Can Ethics Be Taught in Business Schools?

Following previous post - ethics - can we teach students to be ethical?

 

 

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Can Ethics Be Taught in Business Schools?

via The Business Ethics Blog by Chris MacDonald on 11/10/09

It's a common refrain. Don't blame the business schools for all the bad stuff happening on Wall Street. It's not the b-schools' fault, because after all, ethics can't be taught. The first bit there is reasonable enough: the recent financial crisis is the result of a complicated convergence of factors, apparently including bad decisions by quite a number of individuals, and some poorly-structured institutions. But the latter part, implying the futility of ethics instruction at business schools, is simply wrong-headed.

For the latest iteration of this mistaken view, check out this opinion piece by Clifford Orwin, professor of political science at the University of Toronto, in the Globe and Mail: Can we teach ethics? When pigs fly

Ethics is a serious business. And that's why, reading in last weekend's Globe and Mail about the gurgling wave of ethics education sweeping North American business schools, I had to laugh.

"MBA programs around the globe," wrote Joanna Pachner, "are rushing to prove that they teach students to be good – not just rich – by revamping their curriculums and encouraging debates about ethical corporate behaviour."

I blogged about the MBA ethics oaths here. But Orwin's real focus is on business school curriculum:

I'm not suggesting that business students are bad people, or that those who would teach them to be good are any less competent than the rest of us. It's just that the whole notion of teaching ethical behaviour rests on a fundamental misconception – namely, that ethical behaviour can be taught.

But Orwin's criticism is off-target, for two reasons.

The first problem is that Orwin neglects that the main goal of business education is to teach people management skills. So we can usefully teach people to devise management structures that minimize wrong-doing on the part of their employees, even if we can't change the characters of future managers themselves.

The second problem: people like Orwin wrongly assume that the key to better behaviour is modifying character. But that flies in the face of our best understanding (as represented in the criminology literature) of the psychology of wrongdoing. The key to wrongdoing is not primarily that wrongdoers have the wrong values (from which it would follow that ethics classes need to accomplish the difficult, perhaps impossible, task of instilling the right values in just a few short months of instruction). The key to wrongdoing is much more likely to involve faulty ways of thinking about certain behaviours, namely thinking about them in ways that "neutralize" them, morally, effectively exempting the wrongdoer from moral blame. (A simple example is the redescription of theft as "borrowing", or the redescription of stealing from one's employer as "merely taking what I deserve"). The arguments behind such neutralizations are generally fallacious, and fallacies of reasoning are something that can be taught, either in an ethics class or indeed in a first-year Critical Thinking class.

Thus it's not that Orwin is wrong in claiming that virtue cannot be taught. It's that he's wrong in thinking that that's a decisive argument against ethics education.

-----
My take on the moral psychology of wrongdoing, and the conclusion it implies about ethics education, is adopted entirely from Joseph Heath's wonderful paper, "Business Ethics and Moral Motivation: A Criminological Perspective," Journal of Business Ethics 83:4, 2008. Here's the abstract.

 

 

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To Retain New Learning, Do the Math

 

 

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To Retain New Learning, Do the Math

via The Window by Kevin D. Washburn, Ed.D. on 11/8/09

Every teacher experiences the frustration. Content and skills taught throughout the year seem to abandon students during springtime standardized testing. "How can they not know this?" thinks the the teacher. "We learned this back in November."

Recent research reveals some likely causes, and the principles for retaining new learning may not be intuitive to us as teachers. For example, multiple retrievals rather than multiple exposures promote better retention of new learning.1 In other words, the more students are required to recall new content or skills, the better their memory will be. Reviewing the material with students does not have the same effect. The students must be engaged in activity that requires them to recall the material. Even when students recall details incorrectly, if the teacher promptly provides the necessary instructive feedback, engaging students in recall of the material fosters better retention of new learning than a teacher-led review.2

But how often should teachers be engaging students in recall of newly learned material? Two findings provide answers.

First, repeated recall should occur frequently immediately following new learning. For example, a teacher who teaches students to add fractions should engage students in recall and use of that material several times over the school days immediately following instruction. Again, even if students do not recall the skill correctly, requiring recall combined with immediate instructive feedback is more effective than reviewing the skill.3

Second, once the initial period of learning and multiple retrievals is past, students still need to be engaged regularly in recall of the material. In general, students need to recall the material after a delay of 10 to 20% of the time between initial learning and final testing.4 For example, if students learn a new skill with only a month of school (about 20 school days) remaining, they should be engaged in recall of that skill every 2-4 days. This increases the likelihood that the new learning will be part of their knowledge when they begin the following school year. (Ideally, they would be recalling that skill every 7-14 days over a 10-week summer break!)

