Classroom Environment Analogous To A Small Business Meeting

Creating an effective classroom environment is vital to achieving course motivation and productivity as well as the respect you deserve as a professor.  The slide I use during my first lecture to create an expectation that our classroom environment will parallel a small business meeting, is provided as a FREE Attachment. I cover up the four points […]

Electronic Textbooks: Quite Often a Win-Win Decision

For many upper-level courses, it has often been difficult to find the right traditional textbook and until Electronic Textbooks (ETs) became an option, compromising has been commonplace. Professors have often been forced to choose between the lesser of two evils or assemble numerous articles and distribute a packet to each student. ETs are a terrific […]

Providing Detailed Lecture Slides Enhances Educational Experience

Should college be about who can take the best notes while a professor lectures? (No) Does industry place a high importance on a work professional’s ability to take copious notes while someone is speaking for a straight hour? (No) Then the logical conclusion is that undergraduate business schools should advocate to their faculty to provide […]

The Unfortunate Motivation Behind Assigning Group Work

Determining whether assignments should be completed individually or in small groups is a major decision for business school faculty. There are various considerations behind making this important decision. In some situations, group work is appropriate at the undergraduate level; however, there is an overabundance of group work and for the wrong reason. Candidly, the real […]

The College Educator: Coach Rather than Professor Can Enhance Your Role

I encourage students to refer to me as Coach Heller instead of Professor Heller. I have coached sports for decades and have realized that the word associations with Coach align well with what a progressive and reachable teacher can accomplish with his or her students. These typical word associations for Coach and Professor show how […]

College Academic Rigor Improved with Assignment Frequency

It is September 12th and you assign a month-long project due on October 12th, giving students over four weeks to complete the work.  Because you are giving the students an entire month, you are expecting a great deal of both quality and quantity of work effort involved.  After all, it counts a full 25% of […]

Undergraduate Business Schools Need Problem Solving Focus: Enhancing Strategy, Creativity and Resourcefulness

A top objective of undergraduate business schools should include preparing students to be highly productive to their future employers upon arrival, but there is a wide gap between academia and the real world today. Too much of today’s business school curriculum involves memorizing and regurgitating terminology or mechanically plugging numbers into formulas without any analysis. […]