The Best MBA Faculty: Yale SOM & Virginia Darden

SETTING A HIGH BAR…SUPPORTED BY A SAFETY NET

Sankaran Venkataraman was equally hesitant to name his favorite faculty members, electing instead to trumpet three faculty members who each bring a unique ingredient to the classroom.

Among senior Darden faculty, Venkataraman admires Alec Horniman, a 52-year veteran of the program. His biggest talent? Separating teaching subject matter from helping a student learn it. “Those two are very different,” he indicates. “When you help a student learn your subject matter, you put yourself in their shoes. That’s very difficult for an expert to do. He is gifted in a way in that he will take any question and weave it into his larger class structure. He is able to elevate that question into a more general question. This forces students to think hard, reflect, and respond.”

Ed Freeman, a 32-year program veteran best known for his ethics courses, takes an approach that differs from his peers. He opens case discussions by asking students for their questions. This works, says Venkataraman, because Freeman – like Horniman – possesses an uncanny ability to be where the students are. “Ed has a supreme capability of connecting with every student in a way that the students feel he is speaking to him or her personally even though there are 65 students in the classroom.”

Among junior faculty, Venkataraman praises Elena Loutskina, a finance and investment professor who joined Darden in 2006. Watching her grow, Venkataraman is struck by how she brings Darden’s “High touch, high tone, high octane” spirit to life.

“She demands excellence from her students. She demands that they be prepared. She asks good and tough questions and she expects the students to be able to respond and holds them accountable. At the same time, she provides an incredibly supportive environment. The students feel that she is there to support them and help them to succeed. What happens is she sets a high bar, but she also shows them that if you do the work and come halfway, she will provide the safety net and together they will be able to accomplish great things.”

Naturally, a new faculty member won’t turn into an Elena Loutskina or Amy Wrzesniewski overnight. Like anything, great teaching requires time, commitment, and support. The latter is one area where both the Darden School and Yale SOM distinguish themselves.

Take Darden, for instance. New faculty undergo a demanding development program that starts with a three-day orientation, which ranges from structured workshops to top faculty spilling their classroom secrets.  They also hold mock case discussions with established faculty to identify areas where they need coaching. At the same time, senior faculty will sit in on their classes to observe and later provide feedback. Better yet, new faculty enjoy a reduced teaching load, even receiving a teaching credit to spend time in other professors’ classes.

For the most part, new faculty are placed in the required core, where they can be part of a teaching team. “It is in that teaching team where they get their skills developed,” Venkataraman notes. “They’re learning to teach with four other faculty members. They learn how to design a case discussion, teach a case, create assignment questions, design a course, watch other people teach, and get feedback. All of these things help faculty get up to speed in teaching.”

BRINGING NEW FACULTY INTO THE CORE

Informally, new faculty often pick a mentor, who can supply stress-free do’s and don’ts outside the annual Peer Evaluation Process, which is headed by Venkataraman and another associate dean. “Typically, in other schools, the feedback is tipped to their research,” Venkataraman contends. “At Darden, the feedback extends to their teaching as well. The support system here to be a teacher is very, very advanced to a point where it is as good as any other schools’ support systems for research.”

HAVE TO BE GOOD IN EVERY DIMENSION

In fact, teaching is an integral part of Darden’s promotion process. According to Venkataraman, earning tenure at Darden requires four criteria to be met:

1) Being an effective teacher who is committed to developing into an outstanding case method teacher.

2) Significantly contributing to the curriculum and teaching material of the school.

3) Being an accomplished researcher who publishes cited work in prominent outlets in their field

4)  Developing content that reaches practicing managers.

“Because we require all four, you have to be good in all four dimensions,” adds Venkataraman. “Teaching is required for promotion and tenure. You can’t hide. It is not a compensatory model like it is in many other schools. That is, poor teaching cannot be compensated for by superior research or some other attribute. You have to achieve minimum standards in all of these and these standards are high in a top school. At the same time, you have to be world-class in at least one of those dimensions.”

FOR THE LOVE OF TEACHING…

Yale SOM also devotes heavy resources to teaching. Notably, the school holds a faculty development day twice a year. Here, the school sponsors teaching experts and workshops that provide advice and individual coaching to faculty. The program also maintains a portal, where senior faculty record their lectures or share their best practices. SOM isn’t the only school at Yale that values teaching.

“Yale itself has invested a lot in the Center for Teaching and Learning and our faculty is connected to those resources when they are looking to improve,” says Edi Pinker. “There is a strong infrastructure here. “It doesn’t happen by chance. Senior faculty are always giving feedback to junior faculty and we’ve built in regular feedback loops…Everyone cares about teaching. They want to do as best as possible. When you give faculty opportunities to improve, they take it.”

That’s because they love teaching. For Pinker, that love stems from being around students who share his values and appreciate his efforts. “What I love about our students is I do feel they came to learn,” he says. “In my classes, they are there for a reason. They chose to take that class because it is a subject that really interests them. That’s what you want. You want people who come to hear you, to engage with you, and are interested in the same things as you are.”

YOU MADE A DIFFERENCE

Ultimately, Pinker adds, great teachers want to leave an impact. “What I love about teaching is the same as everyone who teaches. When I have a successful class, I feel like I have an impact on the world. I have impacted the way the students in the class think about the world around them. When you hear back from students later, you might hear that they encountered the same thing you talked about and what you taught helped them. That’s very gratifying.”

For Venkataraman, an introvert by temperament, teaching is a means to step in the real world and make a difference. “I’m in there with the students. I get to practice my ideas in a way where they come to life.  I care about my subject – entrepreneurship and strategy – and sharing it with my students in a way where they can appreciate what I’ve gone through and join in that process is very energizing to me.”

Like Pinker, hearing back from students makes all work worthwhile. “In the moment, I don’t think about how students are transforming. What I have discovered, over time. is that people write back to me to tell me about classes and what they meant. Those moments are the most rewarding.”

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