Rockstar vs Ringmaster: Balancing Complementary Teaching Roles to Develop Management Skills

Business school professors are under pressure. With students increasingly being viewed as customers who need to be “satisfied,” student evaluations are more and more consequential in determining contract renewal, tenure, and promotion decisions. Websites such as www.ratemyprofessors.com – enabling students to share unvarnished critiques of their instructors – up the ante. The proliferation of business school rankings taking account of “teaching quality” is creating a further institutional imperative for professors to strive to be stellar teachers, as well as top researchers. What are management instructors who want to improve their teaching to do?