategic O.R. success stories.

Bottom line: This event was time well spent and money well invested. My students and I are both benefiting right now. I'm very glad that I went. Hope to see you there next year.



Vijay Mehrotra (vjm@sfsu.edu) is a faculty member in the Decisions Sciences Group in the College of Business at San Francisco State University and an operations management consultant.

References

1. More details can be found in Bell, Anderson and Kaiser, "Strategic OR/MS and the Edelman Finalist Applications 1989-1998," Operations Research, February 2003.

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