So, let's go back to our opening scenario: a teacher teaches material in November that students need to recall for testing in May—a gap of about six months, or about 120 school days. To increase the likelihood that students will recall the material in May, they should be engaged in retrieving it every 12-24 days, once or twice a month, probably closer to every 12 days for the first few months and every 24 days for the last few months. It is critical that every retrieval be accompanied by immediate instructive feedback.

One more principle helps us design activities that engage students in retrieving new learning. The more material students are required to recall, the better. For example, if students are required to retrieve or construct an explanation of how to add fractions and actually apply the skill to add fractions, their retention will be greater than if they are merely required to apply the skill.4

According to this research, many of our classrooms may be structured for minimal memory retention. If we begin every school year reviewing material from the previous years and spend the second half of the school year introducing new material, students are less likely to retain the new learning in future school years because they were not engaged in recalling it throughout the school year. We need to be teaching more new material at the beginning of the school year and reviewing that material as the school year progresses. Perhaps this helps explain another common teacher frustration: the "They should have learned this last year" syndrome that we've all experienced.

Retrieval + Instructive Feedback = Retention of New Learning.

1. Devachi, L. The Limits of Memory: How to Maximize Your Memory Trace. Presented at the 2008 North American Neuroleadership Summit, New York.
2. Baddeley, A., Eysenck, M. W., & Anderson, M. C. Memory (New York: Psychology Press, 2009), p. 70-78.
3. Ibid. 74.
4. Ibid. 82.

 

 

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Ethics in Business Schools

http://www.the-abs.org.uk/files/Ethics%20Guide%20281009.pdf

Still in draft form - an ethics guide for academics in business schools - mostly research focused but some teaching aspects - should other areas have ethics guides?

--

David Andrew
Head of Academic Practice
Educational and Staff Development: Queen Mary, University of London

Tel - 020 7882 2803 or 07986709981

Bunchberry & Fern: Learning Styles: fable-ous and tragic

Bunchberry & Fern: Learning Styles: fable-ous and tragic

Video footage of math and science teaching

 

 

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Video footage of math and science teaching

via sciencegeekgirl.com by sciencegeekgirl on 11/3/09

Here are a few collections of videos of science teaching and learning — useful for learning how to teach.

Annenberg:

http://www.learner.org/resources/series90.html

http://www.learner.org/resources/series126.html

TIMSS

http://nces.ed.gov/timss/video.asp

 

 

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from the FT today - does this apply to other subjects?

It's all the fault of the timetable and textbook

By Gerard Hanlon

Published: November 2 2009 02:00 | Last updated: November 2 2009 02:00

Both the textbook and the academic timetable, lie at the root of a growing crisis in management education, especially at undergraduate level; one that needs addressing if we are to avert any future economic meltdown and retain any semblance of creative learning in universities and business schools.

How can two things so innocuous and ubiquitous to degree studies be blamed for educational and institutional failings?

The semester divides the year into two teaching periods of 12 weeks each, followed by revision and examination. It was introduced at the zenith of the UK's embrace of globalisation and heralded a world where the majority of students would enrol at a university in the UK and study overseas at universities in Rome, New York or Hong Kong.

Such a world never emerged; undergraduate students increasingly live at home, and they work and are encumbered with debt - globetrotting occurs later in life, if at all. Instead we are left with the negative impact of the semester. This negative is essentially a world of 12 short, inflexible lecturing weeks per module.

On its own this might be workable, but when combined with the restrictions created by the over-reliance on textbooks, we enter a world of de-skilling, one where we subtract rather than add value.

After a week-long introduction and a further week-long conclusion we are left with 10 lectures "umbilically" attached to an eight or 10-chapter text book. The textbook comes with ready-made questions and answers for academics to use - essentially a mass-produced, off-the-shelf solution to large teaching classes - sometimes of 200 students or more.

Within this set up a switched-on student realises he or she must read five chapters in order to answer four questions of assessment and leave some margin for error. A less motivated student thinks the answer to the complex issues of say materiality in accountancy or value in human capital is in the book, specifically chapter three. Hence this is all they need to read.

This teaching encourages instrumentality and fear. Instrumentality, because in the increasingly work- and debt-filled world of a student, time is a rare commodity not to be used to learn beyond the exam and textbook.

Fear, because students are unable to cope with not having one correct answer. Yet management and life are about dealing with complexity and alternatives. If I am right then business schools are spectacularly not preparing students for either.

This problem will get worse as class sizes increase, fees turn students into customers who are not allowed to fail and publishers tighten their grip on education through the production of internet-based e-learning with dedicated readings, assessment and lecture templates; all of which come solely from the publisher's very particular back catalogue.

There is of course an alternative. Oxford, Cambridge, the Open University, Harvard, MIT and institutions such as the British Library and the research funding bodies, are putting vast libraries on open access and programmes such as 'Moodle' provide free software for web-based teaching.

Business schools, I suggest, should be bold and ambitious, use this array of academic material, reject the textbook and discourage the mass produced, de-skilled student. Instead they should nurture risk-taking, innovation, confidence and an appreciation of complexity in their faculty and their student body.

They can do this by preparing teaching that uses the full range of accumulated knowledge and by providing multiple answers - thereby fostering an appreciation of uncertainty in knowledge. As Einstein said: "Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere."

Taking this brave stance will enable business schools to help preserve rather than undermine the university as a site of education and more importantly, to produce students with judgment. After all it is judgment that will see them rise to the growing challenge of work and life.

Prof Gerard Hanlon is head of the School of Business and Management, Queen Mary, University of London, www.ft.com/soapboxforum

Teaching with podcasts: drawing on an existing series

 

 

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Teaching with podcasts: drawing on an existing series

via Liberal Education Tomorrow: by Bryan Alexander on 11/1/09

An example of using podcasts to structure a class is described by Planet Money.  A New York City economics class instructor selected a series of podcasts from that program, then built lesson plans around them.

 

 

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Group Work 1.5: Simple Ways to Make Group Work More Meaningful

 

 

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Group Work 1.5: Simple Ways to Make Group Work More Meaningful

via ProfHacker.com by Jason B. Jones on 10/30/09

I'm not someone who does a lot of in-class group work, where "group work" is understood as clusters of 2-5 students in a class with at least 20.  Most of them do such work outside of class, whether in a wiki, or on blogs, or some other electronic space.  I have always mistrusted group work, both as a student and as a faculty member, because I always feel left out: Whatever's going on in some other group is inherently more interesting.  Plus, it's hard to generate a sense of common intellectual work in small groups: For example, if you're building toward a midterm or final, then the group work has to be fairly carefully designed in order to make sure it's useful.  You can ask groups to report out on their work, but in a 50 minute class, it's hard to find time for both the task and the reporting.

A combination of technical solutions has helped me get over the hump a little bit, by introducing both easy accountability and transparency of the small group to the class as a whole.  Here's how it works:

• As I've posted before, all my classes are organized around a wikified class notes, so students already accustomed to documenting the work of the class.  So, if we're doing group work, I'll simply ask someone from each group to post their results to the wiki.
• I used to have trouble following up on group work, in part because the groups are always ad hoc.  I'd sometimes remember to scribble down who was in what group, but more usually I'd forget.  Now, I take a picture of the class with my phone while they're working.  (Obviously, not for posting to Flickr or Facebook or anything.  Just to follow-up about the work.
• Mobile- and smartphones make it easier to incorporate group work into the class, too.  Groups can tweet their findings to a class account, for example.  I also have an e-mail account to which students send in-class work, either for displaying on the multimedia station or for immediate transfer to the wiki.  (Still can't edit the wiki natively on the iPhone/iPod.) In classes with large numbers of iPods/iPhones I'll frequently ask students to install free mindmap software in order to quickly represent some idea or chunk of text, and then export the results to the class e-mail account.

None of these are transformational–that is, they're not the most powerful uses of mobile computing one could imagine.  But they're easy-to-implement, and yield legitimate payoffs in showing that group work is meaningful to the overall trajectory of the class.

So: How do you make small groups work for you? (Non-technological solutions welcome!  Principled rejections of group work are, too!)

Image by flickr user Lisavanovitch / CC licensed

 

 

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